Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

The Cycle is a 13 page module for Mothership by Luke Frostik. In it you are trapped in a monotonous dehumanising routine, when suddenly you’re given the opportunity to escape from your interstellar prison, run by a crazed AI. It’s intended as a one-shot module.

The layout here is simple, easy to read, well signaled, and has a lovely cohesive colour and art style. I’d love some page numbers or in-text highlighting for clearer in-game use, however. It’s a good example of how small choices can cause issues even in a small text though; the text is super light, which on the thistle-pink background gets challenging to read in large blocks. These large blocks don’t really happen until the second half of the book. You can get away with these misses in a short module like this one. The art by Eli Bensusan is honestly lovely. Great work.

You get one key NPC, the protagonist Dante, and a prisoner generator if you need more. Play takes place during a series of time-loops, which while aren’t technically time-loops, effectively they are. Between cycles, you can have a dream some of which will affect you in different ways. The module expects the session to be over by the third cycle, which is just enough to get a sense for what’s going on; I hope that the players won’t figure this out and try taking advantage of the cycle, though. The likelihood is that they’ll break free of it, and explore the rest of the space station, then realise they’re not going to be rehabilitated, and what their fate will be if they don’t escape. I really like the AI table, which basically automates the responses it makes. This is pretty neat, and makes it feel like AI, and not some god-like being.

I do wish that this module relied a little more on read-aloud text, instead of relying on my translating the description in-text of what I’m supposed to communicate into my own words. It’s just another, unnecessary step. I love to see beautiful writing in modules, especially to read it aloud. Instead, this module tells, rather than shows. I like the locations, though, and plenty of these encounters are interesting. This feels a little bigger than a one-shot, however, by sheer number of rooms; that said, you may just breeze through them, because there aren’t too many random encounters, more a series of scenes you may or may not stumble into.

Overall, I like the Cycle. I’ts a lovely little module, and I love the idea that on the first few play-throughs, you’re living a monotonous and boring life being re-integrated, before the truth starts to come out and you begin to break free. However, I don’t think the module itself scaffolds’ that play well — if someone told me that I was going to be playing a bored corporate drone in Mothership, I’d be confused, which undermines the implied course of play. And the ease of play is limited by the fact that that implied structure of play isn’t really assisted along for the referee by the text itself. I could see this story being told in a different format, incredibly well, and it’s compelling enough a concept that it has my mind jumping to how I could either fix the module or write something inspired by it. And, the truth is, that’s enough that for your table, with your amazing improvisation skills or your enjoyment of prep as an excuse to escape downstairs to the study, the Cycle might be an excellent one-shot for the right table.

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