So I ran it with 2 players using Mothership today, and everyone enjoyed it!
There were some great moments:
- One of the characters fully believed that there was indeed a beast in the sun, which was quite fun opposed to the other one who was much more sceptical.
- They though at one point that they were possibly being experimented on
- Both characters absolutely panicked when the AI started counting down, and immediately hid.
- When the AI started spouting off the poem about Leviathan, the character shot it right in the middle of the monologue and killed it!
- The characters hunkered down by the last messages, as they believed that the creature from the star was going to come inside the station and attack them, because the airlock breached.
- One of the characters ended up sealing themself in a cryopod (my version of the sleep pod), as the other stood guard ready to throw the pod out the window!
My feedback from running it:
- I decided to choose instead of rolling the options for the problems and AI malfunctions beforehand, in order for them to get gradually worse. This worked out very well at building tension, as I chose things depending on how far in the one-shot I put things.
- I kept a 15 minute timer, but found it worked better for the flow of the game to give them the next message at appropriate times. I think it might also work effectively if the times got gradually shorter during play, as the characters were convinced they would get attacked by the last message and so were just staying where they were.
- The AI malfunctions are very fun, I very much enjoyed playing a creepy malfunctioning AI.
- The clues also worked very well at creating the mystery, the characters came up with a bunch of theories as to what might be happening based on those and the scenario itself. I thought at one point that I might need more based off how much the characters were searching everywhere, but it actually turned out alright.
- there was much 'ohh's and such when I sent the last message, the players did not see it coming!
And some general feedback about the pamphlet:
- there's a typo: "6 - Impending cloud fills also viewports." is presumably meant to be phrased differently without the 'also'.
- the titles have quite a low contrast colour, I found it harder to read them.
All in all, it was very fun to run and I enjoyed it a lot!