This holiday season, I’m going to review a different module, game or supplement every day. I haven’t sought any of them out, they’ve been sent to me, so it’s all surprises, all the way. I haven’t planned or allocated time for this, so while I’m endeavouring to bring the same attention to these reviews, it might provide a challenge, but at least, I’ll be bringing attention to some cool stuff!

Into the Blind is a 28 page game Rooted in Trophy by Riley Daniels. It attempts to do for Mothership what Trophy Gold in my mind fails to do for B/X. I find Trophy as a framework incredibly compelling, to the point where my home game is a Trophy hack called Guilders, so I’m pretty keen to see what Riley’s done here. The free rules specifically were what were offered for Critique Navidad, although I’m assured full rules are coming.

One of the things about Trophy is that its principle-forward, and is frank about it. Into the Blind acts similarly, opening with principles that define the working-class horror of Mothership: You’re exploited labour, surrounded by broken and outdated machinery, facing the horrors of the unknown. Principles (labelled “advice”) also forefront the player’s and referee’s sections. They’re not mind-blowing, but are solid and keep things simple — simpler in fact than Trophy does. Which is a good thing.

If you’ve played Trophy Dark or Gold, the actual rules won’t be too much of a surprise. You don’t hack something to ignore its structure. Some superficial changes are made for the sake of theme, like Decay directly replacing Ruin, cred replacing gold, and scout rolls replacing hunt rolls. There is elegance here though, particularly in the way it’s presented: the original Trophy books were disasters of information design, just absolute messes, and Into the Blind is crisp, clear, and provides the information where you need it. A great example is the layout of combat, which was incomprehensible in Trophy Gold and described by a player as “more confusing than Pathfinder 2”, but is very clear here, and the “consequences” section which clarifies all the possible negative outcomes of all roles in one simple set of paragraphs.

It has its own twists, though: Escalation, for example, means that if your situation doesn’t have downtime, you never remove the Dark Dice in your hand, The basic rules are punishing enough, but this addition is so mean that it will encourage the kind of play that is slow and cautious until the moment that everything hits the fan, all the while bringing meaning to moments of respite. Really great stuff, in a tiny rule.

Another twist is how combat has changed to reflect gun fighting. Here, burning ammo can give you nigh infinite dice, at the cost of losing that advantage further down the track. This, like the escalation rule, encourages a scrounging, searching style of play, as ammunition becomes essential for survival. It feels very heavily inspired by videogames like Alien: Isolation. Preparing for combat is also different: You are trying to make it vulnerable to attack, reduce its will to fight, or harm it indirectly: Much more direct solutions that lend itself better to the reactive gameplay of Trophy, that was never reflected well by its endurance rules. These don’t just impact endurance, but can instead impact resistance — armour — meaning that fights are harder, but also that you can target your decision making.

The referee section here is brief and elegant, because it’s implied (although it doesn’t actually state this) that’s it’s really intended to be run with Mothership modules. So the “excursion” section (terrible name, sorry, my six year old goes on excursions), is one page of procedures and 6 pieces of advice. The most important part of this by emphasis, is the introduction of the excursion: Here Daniels is telling us that the freelancers are supposed to be driving the play, because the effort is in setting up their goals and the “brief” so to speak, rather than carefully constructing a set of rings or whatever your version of Trophy contrives to reimagine a dungeon as. On one hand, I love this. It’s especially for me to run the things I want in a framework I enjoy. But also, I wonder if it’s not quite enough for a standalone: Mothership has a whole book dedicated to running the same content.

Oof, this is hard. The minimalism here is either very, very clever, or it’s lazy, and I’m not sure. An example is escalation: There’s no discussion of respite at all, but also, that’s something that will drive play entirely diegetically, so maybe it’s best left unsaid? These new rules are elegant, and drive gameplay through natural consequences. I wonder, though, that a description of the designers intent — a commentary section — would behoove this text. This could probably be worked into the examples of play, but it’s not in there right now.

One proper miss, I think, is the lack of explanation of cred. These rules are incomplete without some explanation of how cred works, and it’s something that really should be here, as it appears to be a critical part of what drives play, from the examples of play and from the combat and scout roll rules. Something like Employment Contracts would be perfect for both the themes here and would fit neatly into the looser, talk-focused mechanics here. But this is a rare miss in an otherwise elegant little ruleset.

I appreciate that the layout here gives the examples of play pride of place, but I think that the effort to keep the layout succinct — which benefits the rules explanations — means that this really wants to be a three column layout on a wider format page, because squeezing the sidebar rules and the examples of play into one space is a little too much at times. Intelligently, they use the font and decoration to differentiate these different sidebar uses effectively, but it’s still crowded. Overall, the layout it is effective — it feels futuristic and corporate, damaged in places, highlights and headings are legible and the text is navigable. Fonts are kept to a maximum of 4 to a page, so they never overwhelm, and except for the crowded sidebars, white space is very generously apportioned. I like how there are icons assigned to the rolls, for example, and to other places in the rules, but aside from being repeated in the character sheet, they aren’t really used as effectively as they could be. I wonder if the example of play could use them to signal phases or uses, for example. I love the few unique splash layouts. Even though they’re not flashy in the Johan Nohr sense of the word, the fact that the Losing Yourself page is inverted (only section breaks have this visual feature until this point) really brings home the importance the text is communicating. The character sheet I mentioned earlier deserves a moment though: It fits all the player principles and the rules onto it elegantly, without being crowded. I like it a lot.

Overall, the free edition of Into the Blind is a hell of a start, but it doesn’t quite stick the landing. There are a few pieces of really clever design, that build the world and feel genre specific in really elegant ways. But there are a few missing pieces, that simply shouldn’t be missing, and there’s no clear discussion of how to take a Mothership module and actually play in it. The blurb says the full version will have a campaign framework, conversion guide, optional rules and procedures, tools to flesh out your own setting and create adventures, and a starter adventure, plus more character options, so it seems like what’s missing is coming — but for now it feels like a game that’s for an audience who knows half the rules. Luckily, I am that audience who knows the other half of the rules, and I’m fairly certain I’d prefer to run a Mothership module in this than in the core Mothership rules, so I’ll wait with bated breath for the final version, and hope it irons out the links. For free right now until the full release, Into the Blind feels like a no brainer, even with its missing pieces.

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