Fear of a Daily Planet

Clouds of plastic paper in a faded rainbow of colors litter local space out here. Flyers, posters, books, pamphlets, and more, all printed in black ink that smells of burnt cedar and petroleum.

The pages are filled with everything from amateurish prose and Dada-tinged nonsense to eloquent poetics and studied design. The only recurring elements are newspapers intimately describing the misery of working for the weapons manufacturer Taiyang-Macht and bluntly alluding to corporate sabotage and assassinations by the company, with all claims attributed to one "Inside Source."

Whether tracing these prints, hunting a corporate blackmailer, or responding to a strange distress call, your crew's arrival signals the beginning of the end for the ancient printer colony of Burgom's Haven.

Fear of a Daily Planet is a 36-page lost colony crawl for the sci-fi horror RPG Mothership through a planetary colony built only to print employee handbooks for Etaoin Shrdlu Stellarcomms. Abruptly cut off from the company in its tumultuous switch to a fully digital infrastructure, the colonists were left on their own for the past 1,000 years.

Their descendants, now starving, are stuck between four dark print cults, each claiming to search for their hidden provider god and beseech its return. In this desperate place, the player crew can track down a wanted man, a former Taiyang-Macht engineer blamed for the theft of experimental company hardware a century ago. Just how he ended up here is only one of the many questions percolating through this forgotten backwater colony...

Contents:

• an isolated, print-obsessed culture channeling messages from beyond to feed their constant production despite looming crises
• 10 colony locations with almost 40 keyed rooms
• 4 cults vying for control of the colony, each with their own monstrous creation
• 8 NPCs struggling among the masses to survive, seize power, or escape
• a d100 “I Read the Paper” table
• and more!

Content Warnings: violence, gore, environmental pollution, religious manipulation, body horror, starvation, alcoholism, self-harm

Mothership 1e

Short Campaign

Written by Jordan Boschman
Published by ATypicalFaux

ATYPICALFAUX