5MW Rokaner Report #22, MM25 Mini-Interviews, pt. 2
RR#22 October 2025, Prospero's Dream
Dawn’s Blessings Upon Y’all,
So, OVER/UNDER has been a trip, yeah? From corporate assassinations, to peace summits, and mass hysteria, it’s been wild times. As a Canyonheavy Boss, I already have a post-game report in the works for this insane mega-game. I can’t wait to get with folks and talk openly about the experience.
This month’s mainline newsletter is bringing together three mini-interviews from creators participating in Mothership Month 2025 who are running a crowdfund campaign for the first time. Check out what these up-and-coming designers—Scott Connor’s The Company’s New Groove, Nathan Taylor’s NO GODS, NO MASTERS, and Zoe Tweedale’s HUNTERS—are working on!
The Company’s New Groove, Scott Connor
Chris: Goodday, Scott! Lemme tell you, it’s always great to interview a fellow European Mothership writer! Your module The Company’s New Groove has what I’d consider an experimental angle: you’ve crafted a prequel to Prospero’s Dream as readers know it from A Pound of Flesh. Can you tell us more about your Mothership Month project and how this unique structure plays into it?
Scott: Hey Chris, first of all thank you for putting a spotlight on the smaller creators of this year!
With this book, I wanted to create something different to your typical Mothership module, something more experimental in terms of how it uses narrative and music. The Company’s New Groove is a Club Crawl where the players are rioters, breaking into an abandoned nightclub to discover that The Company has a hidden facility experimenting with music to brainwash the population. Experiments and all kinds of threats stalk in the darkness and the players need to get out or die trying.
But here’s the twist, the 5 NPCs that help, hinder or hunt the players in this polyphonic hellhole are the same characters that the players have played in the prologue set decades earlier.
For me, music is one of the biggest tools a Warden has to set a certain mood in Mothership. I wanted to use music’s power of atmosphere to its fullest extent in this module. The Prologue is set in ‘The Drunken Monkey’ nightclub full of bass and mischief. The main adventure has you re-explore this now abandoned club; this time silent as a tomb. When the players descend into The Company’s black site, music laced with hidden tones leak out of busted speakers.
Ultimately, it’s the combination of how this book uses music and character interactions that makes this module stand out to give your table a memorable adventure.
Chris: I agree that music is an incredible tool, and it’s one that takes a ton of time (for me, at least!) to research and set up, so it’s great ot hear this work is done for The Company’s New Groove! Another compelling aspect of your module is that it comes with pregenerated player characters for the prologue that become antagonists to the players in following sessions. Pregens are so rare in Mothership, and I’d like to know, what were the seeds for this idea, and how did it develop or mutate for your module?
Scott: I really wanted to pull the rug on my table in some way, something that can only be done in TTRPGs. In my experience, players seldom connect with NPCs on an emotional level. I was trying to come up with a way to change that, so I thought what if the players were the NPCs? The idea was to have this almost Shore Leave style prologue where the players get this mini sandbox and just be this friend group.
Fast forward three decades, and now the players, with their new self-made characters, come face to face with their characters from the prologue. As is often the case in Mothership, time has not been kind to them. How do the players react to that, how do they survive against these horrors who they inhabited as carefree teens a session ago?
That’s what this module is trying to do.
Chris: Hitting that kind of emotional resonance is a great goal for a module, especially one within a megacity of millions of lives, like on Prospero’s Dream. Thanks for your answers Scott, and congrats on the funding! I’m looking forward to seeing how The Company’s New Groove all shakes down.
NO GODS, NO MASTERS, Nathan Taylor
Chris: Hello Nathan, glad to have you here! This might be outta nowhere, but for my money, I think you’ve got the most striking cover out for this year’s Mothership Month, and to be clear, that’s saying a lot because so many are 🔥. What’s the run down of what we can find behind that killer cover?
Nathan: Thank you, that’s some high praise considering the quality of everyone else’s work this year! I owe all the credit to Brayz for the cover art. He really knocked it out of the park. I really enjoy the idea of the spark of rebellion, so littered lots of phrasing around tinder, lighting a flame, etc., throughout the pitch I provided to Brayz, and he just ran with it.
The module is about the return of a megacorp, METAStatic, Inc., to Prospero’s Dream. It’s a deal with the devil for the factions in charge as the company has been spreading its tendrils throughout the station. METAStatic is kind of the apotheosis of capitalism, a company that grows for no other reason than an expansion of their own power, like a cancer. Reaching a breaking point, the players’ crew decides to take the fight to the corp and get them off the station for good, by any means necessary.
No Gods, No Masters is my take on a depthcrawl, with all of the generative locations and situations that implies. I did a lot of digging through the design of depthcrawls with classics like The Stygian Library and The Gardens of Ynn, plus Mothership’s own This Ship Is a Tomb. My goal with this module was two-fold: A) Making a tight, compact depthcrawl, and B) making the module as user-friendly as possible. A lot of generative crawls require a lot of page-flipping and my design principle is to minimize that as much as possible. Each level’s page includes all the info a warden needs to run that level, as well as an easy reference set of tables guiding wardens on where to go next based on a given roll.
Chris: I totally understand what you mean with the depthcrawl page-flippery, I’m very interested to see how your information design tackles this. You’ve also teased the existence of the corpo horrors hiding in your tower depthcrawl. What are a couple that you can spill for us today?
Nathan: Christ, because the existence of megacorps isn’t bad enough? I’m mixing up the levels with a melange of the banal and the creepy. I’m just going to list out a handful of my favorites. The Cubicle Farms are managed by overly chipper android middle-managers, all constantly on the cusp of losing their marbles from the pressure of their positions. Another is the Financial Department where financial analysts break into bouts of glossolalia at an uptick in company stock prices and suicidal depression when it dips. There’s also the Biological Research Division, where experiments both mundane and horrifying take place, including a little something called the HK Protocol. That’s a particularly nasty creation that will pursue players from level to level, though there’s a chance that players could turn the tables on the corp if they can make it to Biological Research.
And that’s three of twenty-two total levels, so there should be plenty of variety for folks to enjoy and players to run away from.
Chris: Haha, that’s a LOT of chances of screwing with the corpos, and if there’s one thing OVER/UNDER has taught me is that players will jump at the chance to burn these kinds of characters! Glad to see you’ve funded, and can’t wait to set my players on molotoving these METAStatic sickos.
Hunters, Zoe Tweedale
Chris: Heya Zoe! Wonderful to see a new writer hitting so much success during Mothership Month, and from what we can glean from the BackerKit page, it’s no surprise! Can you tell us about Hunters, to clue readers in on why folks are so keen to snag your Mothership Month project?
Zoe: I am blown away by the response to Hunters so far. As someone new to crowdfunding, I’m very humbled by the faith the community has put in me as a first-time module creator.
The pitch for Hunters is simple: a death-game set in The Sink on Prospero’s Dream. The player characters find themselves trapped in the plague and monster-riddled ruins of the old corporate heart of Prospero’s Dream, and if that wasn’t bad enough, wealthy thrill-seeking hunters are competing to kill them and their crewmates. Their only way to officially “win” this lopsided game is to kill all of the hunters, which is a steep task. Or, they can use their wits to attempt to break the rules and find their own way out.
Supporting this scenario is the adventure’s location: The Hunting Grounds, a mini sandbox detailing the downtown core of the sink with over a dozen locations, fellow hunted target NPCs, unique monsters, and environmental storytelling. My hope is that Hunters can also be used as a toolkit to help support any campaign that ventures down into The Sink.
Aside from writing Hunters, I am also illustrating it myself. For me, the atmospheric and detailed art bringing life to The Sink is just as important as the text. Even if the players never see it (and I hope they do!), evocative art helps to bring the world alive in the Warden’s imagination, which I think is an essential job for any good adventure module.
Chris: After the artwork I’ve seen you put into Hunters, I have to agree. The NPC cards look wonderful, too, I must say. Which one of these sickos do you love (or love to hate) the most?
Zoe: Thanks! I always appreciate the repeated stat-blocks in the TKG modules like Another Bug Hunt as a Warden, but for the hunters, it’s a bit harder to do that effectively since their characterisation is just as important as their mechanics. So cards are a good alternative, with the added bonus that you can show them to your players without spoiling any surprises.
It’s hard to pick! Especially because once I start play-testing with my main group, they will come alive in ways I haven’t expected yet. That being said, I’m very excited to see The Green Man (the one with 4 arms on the cover) in play. He’s a terrifying and extremely challenging antagonist; he’s playing to win, and enjoys the thrill of the game. But probably my “favourite” is the secret-android corporate spy Anna Yoon. She’s an accomplished liar and at the heart of an assassination plot against some of the other Hunters, and has some fun abilities with her “invisibility poncho” and her android nature allowing her to continue fighting until the players find a way to completely destroy her. But most importantly, she’s a hook for the players to get involved in the melodrama and backstabbing of the ultra-rich if they so choose; because while the hunters are monstrous, it is important to me that these are unique characters who are fun for the Warden to play!
Chris: That’s the rub isn’t it? Because Wardens want to have fun too, and making the complex characters is a great way to do that. 750+ backers seem to agree with me too, haha. Major congratulations on your campaign, and I’m eager to see the Hunting Grounds come to life!
Signing off,
Chris Airiau