Mothership: Foreign Bodies

Elysian-X58 - a recently discovered garden world, rich in resources and breathable atmosphere. A one in a quadrillion opportunity for any corp fortunate to claim it first. You are an expeditionary team sent to survey and claim this paradise. Unfortunately, you're not the only ones.

Accidents happen all the time on these expeditions. Just make sure they don't happen to you first.

Foreign Bodies is a point-crawl through paradise, a competition to claim this wilderness before anyone else can - or kills you for it. With resources scattered to the wind, the players' characters will need to figure out how to survive here while also completing the survey they've committed to. The food and water on the planet have been identified as safe for human consumption, but players have the choice of risking the unknown or taking what they need from another survey crew. Either way, survival has consequences.

Influenced by media such as Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach series and Scavenger's Reign, this tri-fold module comes with everything you need to run this scenario, including:

• Two competing survey factions with 8 NPCs, including countermeasures that will occur in response to player actions
• Eight landmarks for the players to explore and survey
• A randomizer table for creating unique and strange organisms for the players to encounter (or run away from)

Will your players discover the secrets hidden on and within Elysian-X58? Will they become thieves, murderers, or worse to survive?  Or, perhaps, they will come out the other end of this adventure as something stranger still...

Content Warnings: Body horror, psychological horror, loss of player agency, violence

Art for this module was generated from public domain files made available via public.work. The works referenced therein were Nature Through Microscope and Camera by Richard Kerr (1909), featuring micrograph photography by Arthur E. Smith, and the Hortus Malabaricus, published between 1678 and 1693 with support from nearly a hundred contributors.

Additional art created by Jeremy Goodfellow and Joshua Kramer, with additional proof-reading by Megan Taylor.

This work is AI-Free. It does not include content or media that was AI or Machine Generated. Supporting this work means supporting real people.

This module was originally created as part of the TripTech Game Jam. The original version can be still be downloaded from this page as a demo for free.