The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 Prep and Actual Play Video

I love Alien. Along with The Thing, The Matrix, Cloud Atlas, and Mad Max: Fury Road, Alien is one of my top favorite movies.

That's why I was overjoyed when I first saw the adventure The Haunting of Ypsilon 14! It’s a short, sweet, not-too-predictable Alien-esque adventure that fits in a little yellow pamphlet!

I recently ran Ypsilon 14 for the second time, with a few players who had never played before! These players included my partner’s sister and dad - they finally bit and said “you know, I might be interested in playing one of those!” after years of me talking about adventure games :P. 

I made a custom overloaded encounter die in order to (SPOILERS from here on out) proceduralize: 1) the movement of the monster; 2) its strikes on mining asteroid crew members; 3) encounters with crew; 4) arguments among crew members over how to respond to their missing coworker; 5) the appearance of the station’s cat, Prince; 6) ongoing damage from goo-transformation by the alien goo; 6) the light-flickering movement of the “faulty” elevator (actually being used by the invisible monster); and 7) sudden gear-threatening trajectory shifts for the asteroid - which is actually an alien spaceship!

Click the image for a copy of the document

Above is a copy of the overloaded encounter die table, along two tables inspired by Sly Flourish: a list of NPCs/inter-relationships including archetypal pop culture characters to help me characterize them, and a list of secrets and clues. These secrets add to the story of the scenario by making the missing miner Mike a recovering alcoholic who went missing once before, a year ago, and was found drunk after a bender. For a clue to this addiction/goo-transformation theme, I added to the contents of Mike’s bedroom a 12-step daily prayer book opened to a page stained with yellow tears that reads “being self-supporting means being aware of the responsibility of every member of the group.” When I run this adventure again I’ll also change the ominous last words Mike seared on the cavern wall in room 8 from “Silence” to “for the group.” 

This one page helped me run the NPCs, and the overloaded encounter die helped the game feel dynamic and surprising to me. I also randomly determined using a d10 the starting location of each of the NPCs, for a clear picture of the scenario that the party was.

System-wise I used Adventure Hour as the touchstone, resolving all uncertain actions with 50/50 success/fail odds, heavily informed by impact. Instead of giving each player two injuries before they are taken out of the action, I had every injury fill inventory slots with a number of wounds, with death occurring at 10 wounds. Different enemies inflicted different numbers of wounds, as noted on the DM one pager above. This system was inspired by Knave 2e and Runehammer’s Crown and Skull. This approach to damage proved fun, tense, and impactful. Hits were less abstract than a hit point pool, directly affecting the characters’ main ability: carrying stuff. 

 You can see a video of the session here: 

For character creation we used my new zine: All-Dice Space Truckers. It’s a PWYW system-neutral sci-fi character creator, created with The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 in mind :)