An Easy Job by Joe is a role playing game supplement published by Joe J for use with Mothership.
The supplement is available as a 38 page Pay What You Want PDF from DriveThruRPG.
There are also seven png files, one being a map of the ship, four being graphical versions of crew logs and two being communications with the company. One page is the front cover and one the table of contents and front matter.
The Introduction explains that the characters are hired by a mega-corp for a deep space mission, during which an experiment will be performed. It gives some background and explains that this is an 8–12-hour adventure and how the module is laid out.
The Ship gives an overview of the ship, including a map.
The Crew gives details on the other crew members.
The Job has a briefing from the company about what the job involves, including a Q&A section.
The Lies is what the company isn’t telling the truth about and what was actually being done.
The Truth isn’t so much the truth, as that was covered in the previous section, but what’s gone wrong.
The Timeline has a timeline of events for what happens to the other crewmembers.
The Prologue starts before the mission and introduces the characters to the NPCs and gives them some clues.
The Awakening has the characters coming out of cryosleep.
The Solution has what the characters must do in order to survive.
The Struggle starts by explaining that locations have two modes, depending on whether power is on or off, and off is only available after connecting the emergency battery. Time needs to be tracked as some events are based on when it is. The various decks of the ship are then described, with the aforementioned two modes for each, which affects the options available.
Appendix 1: The Bad Guys has stats for foes.
Appendix 2: The Logs has logs for the NPCs, in text rather than image versions.
Appendix 3: The Images has the images from the pngs.
An Easy Job in Review
The PDF is bookmarked, but not helpfully, as none of the bookmarks are actually named after what they link to, just the page number. The table of contents covers the major sections and major subsections and is hyperlinked. Navigation is okay. The text maintains a two-column format and appeared to be free of errors. As well as the map, there are a number of black and white illustrations. Presentation is good, but a lot of the text is white on a black background, which is definitely detrimental to printing.
This is definitely a horror adventure that seems to take inspiration from some classic sci-fi horror films. One issue with it is the asteroid field that the ship is passing through; this definitely takes inspiration from films and television, because it’s far too dense. There are effectively variable time limits for the players; the longer they take to do things, the more likely that things will go wrong. An Easy Job can be found by clicking here.
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