The Presses Go to Hell: Fear of a Daily Planet
In this lost colony crawl for Mothership crowdfunding Feb. 4th, an outpost built solely to print employee handbooks for Etaoin Shrdlu Stellarcomms was quietly forgotten 1,000 years ago in their switch to digital. But the presses never stopped...
Crowdfunding Feb. 4th to 25th on BackerKit as part of Zine Month 2025, Fear of a Daily Planet is a 36-page lost colony crawl to be played with the sci-fi horror RPG Mothership. It's written by Jordan Boschman, creator of the Mothership modules So You've Been Chump-Dumped and The Stone-Flesh Gift and lead editor of the upcoming Devil's Due. To sign up for updates on the project and be notified when it goes live, click here.
Fear of a Daily Planet is a digest-sized (5.5 x 8.5 in), 36-page book featuring:
- an isolated, print-obsessed culture channeling messages from beyond to feed their daily art despite looming crises
- 10 colony buildings with almost 40 keyed rooms
- 4 cults vying for control of the colony, each with their own monstrous creation
- 8 NPCs struggling among the masses to survive, seize power, or escape
- a d100 "I Read the Paper" table
- and more!
Whether bounty hunting a target hoarding corporate blackmail, following the trail of strange prints on plastic paper cluttering local space, or responding to an oddly calm distress call, the player crew will explore what remains of Burgom's Haven, a bleak printer colony established by the long-defunct Etaoin Shrdlu Stellarcomms, starving and festering with cults after centuries of isolation.
Into this volatile mix, a charismatic new arrival, the enigmatic preacher known only as Inside Source, brings the secrets of a place called "Hell," with thousands if not millions of lines of text magically condensed into a stick no bigger than your thumb. He tells the colonists that their ancient, forgotten practice of delivering prints to the black quartz above brought him here, so he has revived it, despite most of their wishes, claiming it will bring them renewed prosperity.
Flanked by his Loyal Guard who see him as their only means of salvation, Inside Source has spent the past ten years printing newspapers from his Hell archive and placing them alongside historical prints ransacked from the reliquary of Burgom's Haven, to be once more sucked out into space each Deadline as a plea for help to the hidden, two-faced god Etaoin Shrdlu.
Content Warnings: violence, gore, theft of agency, religious manipulation, environmental pollution, body horror, self-harm, starvation, alcoholism
Backers at the Physical and Deluxe levels in the first 48 hours after launch will also receive a free patch themed after the Smudge workers of Burgom's Haven.
