"The Agony of the Devoured creature is always far greater than the Pleasure of the Devourer"
- Arthur Schopenhauer
(Content Warning: Depression, Self-harm, Suicide)
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Hyperspace is a fickle mistress.
The Noumenal was a colony ship delivering food and medicine that
disappeared 6 years ago. 2 weeks ago, it was detected in Rimspace. The
engines aren’t turning, and nobody is responding to hails. And yet,
systems are online, and the hull doesn’t bear a scratch. It’s up to you
and your crew to investigate.
A pitiless Void awaits you, and it has an appetite for Despair. Hold your composure, or you may end up as worm food…
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https://xiaofang64.itch.io/the-worms-embrace
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/540909/the-worm-s-embrace-a-mothership-scenario
The Father of Pessimism
This one was written for the
Derelict Jam 2025, but the embryo of an idea was there already, I just needed a push to finish it. Originally I was going to call it "Call of the Void" but another MoSh module came out with that name (predictable). In retrospect I like the change. When you've got a monster, you ought to want to put it front and centre, you know?
Anyway this dour looking fellow is Arthur Schopenhauer, whose quote features on TWE's cover:
He's considered the father of philosophical pessimism which is basically what it sounds like.
Look, I would never tell you to read anything. But if you are a fan of cosmic horror, I would say its worth having a look at some Schopenhauer. The seed of that genre was present there. For Schopenhauer, the world was tilted towards emptiness, towards suffering, and towards death. There always seems to be more pain than pleasure in the world, doesn't there? Life does not present itself as being worth living. How could it? We spend so much time filling life with things to make it worth living. We admit in our actions that the mere fact of our existence is not satisfactory.
Schopenhauer considered himself as building on the work of Kant, who spent a great deal of effort thinking about how to distinguish between the world as presented to us through the mind and senses and the World out There, the Thing-in-Itself that was really Real, but always outside our ability to understand it. But Kant and, say, the proponents of some religions would say that the Thing out there- the Ultimate reality- is Good, or at least worth knowing. Schopenhauer says instead that the Thing (or the Will) is in reality quite terrible.
Reminds me of someone.
The Worm is a blunt representative of all of those things. The emptiness of the void, the death drive, the sharp and aching suspicion that none of it is really worth the effort, the fear that if there is God, He hates you.
(You can tell by now, that all this comes from a pretty personal place.)
Still, though. We carry on. In my most audacious planning phase I did consider creating a scenario that literally had no win state. The idea was that the players would be trapped in a situation that was utterly hopeless- flung out of the galaxy without the fuel to return, doomed to starve or suffocate in the Void. The session would be merely about how to grapple and make amends with the end. And you know, I still think with the right people that might make for an interesting experience. But we carry on in the face of the void. We find reasons to persist. Any reason can do the job.
So of course, the hopeless scenario really isn't as hopeless as it seems. There are ways out. How can you escape the Worm? Buy The Worm's Embrace now and find out!!!
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