Tuesday, February 25, 2020

XX-Class Ports: The Station From Hell

Content for Mothership, or your favorite sci-fi RPG.

A den of utmost scum and villainy. Haunted to the gills. The worst of the worst. The second you step foot off your ship, it's gone. Stolen by those who need it more than you: they've been here longer.

I had some miscellaneous tables trimmed from other projects lying around and I thought I'd spruce them up and post them as something resembling a coherent theme. Use these tables to add a little extra terrible flavor to your X-Class stations.

Shoddy Equipment

When players want to buy stuff on the cheap. Too-good-to-be-true, back alley deals.

  1. Automed/Pain Pills: 50% sugar pills.
  2. Bioscanner: False readings frequent to the point of uselessness.
  3. Body Cam: Secretly transmits all footage to corporate database. Feed delayed additional 10 secs.
  4. Emergency Beacon: Only transmits on pirate-used frequency.
  5. Heads-Up Display: Unskippable ads play at most inopportune times, obscuring 80% of vision.
  6. Laser Cutter: Lens shaped like a smiley face. Half damage and charge capacity.
  7. Mag-Boots: Polarity reversed.
  8. Smart Rifle: Prone to friendly fire. On a miss, reroll the 1s digit 3 times to check for critical failure.
  9. Stimpack: Solution recovered from bloodstream of patients who didn't make it. Half as effective. 10% infection standard blood-borne disease, 1% rare alien disease.
  10. Vaccsuit: Stuck air pressure gauge. Indicates full oxygen, actually at 5%.


Nightmarish Items

Items looted from corpses killed in unexplainable ways, or at the site of a haunting, or in a dream.

  1. VHS tapes/other antiquated formats marked with upsetting titles: Last Moments 04/08 | Pretty One, 2 Houses Over
  2. Photograph of you taken moments ago from very nearby.
  3. Used needle. Pricks finger on retrieval.
  4. Childhood ceramics project, shattered.
  5. Butterflies, wings clipped. Writhing.
  6. Bottle sleeping pills.
  7. Frag grenade with pulled pin. Dud.
  8. Short Range Comms device, incoherent mumbling, laughter, and pleading heard on every channel.
  9. Medkit. Blood soaked bandages, empty bottles.
  10. Item carried by another character. If checked, no longer in their possession.


Get me off this Damned Station!

Questionable ideas supplied by shadier people. You get what you pay for.

  1. Bribe waste management to jettison trash cube towards the nearest station, burrow inside.
  2. Conduct a séance, become possessed by a hyperspace ghost. Offer body in exchange for its powers.
  3. Cut away and hijack station's anti-orbital-decay thrusters. Ride it like Slim Pickens to civilization.
  4. Lure innocent ship with distress signal. Be the first to steal it when they dock.
  5. Pray for the Great Implosion when all things are near.