Avatar Alert! Mothership Month '25 Mini-Interviews, pt. 1
5MW AA, October 2025
Howdy Dreamers,
With Mothership Month 2025 in full swing, I thought I’d revive last year’s mini-interviews, featuring designers new to crowdfunding to help bring their modules to a wider audience.
In the first of this three-part series, I’m bringing on Abe Chester from All on Red, and Chris Foley from Cleaning Crew.
All on Red, Abe Chester
Chris: Howdy-hey Abe! Welcome to the madness of MM25, I hope it’s been treating you well. As a developer on your project, I know the whole story behind the central mystery of All on Red, so what bits of intrigue can you divulge about your neon noir Mothership Month project?
Abe: Thanks Chris, it’s been going great so far, a bit overwhelming for a first-timer but so much fun! We appreciate the dev editing, it’s been invaluable!
Our primary goal with All on Red was to add a small but dense neighborhood to Prospero’s Dream, and make sure it could add something exciting to any Warden’s arsenal of content. We’ve made sure to build in a variety of physical and conceptual links to The Dream, making this module super easy to connect with any table’s version of the station. I think it would make a fantastic place to start a campaign as well as the perfect module to slip in as soon as someone important (PC or NPC) gets badly wounded and medical facilities are needed post haste.
The central mystery of “What happened to Dr. Haddaway” is a great 3-4 session investigation for a crew to tackle, but while doing so they’re also going to run headlong into other hooks and threads. Our test groups have had to make hard choices about finding Dr. Haddaway ASAP vs. dealing with other ticking time bombs such as an infestation of alien worms, handling the vicious gang exploiting the clinic, or foiling/aiding an attack on the station by a dissident faction.
Chris: It’s true this zine is packed with tons of cool, game-changing ideas, and like the neighborhood itself, this helps the station at large come alive. But you’re not alone in packing this zine with intrigue, you have teamed up with veteran Mothership writer A. Jordan DeWitt to form Glue Trap Games. Can you tell us how this came about, and some of the wild ideas you two cooked up together for this collaboration?
Abe: I met Jordan initially playing FIST: Ultra Edition by CLAYMORE RPGs. That online group had been mostly playing Mothership, and after the hilarious FIST one-shot, I joined a long Mothership campaign and Jordan and I and hit it off. We got to chatting about random ideas, and projects we were writing.
I think I started riffing on his re-sleeving facility heist mission pitch of “Anderson Frink is trapped in a box. A hard drive, to be precise,”. Ideas bounced around and I believe he suggested we just write it. We had this bizarrely fast process of just blasting out ideas and hopping around in a google doc looking at what the other person wrote and embellishing on it until we ended up with a pretty decent sized module called BLOCK PATTERN. We tested it a bunch and refined it, and we’ll come back to that after All on Red is complete and shipped.
As for wild ideas relating to All on Red, we’ve got a cybernetic cannibal, an absolutely disgusting parasite worm with a fucked up life cycle that could spiral out into the rest of Prospero’s Dream, and a hardcore rebel faction with an axe to grind against the Novos. The market with its deadly train running through the middle is wildly effective at pumping up stress and making random encounters even more dangerous and pressing. There’s also a corporate vampire. I don’t think many will find him, but he’s there for those players that just can’t help but open the thing they shouldn’t.
Chris: And what is an OSR/NSR module without such wonderful forbidden fruit, eh? Thanks for your answers Abe, and again, congrats on your funding! Looking forward seeing to the next draft of All on Red!
Cleaning Crew, Chris Foley
ChrisAir: Heya Chris, thanks for coming onto the newsletter! I gotta say, the pitch for your module as a “Janitor’s Handbook” cracks me up, and hits on a point I’ve been stuck on before: Normal jobs for folks on the Dream! Can you tell our readers about what kind of gaming materials you’re including in Cleaning Crew?
Chris Foley: We’ve really tried to hit a few different angles with Cleaning Crew to create a sourcebook for all things janitorial! Starting out our focus was very much on equipment—scrubbers, cleaning canisters, disinfecting lasers and the like—but we quickly spread out from there. New chemical rules like wounds and examples, roll tables for various encounters for janitors working around the Dream, a new class for those wanting to get to mopping & scrubbing and eventually a small adventure within: Slip Hazard.
Everything in Cleaning Crew centres around the arrival of a new company to Prospero’s Dream: Hygeia Interplanetary. A cleaning megacorp, Hygeia has every intent in making its presence on the station a formidable and permanent one and will stop at nothing to accrue workers to their fold. However, Hygeia has no intention of footing the bill. Cheap second-hand equipment, gig-economy work and underhanded tactics are sowing discord on Prospero’s.
Slip Hazard is the culmination of that. Hygeia has found a part of the station they are particularly curious about and have had remarkably bad luck cleaning it out. Bad enough that they’ve had to call in the cavalry, Player Contractors, to sort it out. Players venturing down into the Slip find themselves knee deep in grime, grease and something far more sinister lurking down there, all whilst Hygeia’s presence unravels.
Cleaning Crew really brings all of these elements together under one roof, expanding the Dream as a whole.
ChrisAir: And doesn’t everyone love to hate a corporation, especially on the Dream? You’ve also hit a boatload of Stretch Goals for your project! Can you tell us more about the pamphlet Hygeia Automotives and the zine, Unions and You?
Chris Foley: We wanted to build two branches from Hygeia’s arrival on Prospero’s Dream that go a bit beyond what happens in Cleaning Crew!
Hygeia Automotives is styled as an advertising pamphlet to the richest of investors and contractors, offering to exchange their cold hard credits for a variety of formidable engines. Some of these are utility minded like the armoured Domovoy Cleaner-Tanker or the radiation-eating Tiangou Sink, though others like the Caduceus aerial bomber and the ExecuCab are clearly geared towards the more corporate-minded. It’s Hygeia’s corporate victory lap, showing fancy new offerings that came with their investments in the Dream.
Unions and You delves deeper into the darker side of Hygeia. Both A Pound of Flesh fans and current OVER/UNDER players might be familiar with the Local 32819L, the Teamster Union of Prospero’s Dream. Having been pushed to the sideline by this megacorp’s arrival, their discontent has swelled rapidly.
Faced with the threat of mass uprising Hygeia has responded with a polished iron fist. Players are introduced to dangerous Union contraband (from brand-removing steam cleaners to treacherous chem-bombs) and the newly unleashed Garrison, Hygeia’s elite ‘custodial’ unit. It should give some insight into a Dream back under threat of violence from above and below!
ChrisAir: That sounds like a properly thorough exploration of the janitors of the Dream. I can really see PCs starting from the bottom of the job market, and making a rise through the ranks aboard the Dream as they combat Hygeia! Congrats on funding, and thanks for sharing Cleaning Crew with us, Chris!
Signing off,
Chris Airiau