Overview:
We Are Not Ourselves is an adventure booklet made for the sci-fi horror tabletop roleplaying game, Mothership. It is short adventure centered around themes of paranoia, mistrust, psychological horror, and a bit of body horror that takes advantage of the TTRPG format to tell a unique story. I was inspired to make the booklet after discovering the Pirate Borg TTRPG, which had bold and beautiful page layouts and art, but the text was rather inaccessible. I wanted to make something laid out in a similarly artful way, while maintaining readability.
Achievements:
Used a union of game design, creative writing, illustration, and game design to make a visually pleasing and readable adventure module for the Mothership Horror Tabletop Roleplaying game, garnering 85 downloads on itch.io.
Personally ran the module 4 times for a total of 12 players, twice for playing players, and once on a livestream for the Open the Gates Gaming research organization.
Design Process
Second Chances
WANO is designed to be a "one-shot" adventure, meaning it's to be played in one 3-4 hour sitting. The game it's built on, Mothership, is very deadly. Characters will die and be removed from the game regularly.
In order to make sure players whose characters die still get to participate, I designed a system where every character can respawn once through cloning. Dying still has consequences, however, as each character only gets one clone, and whatever items that character carried are lost unless the party retrieves them.
The fact that characters can respawn is hidden from players until one of them dies. This keeps the tension of dying felt until after the moment it happens.
Sowing Paranoia
A lot of the player experience around the psychological horror and paranoia in WANO is all about revealing and concealing information at the right times. I put the players in their characters shoes by hiding background information from them, slowly trickling clues as to what's really going on, and allowing them to piece them together themselves.
The game very quickly reveals a message written in blood on the wall: "Don't trust [character name]". This immediately begins to sow doubt among every player. I rely on their prior knowledge of social deduction games like Werewolf or Among Us to plant the idea that another player could be an imposter.
What Didn't Work
After one player dies and the clones are revealed, the tension drains significantly for the other players as they realize they get an extra life. As mentioned, there are still consequences for dying, but they aren't as significant as they are initially perceived, and it changes the mood of the game once this is revealed.
Something I would like to play around with to address this is incorporating the fungus into this death system. When the players' characters die, they can respawn in a new body, but the old one may rise back up as an enemy.
