Lethal Company seems to be blowing up on Steam currently and it’s the most dungeoneering fun I’ve ever had and I think it’s very accessible to get into. It’s also the best digital approximation of a session of Mothership RPG I’ve found I really, really, like it and think a lot of my enjoyment comes from what I love about OSR dungeoneering.
In Lethal Company, you’re players on a team of up to 4 interns/subcontractors that has a clunky spaceship on lease from The Company. You land your ship on a series of moons and delve into abandoned industrial structures with your friends over in game voice chat looking for scrap. And these moons and structures are filled with a variety of awful creatures that want you dead. Here’s a couple things I enjoy about the game that can be applied to OSR dungeoneering.
1. Debt
In the game you have 3 days to reach your profit quota from the scrap and items you’re able to recover from your expeditions. Each time you land on a moon is 1 day of your time. In the first days if things get too dangerous or a crew member dies it’s easier to call it early and try to get out alive with a minor haul, but as time gets closer to your terminal deadline the pressure of a fatal default leads to riskier decisions in spite of really not wanting to go back in. “I don’t care what you saw in there, get back in- we’ve got to make quota!” This corporate horror framing helps answer the horror RPG question of “Why don’t they just leave this awful place?” and pushes players to constantly have to weigh their greed against their fear on each run in an awesome push your luck effect.
I like this framing even more than the traditional OSR treasure as XP for encouraging adventurous behavior in a survival horror setting. It’s not just how you get better but if you don’t extract the required value in goods, you’re dead or as good as. The pressure of debt on your character is a constant needle to take risks or actions you don’t want to in order to keep your head above water and live to delve another day with an even higher quota to reach. Also relatable to lots of players.
2. Limiting Communication
The best way to play is using the in-game voice chat. Directional audio is excellent so you can hear where your buddy is as they walk around you, voices echo in canyons, and get muffled underwater. If you go out of audible range you need to carry an in game walkie talkie and communicate with a crackling static filter. It’s not uncommon to discover a coworker has died only by not hearing them for a second, turning a corner and seeing their twisted body and still glowing flashlight and having to breathlessly report it to the rest of the team.
A monitor inside the ship offers a radar that can switch cameras to view each player as a blue dot on the map. requires someone to stay back at the ship as overwatch instead of haul scrap if they want to use it and communicate intel about the layout of the facility, green dots representing goodies, and the presence and movement of red dots representing hostile creatures via the walkie.
One of the worst feelings is when you hear a cut short scream over the walkie from ground control person and know you don’t have anyone scanning for dangers around you and you’re going to have to go back there and face whatever killed them to escape the moon
Due to the difference in medium this is hard to pull off in tabletop RPG’s but I think for novelty occasions pulling players into a different Discord channel or room of a building and the GM jumping between them fairly rapidly to reduce deadtime is a fun gimmick to bring out rarely.
Splitting the party and cutting between characters’ viewpoints while the players are at the same table would be the more efficient way of doing this 90% of the time and I’ve used this to good effect in horror games. Foreshadowing dread is spooky and provides some of the joys of knowing dread when you see the thing moving behind a character in a horror film even if it doesn’t provide the actual lack of information. But as both the knowing audience and unknowing participant, tabletop RPG’s are in an interesting space between a horror movie and a horror video game and I think provokes cool feelings and experiences that are distinctive from both.
3. Woeful Underequipment
The Company recommends a rookie starter package that costs more credits then you start with, which sets the tone for the level of employee benefits and support you can expect in the game. This leads to creativity through necessity. Without enough money to get radios for everyone do we have one person stay at the ship? Do we just all run for it without someone watching the radar monitor? Dave died carrying the stop sign we found, but if I pick it up I can club this spider with it. As teams amass more credits they never have enough for everything they might want. Should we buy a teleporter or pay for fuel to get to the moon Titan and it’s more lucrative and dangerous terrain? This vibes with the high focus on equipment and making the best of the tools you have with the environment in OSR type dungeon play.
4. Go Back For The Body!
The company docks your pay if you leave a body behind. This often leads to fleeing a beast that’s just slaughtered your coworker only to double back sneakily after being reminded of the cost for leaving them there. This has the same effect of the Funerals for the Fallen house rule of gaining the XP of fallen teammates for the equivalent spent on proper funerals and I think it’s fun and leads to stressful and occasionally silly gameplay benefits.
5. Swings between Terror and Hilarity
I haven’t played any other video game that pivots so strongly and frequently between the two poles. It’s a great time hanging out with your friends or nice internet strangers and joking and shooting the breeze that gets interrupted by moments of sheer terror and long stretches of building tension. The games PS1 era graphics also give it a goofy primativeness that also makes it spookier in a retro analog horror way.
You very, very, rarely can get the feeling of true horror around the table in RPGs. Trying to enforce a single vibe at the table is counter productive. Humor is used to defuse tension and is a natural reaction and also fun.
On the flipside I also think that a GM trying to be consistantly funny can rapidly turn into pure farce. Every game I’ve played at a con that marketed itself as humorous wasn’t as funny or fun to me as the unexpected laughs in other RPG sessions.
Silliness is an emergent property of gaming and throwing too much of the GM’s own from the start often overspices the stew. The gameplay in Lethal Company acts as a GM that plays the horrific straight man to player shenanigans through the setting but with a cheeky sprinkle of dark humor that doesn’t take itself over seriously. It’s nice to have both things.
6. Easy to Get Into The Game
I’ve played like 12 hours total so far. Multiple times I’ve had a friend or random player join for their first round ever and told them. “You push 1 to dance emote, 2 to point, and we need to go into spooky buildings and grab trash to take it back to the ship and pay off the debt on the monitor or we’re dead in 3 days.” And they were good to go! When you die and get to spectate the rest of the team with the other dead folks in a voice chat, commenting on the livings impending peril and laughing about how you kicked the dust-this downtime is brief because each day is limited to ~10 minutes at which point the ship autopilot takes off at midnight. And the experience of watching mirrors my feelings when I’ve died in Mothership, OSE, or another game I can expect to hop back in lickity split without spending two hours of character creation.
7. Player Skill over Character Skill
There’s no permanent progression between plays, you can buy some better equipment like a shovel, teleporter, boombox, or a romantic table for your ship as you gain credits on each playthrough. Everyone is playing the same noodly armed intern in an oxygen mask. Much like Mothership there’s not really leveling up (though the company gives you XP that leads purely to a fancier job title on your hazard suit) and when your crew inevitably falls short of quota eventually you’re given a High Score. You get better at knowing the behaviors of creatures, natural hazards, and the differences between moons on each subsequent run and can pass this info on to new players.
8. Teamplay
The life of the game is your teammates. Your fates are welded to each other and the team lives in dies on the mistakes,triumphs, banter, and sacrificial monster distractions to allow the other intern with the loot to get away from each other.
More than that, the real person on the other end of the is what makes it fun. Because communication is such an important part of the game you spend a lot of time just chatting with the other folks on the team. There’s enough downtime and goofiness in the game that you get to just talk as well instead of constantly aiming for optimized behavior. On a mechanistic level there’s not that much going on in the game loop and it could seem boring. Get scrap, go to other moons, meet quota, get higher quota, get more scrap. What makes it so replayable and entertaining is the specific humanity of the player behind the player character. I’ve had a blast with friends but also complete strangers who I developed a sense of genuine camaraderie with after 2 hours on a team shooting the shit while dancing and pointing at each other, creeping through dark facilities, stealing alien bee hives, and huffing strange inhalants, and hauling each others corpses. The game has a lot of space for emergent gameplay.
The human element of playing with other people towards a shared goal while being able to communicate and goof off with each other is a lot of what I love about RPG’s. While not able to reach the same highs of experience as GMing a table of good friends in person, Lethal Company offers a bit of that joyous experience- which is quite the achievement for a $10 video game.
Bonus: Steal the Premise for Your Fantasy RPG.
You and the other PC’s have been branded for your crimes with a geas sigil -the Holy Order of Tharn believe all members of society deserve a chance to contribute without being constrained to a prison. If you don’t haul out enough gold pieces worth of treasure from these awful holes in the ground in the pockmarked Valley of the Old Ones and deliver it to your debt holders outpost you’ll be burned to a crisp by your searing geas brand in 3 days. Perhaps you can find a way to break the geas by paying it off or rising against your captors but right now you’ve got a quota of 2000 gold pieces and daylight is waning.
*Debtors brand entirely stolen from a suggested framing for a Hot Springs Island campaign