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.

Wages of Sin is a 333 page “bounty hunting toolkit” for Mothership, written by Luke Gearing with additional writing by Alan Gerding, with art by Tyler Garlando, Gil Rodrigo, and Adam P. McIver, the latter of which also shared graphic design with Sean McCoy. I was provide complementary copies by Tuesday Knight Games.

The first question that probably needs answering about Wages of Sin is “what is a bounty hunting toolkit?” Well, the short answer is that it’s a book of 100 tiny modules — the titular bounties — each containing enough content to run as a one-shot session. Wrapped around those 100 bounties are a bunch of systems designed to support using those bounties as the primary catalyst in a campaign of space-faring bounty-hunters — this includes rules, and legal and court proceedings that are compatible with Mothership, non-player character bounty hunters that can serve as major ongoing antagonists in the campaign, and a significantly detailed location — the prison moon “ODC”, to support the campaign as both a jail for criminal players and a place for the criminals you track down to make evil plans.

We open with an introduction which helps you with running a bounty hunting campaign, or how to incorporate individual bounties as side quests into an existing campaign or as a one-shot. This is brief — half a page to 1 page each — and appropriately so. Our chapter heading changes from here, but it’s still introductory: We then get to how to set up bounty boards for your campaign, how to use and read the bounties in the book, how to run bounties and improvise details based on them, what might happen en route to delivery, and a random bounty generator in case 100 isn’t enough. There’s a huge number of variables within the bounties (14), so all of this information is useful and communicated pretty clearly with a bunch of clear iconography. It’s busy work, though: I do feel like for such a chonky, expensive book, a lot of this is self-explanatory and doesn’t need this degree of explication, particularly because we’ll find later that that iconography isn’t utilised later in the book.

The overall quality of the bounties is excellent. They range from 1 to 4 pages (with a single outlier at 7 pages), and are split into single-location, multi-location, and ship-based. As much as I think the overexplication of the structure is a bit much, the structure itself makes it very easy to pick up one of these and run, but for all of them a referee needs some confidence in improvising in the galaxy they’re running in. I’ll look at some exemplars, spoilers for a few bounties ahead.

Bounty 11 is a 1-page bounty. Bahdan Eros is a courier, operating without a license, and you’re charged to prevent his delivery and deliver him to pay his fine. Secretly, he’s delivering a nuke. A group of mercenaries plan to ambush him, and he’s delivering to a terrorist cell. There’s a lot to improvise here: The locations of the encounters (although there are descriptive prompts), and names of 8 of the 11 NPCs. We get some evocative details about Eros, but nothing on any of the other characters. This and 8 other bounties are set in and around Balonov Downport City, so you’re expected to draw from the other bounties in the area and the 1-page location description for a few things, like a sense of the area and who the bounty is being delivered to, and you’re expected to draw from a previous section for information on the terrorist cell (Bounty 7), the later of which is an issue given there are no page references in this case (there are, occasionally, page references elsewhere in the book). The latter issue is compounded because the pdf is huge, and I had trouble loading for a search on Acrobat on multiple devices (I ended up being able to use it on Files of my phone of all things). That all said, this is a fun one page module, and using pre-existing information is only a problem if you’re expecting to run this directly from the book. Most of the 1-page bounties are a similar quality.

At the other extreme, Bounty 87 is the longest one, at 6 pages plus the planet description page. You’re seeking a pirate queen, dead or alive, and her captains who are reporting to her to give their oaths. Five of these captains and their ships are detailed (their ships are pretty funny in an Iain M Banksy way, and it’s fun to see Gearing bring the humour that abounds in Swyvers into his Mothership work). The pirates are weirdly anachronistic in fun ways that are only alluded to but in a way that makes it easy to improvise your own version of. There is a 15 room dungeon on the asteroid, and a lot of flexibility in how it plays out: Deception, dogfighting, ground battle or sabotage are all covered. This is an excellent 7 page module, but what it’s missing is a clear information source or way to gain intel on the location or the captains. In the introductory section, it places icons next to what information is player facing and what is not, but this iconography doesn’t transfer across to the bounties themselves, which is honestly a massive misstep. I’m not sure if the asides are GM-facing or not, and I’d rather not have to tackle with that question on the fly if I don’t have to. You’ll have to refer back to page 16 for ideas of how to investigate. You’ll also have to improvise a lot of other content — the low-ranking pirates and their stats, for example — which means that dogfighting the captains feels better supported than a ground mission. But space pirate worn queen heist? I’m in.

The third type of mission is the ship-based bounty. Bounty 97 is Aias Joshi, a CEO who makes illegal celebrity lookalike android, who must be brought to trial for copyright infringement. This is an R-rated bounty, which it advises to run by your players before you introduce it. This is a 4-page bounty, which consists a 13 page ship you’re expected to deceive your way into, filled with security cameras and deadly androids. This bounty really leans into the corporate horror that Mothership is known for. You’ll have to improvise 2 of the 3 characters, but in this case the informant and your way to access the ship is better detailed.

If you like the sound of these 3, you’ll thrive on basically all of the bounties here. Individual planets each have suggestions regarding how to begin a campaign there, and the overall included campaign map allows players to wander planet to planet as well as bounty to bounty. The galaxy-crawl feels very organic, and there are lots of recurring themes, organisations and characters to tie things together; I especially like the ships included to populate space, even when they’re not yet a bounty of themselves. A bunch of the bodies also have galaxy spanning impacts — bounties being put out on the players, or price increases for example. There’s also a natural arc to the campaign, although it’s implied: The crew starts out as law abiding citizens, collecting bounties, slowly has bounties taken out on them for real crimes or in response to their actions against powerful people, and then end up in a climactic ODC filled with the people they’ve jailed. The bounty hunters seek the crew are all varying horrors, ranging from reality TV show hosts to interdimensional beings, which lets you target them to the galaxy you’ve built and the bounties you’ve chosen to include.

The ODC is a large mapped space, with rules and routines. It’s expected you track time in weeks, and that escape is likely to be challenging. The book recognises the challenge of this environment, and provides procedures to support the warden in running it. It includes 100 events, 100 prisoners, 100 staff, existing gangs, an economy and weapons, escape routes and what it’s like outside once you escape. It’s shockingly thorough, but it would take me a lot of prep to get running. It’s excellent but challenging.

Finally, the end of the book has support materials: Practical ODC procedures and custom bounty sheets, character loadouts and a master list of prisoners and staff, maps of a few major ships, and a copy of the galaxy map.

I was kindly sent the digital, standard, and deluxe editions, and in terms of format, layout and art they’re awfully similar. The standard edition is gorgeous, and honestly the cover matches the internals better than the deluxe. The gold edging and cloth cover is very pleasing to touch, though. I think the deluxe’ additional price could better be justified if they’d had more practical additions — your going to be referring back and forth, so a second bookmark would make me like the deluxe option more. Both of these books will be excellent at the table, are sturdy, and won’t damage easily. The pdf format I had distinctly loading and searching across multiple devices, and it’s a very large file — this is a problem for a book without a traditional index. The layout is super clean, and one of the first Mothership official products that doesn’t feel the need to fill its margins with additional text, making it very readable, and it keeps navigation cues like section identifiers easily usable. It maintains traditional house elements, like utilising the inside and outside covers, and being smart with placing key information in easy to access places (bounty mugshots in the covers, how to use in the first 20-odd pages, tackles of stock characters and maps in the back 20-odd pages). I should add that the books also come with a table map of the ODC and the system as a whole. Overall, one of the best Mothership formats yet. I think it’s also an interesting direction for Tuesday Knight Games to head in. Until this point, they’ve been small-format zine focused, but with this and Megadamage they’ve chosen to expand beyond this format for the first time. Their recent announcement of the Jump-9 grant and Mothership Select make me wonder if they’re going to continue into these longer, larger format products, or repackage their earlier products into more premium packages, rather than the current, admittedly very high-end, A5 boxed sets.

Wages of Sin is enough Mothership to run weekly for years, in an interconnected galaxy unlike anything thus far published for it. While there are better modules individually than the ones included here, the average quality of the modules here, plus the massive ODC, places this as a very good investment in a specific type of campaign model if that’s what you want to run. The very sweet spot is that all of these, aside from the ODC, are runnable as one-shots, making this very clearly the best choice for the basis of an open table or a group whose members tend to drop in and out of games. The downside is that there’s a lot to read up on and absorb, and a lot to improvise even if you’re prepared. For me personally, I’d like something this huge to cover all eventualities, but it aims for scope rather than detail — you need to go in expecting this. The writing in here is genuinely exciting, and makes me want to run a campaign using the book despite my misgivings. If Mothership is going to be your weekly game for the next year or so, you shouldn’t look past Wages of Sin — it’s a big swing at campaign play for Mothership, and it knocks it out of the park.

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