Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG designed to invoke Alien-sy, Event Horizon-y, Space Odyssey-esque scenarios:
There’s a puncture in your vac suit, the ship AI is being no fucking help at all – your handheld motion sensor is beginning to bleep, bleep, bleep-bleep-bleep-bleepbleepbleepbleep.
I’m not even into sci-fi RPGs all that much, but if I gave awards I’d give Mothership my “Best RPG Rule System 2018″ award.
The game’s basically a primer for collective design wisdom accrued in old-school-y, art-punk-y DIY RPG circles thus far?
It’s crazy-good at information design. The character sheet is a single A4-sized document that also includes all character creation rules.
Skills as a flowchart, holy shit. How has nobody done this before? (Have they?)
The Player’s Survival Guide is a 42-page, zine-sized pamphlet that has all the rules you need to play – plus an NPC generator, a module-by-module ship generator, a d100 table for fun patches that you might’ve sewn onto your bag or jacket:
‘“All Out Of Fucks To Give” (Astronaut with turned out pockets)’
Simple, effective tone-setting.
Mothership is a percentile, d100, roll-under system. In my brain I’ve been comparing it to other d100 games I’ve played: WFRP (2nd Edition, onwards); the Fantasy Flight Warhammer 40K RPGs.
I have a bruised-papaya soft spot for these Warhammer games. (And their retroclones, like Zweihander.) But playing them is a chore. They tend to be overwritten messes.
Here’s the auspex (a kind of multipurpose scanner) from Dark Heresy 2E:
“ These standard Imperial detection devices are used to reveal energy emissions, motion, life-signs, and other information. A character using an auspex gains a +20 bonus to Awareness tests. Once per round, as a Free Action, a character with one may make a Tech-Use test to spot things not normally visible to human senses, such as invisible gases, nearby signs of life, non-visible radiation, or other things as appropriate. The standard range is 50m, though walls more than 50cm thick and certain shielding materials can block a scanner. Good craftsmanship models increase the bonus to +30, but Poor models an only penetrate 20cm of material. ”
2) For a long-ass entry it’s super vague. “ … and other information.” “ … or other things as appropriate.”
The auspex is less a piece of actual gear, more a tchotchke conferring an abstract +20 bonus to a system-specific skill. The most concrete detail about it is its can’t-penetrate 50cm-thick-walls thing.
Compare Mothership’s bioscanner:
“ Allows the user to scan the immediate area for signs of life. Generally can scan for 100m in all directions, without being blocked by most known metals. Can tell the location of signs of life, but not what that life is. ”
You have it? It isn’t broken? It does such-and-such concrete things in the world of the game.
The entry is terse but implies much. “Most known metals”. “Generally scans for 100m”. How can you boost your bioscanner’s range? Is it being blocked by alien alloys?
( Hooray for natural language! Less rules jargon means:
1) Things are intuitive to play and prep for, because your brain is less colonised by specialist nonsense language – also making it easier to play creatively;
2) Play is focused on comprehending and manipulating the shared imagined space, not abstract numbers. You’ll be looking to favourably-stack the situation, not your situation bonus. )
Dead Planet is the inaugural adventure module for Mothership:
a derelict-spaceship dungeon; a town of colourful, cannibalistic, doomed characters; an incursion from the dimension of the dead; a mooncrawl and a planetcrawl and a abandoned-base dungeon and tables for nightmares and warp-drive malfunctions and tables for generating NPCs and derelict spaceships and and and
Crazy how much stuff there is, in a mere 48 zine-sized pages.
And basically everything is great. To wit:
Every RPG person I know who’s talked about Mothership mentions this drop-a-bunch-of-d6s-and-arrange-them procedure to map spaceship dungeons.
How it suggests creating hidden ducts - if any two d6 faces add up to 7, those two rooms are connected by a secret passages - is genius. If this isn’t stolen and repurposed for dungeons general in whatever genre RPG people are dumb.
When Sharon flipped through Dead Planet she said: “Person who designed layout in this probably worked in magazines before.” Scumfuck staticky space horror blood-red Vogue.
( Asked Sean McCoy, who did the layout – and wrote the damn game, alongside Donn Stroud and Fiona Geist – and he said no, he’s not done magazine work before. Once again: hooray for the DIY RPG scene, and the envelopes we are pushing. )
So far, Mothership’s community’s been excellent. They’ve voted it /rpg’s Game of the Month.
It’s got a jumping Discord, one that outputs player-made stuff like this:
When I have time to run games again I know what I’m running.
GET IT HERE. (Considering that the Player’s Survival Guide is a pay-what-you-want PDF on DrivethruRPG you really have no excuse.)
