A while ago, when Mothership 1e was getting crowdfunded, I wrote about the game in its “early access” state and what I hoped for in the full release. Now that it has finally been delivered, and a new crowdfunding campaign is in full swing, let us revisit it. Has Mothership lived up to the expectations?
Mothership is a sci-fi horror game set in outer space. It adamantly refuses to have a defined setting beyond that, partly because the setting is very obvously “Alien”, and partly because its main strength (in my opinion, at least) are the adventures, and the fewer details are set in stone, the easier it is to integrate them.
It uses a streamlined d100 roll under system, giving a typical character 30-40% chance of success under normal circumstances. While that is quite low, the game is not modelling their everyday competence but the worst day of their lives. Although pure success is hard to come by, a failed roll doesn’t necessarily mean a failed action. Instead, it means the situation changes for the worse. There’s a whole page of examples of partial successes and successes at a cost, with a suggestion that a near miss “can mean something if you let it”.
Most of the rules are solid, but there’s one significant area where the rulebooks have failed, and that’s combat rules. Combat works as follows: at the start of a round, GM announces what the opposition is likely to do if they’re not stopped, e.g. eat PCs’ faces. Players decide what they’ll do to avoid this, GM figures out what rolls are involved, then resolves the situation in the order that makes sense to them. Nowhere in the rules or examples does it mention anything about NPCs rolling dice. Failed to shoot/run away/do something else? Your face gets eaten. Except at the very end of the Warden’s Operations Manual, the GM book, we find out such player-facing rolls are an optional rule, and the actual rules are left to be inferred.
On the one hand, it’s not that big of a deal. Your group or GM will decide how they’ll resolve combat and move on. Maybe it’ll be player facing, maybe monster stats will give some modifiers to player rolls, maybe everyone will roll and whiff incessantly, up to you. On the other hand, despite appearances, Mothership is not just a scruffy indie darling upstart. Its 0e rules have been out for years, many adventures were written by 3rd party authors to support it, the kickstarter for 1e earned $1.4 million, the books were delivered a year and a half late. They had time and resources to nail these two pages, is my point. And it’s not a minor side rule you may not even use in your game, it’s the rule that determines whether a monster eats your character’s face in a game about monsters eating chararcters’ faces.
Dying rules, on the other hand, are brilliant. When you run out of Wounds and make a roll to see if you’re dead-dead, knocked unconscious, or bleeding out, you cover this roll with a cup. It’s there, the determinant of your fate, but no one gets to see it until someone takes the time to go and check on you – time that could be spent running. The tension of not knowing is great, and I only wish this trick was used more.
While the final books no longer mention it, Mothership is very much an OSR-related game: high lethality, simple rules, emphasis on how PCs do things rather than what their character sheet says they can do. All of your stats are low, and the best way to avoid failing a roll is not to roll. Even if it is the expected approach in these games, I’m glad there’s a page dedicated to discussing when to roll dice at all. Have the right tools and a good plan, and you’re not at the mercy of dice. But of course this is a horror game, where things go awry and alien monster burst through the vents, so roll you shall.
With die rolls comes Stress and and with Stress comes Panic, the distinguishing features of the system. Any time a PC fails a roll, and that happens a lot, they gain stress. When they critically fail (by getting doubles on a failed roll) or are otherwise directed by the GM, they make a Panic check: roll a d20 and, if the result is equal or under their stress value, look it up on the panic table. Meaning the lower results are much more common than the higher ones, and not as deadly with one notable exception. Getting “overwhelmed” on a 4 gives you a disadvantage (roll twice, pick worst) on all rolls for 1d10 minutes, which is tantamount to a death sentence in a situation where you’re already panicking. Other low-end results give you more stress, or, notably, remove stress and give you advantage on a 1. Then follows a slew of Conditions, long-term psychological damage that’s very pricey to get rid of. And finally a few effects that take over the character’s actions entirely or kill them outright.
For my tastes, some of the results could be punchier. You probably won’t make more than a couple of panic checks in a given session, meaning until your stress is really high you may not even panic at all. So when you do, you want it to be an event. That’s what all the bookkeeping was for, that’s why the GM kept reminding you to increment your stress whenever you failed a roll. Then the moment of truth comes, and, tada, you’re “nervous” and gained 1 more stress.
There’s also a peculiarity to this mechanic that makes it dependent on the playstyle. The Stress you get is directly proportional to the number of rolls you make. In other games, it’s a good practice for a GM to consider if a failed roll would be interesting before asking for one, especially if such failure is supposed to trigger a response. In Mothership, the question is “would failing here be stressful?” The flipside is that gaining Stress is a tangible outcome in its own right, and could be all that happens.
Stress is hard to get rid of in the field: resting in a safe place lets you make a roll using your worst Save to reduce it by a few points, with leisure activities granting advantage. The odds are still not great, and failure increases Stress by 1 as it always does. For a more reliable stress relief method, characters can enjoy shore leave. It still relies on a roll, but at least this time it’s not necessarily your worst Save, and even a failure resets Stress to its minimum value. Don’t critically fail, though. Success converts some stress into a Save of your choice. The amount converted depends on the money you’re willing to pay, with anything beyond 1d10 likely not affordable.
This is the main way your character will grow mechanically. They can gain skills, but that takes not just huge fees for education materials but also literal years of study. Military Training is an exception – you can sign up for 6 years of service (!), and make a roll at the end to see if you’ve distinguished yourself or were killed in action.
Thus the gameplay loop is go on a mission -> oh no, alien monsters -> stress rising -> back to space port for shore leave and stress relief -> skip 1d10 month -> go on a mission. As time passes, if you live long enough, you may even pick up a skill. And time does pass a lot, as one of the few things the game defines about its world is that space travel is fairly realistic, before you get to the hyperspace jumps. Namely, it can easily take months to transit between planets, and even hyperspace travel probably involves lenghty within-system flights to jump points. Meaning the suggested time skips are often simply the time between points A and B.
When it comes to the missions themselves, Mothership’s tagline floats ominously into view: “Survive, Solve, Save.” Players can typically do one, or two if they try hard enough. Warden’s Operations Manual actually uses these terms in its excellent chapter on session preparation. I love a game framing how you ought to think about it. Beyond this framing, WOM offers practical advice and step by step guides on not just session preparation, but also developing the threat, drawing maps, running a session, keeping a campaign journal, mapping space, creating factions. It even offers some random tables for horror inspiration, planet generation, etc. WOM is a masterpiece, and most of this book can be used in any game you run.
Thus concludes the overview of the game. But what do I think about it as a whole? Weeeeell. Let’s get one thing out of the way first: I co-wrote a massive Mothership adventure, Terror Signal. I’m maybe writing more. Criticising the game is not exactly a comfortable position for me. With that in mind, I think Mothership is a good game that doesn’t commit to anything that would make it great.
Over and over it says you can play it in different ways, modify rules as you see fit, decide for yourself how technology works, etc., it offers suggestions and ideas for different approaches, but never fully develops a single one.
Consider the humble android. There are androids in the game, they’re omnipresent, one of the 4 character classes, you really can’t get away from them. People find them unnerving. That’s all we’re told. At different points, the rules say that maybe they can carry more than people, or maybe they don’t need to breathe or are immune to radiation, etc.. The text recongises these questions are important, but leaves it up for the group to decide themselves, often in the middle of action.
It is so much easier to modify or ignore existing rules or setting details than it is to come up with them wholesale on the spot. There’s a gorgeous spread of armour illustrations with details of what each of them is equipped with. Give me that for different models of androids. Give me an outline or a list of questions or anything. Instead we get Here Be Androids. And this attitude extends all the way to the core rules.
The game wants you to run it as an OSR game: to only roll when absolutely necessary, be an impartial arbiter, etc. It also needs you to roll dice a fair bit for its Stress mechanic to function. And the action resolution mechanics are more freeform than, say, Apocalypse World, a notorious OSR darling. Consider: in AW you have defined success-mixed success-failure ranges for a roll, with usually a few options to choose from for each result. In Mothership, which “uses a d100 system because it gives you so much room to interpret,” this room is for you to fill as you see fit. A jammed gun here, an extra xenomoprh there. A failed roll is what you make of it. Impartially. No rules for success ranges or potential outcomes, optional or otherwise, just a suggestion that you could have some.
Every roll a ruling.
Mothership insists, repeatedly, that it’s about the worst day of the characters’ lives. It is also a Traveller-lite life-in-space sim, where the characters have an occupation, engage in vocational training and try to save up for retirement. While also keeping track of their High Score, the number of sessions they’ve survived, with median value being “somewhere around 4”.
There’s a dissonance here. Maybe it’s because the setting is not a horror setting. It’s not anything setting because there’s no setting, just vibes. And the vibes are that space is hard and spooky, corporations are inhuman and run everything, but people keep on truckin’. The rules are for people to keep on truckin’. Go on a mission, get stressed, get paid, get drunk, read a book, go on a mission. Except every 1d10 months it’s the worst day of your life.
These are different games.
For Mothership to be a great Space Truckin’ game, I would want economy to be the driving factor. It certainly fits the themes. There’s a decent start for it in WOM, typical salaries and hazard pay rates, different kinds of employers and what expenses they cover. Yet the only non-emergency expenses it offers is shore leave or better personal equipment. The only aspiration you get is saving up for various treatments. You do stuff to recover from doing stuff or be able to do stuff better, that doesn’t drive a campaign. Upwards mobility is statistically impossible, reminds us the book. Then what are we doing?
The game acknowledges that spaceships are prohibitively expensive and you probably don’t own one. At the same time, it tells us private ownership or co-op or lease or whatever else is possible, and introduces Bankruptcy saves to cover some of vagaries of these arrangement. It is, yet again, a kernel of an idea. I would much rather have a worked out setting detail of how and why it’s a relatively common practice to fly your own (loosely speaking) ship despite all the outlined monetary constraints, and tied economic pressures that would force the crew to make dangerous choices. Give me Red Markets in space, is what I’m saying.
For Mothership to be a great Worst Day of Your Life game, it would need a Stress adjustment. Not only do some of the Panic results only matter in a longer game, as written Stress doesn’t really work for shorter adventures, as you simply won’t accrue enough for it to matter. There are simple fixes to this, such as starting off with some stress or gaining more than 1 stress per failure. But given that so many of the published Mothership adventures are fairly short, and in a somewhat unique situation many were published way before these rules came out, they really should have addressed this in the text.
For Mothership to be a great episodic game, a sequence of Worst Days, it would need some mixture of downtime action and event generator to fill the months or years between the incidents. Skill training is the one option we’re given, and Bankruptcy save another. It’s a missed opportunity to learn something about our characters, to develop them and their connections to the larger world. A year has passed: did they get married? Gain a tattoo they don’t remember getting? A malfunctioning implant? Develop an addiction? Cheat a mob boss at a game of cards?
It’s cool that it takes 2 minutes to make a character in Mothership, they can die just as quickly. But once they’ve survived the ordeal of the first adventure, once we care about them a bit, it would be great to have a tool to help give them more personality than a d100 patch table affords. We won’t have the time for that once cyberzombies start crawling again.
Perhaps you don’t want any of the things I listed. Your perfect Mothership game, whaterver form it takes, may look entirely different. The point wasn’t so much to declare how to make Mothership better, but to show why for any application of the system, it could have been.
Previously, I had called Mothership the tabula rasa of sci-fi horror. I no longer think that’s quite accurate. No, Mothership is the D&D of sci-fi horror. And if you’ve followed this blog for a decade for some god-forsaken reason, you’d know it’s a dubious compliment coming from me.