I went and (co)wrote another Mothership adventure, this time a one-shot. You can find Ship of Fools on itch.io or DriveThruRPG, whichever you prefer.

Leviathanic, a luxury space cruise ship, has suffered a giant space amoeba related misfortune. Within hours, all its crew and systems have been severely compromised. According to the procedure, the ship’s AI has woken up several passengers most qualified for the task at hand. Too bad some of them are not who they said they are.

The premise, as you can see, is fairly straightforward. None of the high-concept weirdness of Terror Signal, our previous sandbox campaign (though there are tiniest of references connecting the two). There is, however, a twist. Naturally, it’s best if you don’t know it if you’re going to play the adventure. If you’re going to run it, read on.

None of the characters are the handpicked, qualified specialists they claimed to be. Each PC is given a brief backstory explaining how they came to be on Leviathanic under an assumed identity. The text also strongly suggests they should hide this fact from others, rely on their more competent colleagues, and deflect blame.

The entire adventure, thus, is a black comedy of escalating disasters that are in practice indistinguishable from a regular Mothership session until the final reveal. It feels like you’ve pulled off a magic trick when, as you conclude the adventure, one of the players admits their character’s big secret, and everyone suddenly starts talking over one another as the realisation sinks in.

After I ran it for the first time, an utterly unexpected thing happened: the players decided they really wanted to see how others would fare in the same circumstances, and were happy to play it again, this time being in on it from the start. How many adventures have you played that you’d immediately want to replay?

It took some time to figure out how to facilitate such a game. How do you play a character that cannot do what their character sheet says they can, how do you handle that as a GM? Turns out, it’s quite straightforward. When a character tries to do something that would require an expert or master skill (that their sheet has but they don’t), they make the check as usual. On a failure, they make everything worse and have to look for a different approach (giving them a chance to deflect the responsibility onto others), which is how Mothership works anyway. On success, they still don’t do it, but don’t actually screw up the situation further, and the Warden gives them a hint as to what’s required to succeed.

From this, the structure of the adventure followed. Each location has a PC “associated” with it, who would obviously come in handy there. Medbay – surgeon, reactor – spaceship engineer, etc.. When the party gets there, all eyes turn to them. Except they can’t actually do the things expected of them, so they’ll have to look for excuses, screw things up, and ultimately shove the responsibility onto someone else. Medbay medical systems are on the fritz, we need to do a proper reset from the Bridge. Which is where a different PC has to step up and slip up. In order to help them, each location comes with suggestions for the Warden on how the PCs could make things worse there, and what sort of excuses they may use to redirect the responsibility.

The PCs bounce around the ship as things turn from bad to worse.

In other words, a typical Mothership session.

With just a modicum of help from the adventure itself.