Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

Daedelus Station is a 43 page module for Mothership by S. Murphy, with art by Guy Pradel. In it, you investigate a dark plot surrounding a space-racing league. I backed this during Mothership Month.

The module begins with a few reasons to be at the station in the first place. Sadly there’s nothing here that isn’t implied by the locations themselves, they don’t provide any personal connections or linkages: For example it suggests your ship suffers a mechanical failure so you need to go to the mechanic. I’d love for these to be juicy hooks, instead. From here we spend a page covering the Icarian League (the faction that runs the Rimspace Racing League), a page on the planet the space station orbits around, and a page covering security and the racing league itself. At this point I’m struggling to figure out where I am and what is going on. What I want out of a module is to be excited to turn the page and see what’s coming next — here, I’m not sure who Krule is or why I care, I don’t know why I need to know about security, or the planet Garrus, or the Racing League. The order of information here is doing the opposite of drawing me in. A pitch isn’t just your first paragraph: The whole zine needs to be the pitch. I should be gasping for more.

Then we get to the conspiracy proper, I remain confused: Why won’t it tell me what’s going on? The answer is that what’s going on is randomly generated. All four potential culprits have a spread devoted to it, but the decision to randomise here means my movement through the module as a referee remains directionless, and hence I’m a good chunk of the way in and I’m not yet excited to play, because I now have to choose one of these four factions.

I think this is a big misstep: The energy spent on describing multiple outcomes and methods could’ve been spent describing how they’re red herrings or how they’re involved. There’s potential here — particularly if you’re trying to make this into a campaign hub — for some incredible intrigue, but a lot of the work that is in here is ignored if you run it by the book. I want creators — especially ones with such excellent potential as Murphy has — to spend their energy digging into their ideas, not wasting them on things that are never to be used. If time was spent figuring out how these cogs interact rather than giving me as a referee choices, this political arena could be a firecracker waiting to go off. As is, we have four flat options rather than one that pops.

We then get into the locations proper. These are quite wordy, although well written in a colloquial voice I like — very different in approach though to In Carmine. There’s a little too much telling and not enough showing for me — the menu in the high class restaurant for example is over half description and less than half actual menu items. The character descriptions are universally excellent, though, and I wish there were at least 1 in every area — characters are the most compelling part of the module, with memorable personality traits and agendas: “…frog-like individual dressed in a 1930’s style suit…usually tries to go in for a hug…”

The module closes with the race itself — rules on how to bet, sabotage, and run the races. The race rules are fine. For me, the best racing rules are in Song of the Frogacle and they haven’t been beaten yet. The pilots get their own descriptions (weirdly different in structure to the rest of the NPCs) which is a nice touch, and they’re nicely manipulable. They’re each in a location, however frustratingly they’re not marked as being in those locations in the descriptions for those locations.

The layout here is straightforward, easy to read, but nothing flashy. It doesn’t feel like most Mothership, but that makes sense for the theme, and Guy Pradel’s art is exceptional at bringing out the golden age vibe of the Rimspace Racing League. The combination of “un-Mothership-like layout and golden age art makes this one stand out in the Mothership crowd, in a very good way. It’s really good stuff.

The concept for Daedalus Station is absolutely fun, but for me, it just doesn’t hang together. I’m being presented with a strange and unique situation — a space racing league with assassinations and betting and intrigue — but it doesn’t successfully guide me through how to run it, or make it compelling or exciting for me to want to run. I don’t have the time or energy to take the pieces presented in Daedalus Station and assemble them into something as explosive and compelling as they have the potential to be. I just wish it did that itself. It’s a disappointing outcome when the last module of Murphy’s I reviewed, In Carmine, spent a year being my recommendation for best introductory module to Mothership. They’re very different modules, and I’d put this down to teething issues with entering new, more social territory. I have not been soured to see Murphy’s future work.

That said, Daedalus Station is a very unique set up, unlike anything else available in Mothership: If you find this high class gambling crime scene compelling to run your campaign in, and you’ve got some time to piece things together (or perhaps are a master improviser), Daedalus Station & The Rimspace Racing League is a perfect place to start.

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