Stumbling Through RPG Self-Publishing

In the past few months, I've stumbled my way through the process of developing and releasing a small, 2-page RPG scenario for the Mothership RPG. Though many other creators have come before me, it's been an exciting process and I thought others might be interested to hear some bits and pieces I've learned along the way.

Back in January, Dai Shugars posted a fun prompt for a Mothership scenario in a discord server I use. I elaborated on the prompt with a d10 table to use with the scenario, and left it at that. After some encouraging words about the table, I decided to flesh it out into a fully playable scenario. A month or so later and with Shugars' permission, I had a blog post I was pretty happy with. I posted it to the always-bustling Mothership discord server as well as r/rpg, where it was met with modest interest. As of right now that blog post, "Moonbase Blues", sits at about 600 views.

A few weeks went by, I continued to write blog posts and I started running the scenario for my regular Mothership playgroup. Out of the blue, I got a message from someone I'd seen hanging around the Mothership discord but had never spoken with, Warren Denning. Turns out he'd read Moonbase Blues and liked it so much that he laid out the scenario onto a professional-looking 1-page spread with maps to use in his home game. I was floored by the work and the compliment it represented. It made me feel like the blogging I'd been doing, which had heretofore received minor engagement, was all worth it.

Warren and I got to talking about what to do with the pdf. We both agreed that we should release it to the community, but weren't sure if we should try and sell it or put it out for free. We got in contact with Sean McCoy, the creator of Mothership, who began supplying us with a TON of excellent advice and support. I seriously cannot thank him enough for the help he's given us on this project. He encouraged us to sell the scenario for a similar price point to The Haunting of Ypsilon 14, an official 2-page one-shot scenario released for Mothership earlier this year. Because the free version of the scenario exists on my blog for anyone wanting to play it but without the inclination or financial ability to pay, Warren and I made the final decision to try and sell Moonbase.

With our decision to sell the product, we started working to polish up the material and expand the scope to fill both the front and back of a double-sided pamphlet. We added more content, tweaked and improved the layout, and made several editing passes. Meanwhile, we began to work on the logistical and marketing side of our project.

First, we had to decide where to put Moonbase Blues up for sale. DriveThruRPG is the largest online RPG marketplace, and other Mothership products have had a lot of success there. There's also Itch.io, a marketplace primarily used for video games sales but with a burgeoning RPG scene. DriveThruRPG takes a 30% cut of pdf sales for products sold exclusively on their website, and a 35% cut for non-exclusive products. Furthermore, they require an 18-month wait time to switch a publisher account from exclusive to non-exclusive. Itch.io takes 0%, with an option to donate a percentage of the creator's choice to maintain the site. DriveThruRPG also awards products with medals according to sales numbers and visibly promotes high-selling titles, pushing creators towards putting all eggs in their basket.

I reached out to Sean McCoy for advice, who shared that Mothership received roughly 80% of its sales on DriveThru and 20% on Itch. Doing some table napkin math, I applied those numbers and determined that one would keep 72% of a product's profits selling on both DriveThru and Itch, compared to 70% from going DriveThru-exclusive (assuming equal sales numbers). I also got in contact with Aaron Sturgill, the author of Vita Nova, a 3rd-party Mothership scenario that had been for sale on DriveThruRPG for several months. Aaron also graciously shared some of his sales experiences, and told me that Vita Nova had enjoyed very consistent sales on DriveThru since its release. With this information in hand, Warren and I weighed our options and came down on the side of a simultaneous Itch and DriveThru release. Though it seemed DriveThru was helping to promote its games and drive consistent sales, the numbers were close enough that we decided to err on the side of being less constrained in our future options.

Next, we tackled the hurdle of copyright. We wanted to protect our creation but avoid the relatively costly copyright registration fee (around $50, depending) on this very small project. Luckily, an attorney friend of mine shed some light on copyright law for us. From her advice and my own research, I learned that published works in the US automatically gain copyright protections upon creation, no registration required. Even a notice of copyright is optional, though we decided to post one on the pdf for thoroughness.

Now fully prepared with our completed files and all decisions made, we went to release our little scenario. I created pages on both DriveThruRPG and Itch.io and went to hit the button to upload my files to the latter site when DriveThru notified me of an approval process that would take up to 5 days. I wasn't aware of this requirement, so had to postpone release plans.

On the following Monday, I got an email from DriveThru that Moonbase was not only approved, but automatically pushed live to their marketplace. If I'd wanted the option to choose when it went live, apparently I should have set a specific release day in the future. I scrambled to organize some marketing posts before I lost the benefit of DriveThru's algorithms for newly posted content. I posted links to both the DriveThru and Itch pages to the Mothership discord, my twitter account (which had only 15 or so followers), and to a few subreddits in the body of a longer text post explaining the story of its creation and linking play reports from Warren and I.

Sean McCoy and several other notable RPG people retweeted me, so my post managed to reach a decent number of people there. On the discord, Sean posted Moonbase to their "announcements" channel where it was much more visible. My posts to reddit did better than expected, receiving some attention on both r/mothershiprpg and r/osr but climbing almost to the top of r/rpg. The marketing effort felt like a reasonable success despite my minimal social media presence, largely due to help from others.

Within a few hours of my posts, Moonbase shot to the #1 spot on DriveThruRPG's "Most Popular Under $5" section, which is prominently visible on the site's front page. It stayed there at #1 for an entire week, and has only today dropped to position 3. I attribute many of my sales on DriveThru to this. On the first day of release, Itch accounted for approximately 1/4 of our sales, but that ratio soon trailed off as Itch sales dropped to almost nothing. DriveThru sales remained fairly consistent, tailing off but at a slower rate. We earned a Bronze Best Seller badge from DriveThru within the first 24 hours of our release and Silver a couple days later.

Itch sales have settled at around 15% of our total sales, not far off the 80/20 estimation shared by Sean. I feel good about our decision to go non-exclusive, mostly because it's given us flexibility while seemingly doing no harm to (or even slightly benefiting) our sales numbers. I think in the future, I might choose to only promote a DriveThru page for a new product now that I know the vital importance of hitting its front page (which would be impossible on Itch given competition with the much more popular video games on the site), even if I was posting to both DriveThru and Itch.

Despite our rookie mistakes and various unforeseen problems and challenges, this all worked out pretty well. Starting on a small, manageable project provided plenty of trial and error learning opportunities without setting the stakes and stress too highly. Warren and I haven't earned back anything close to minimum wage given the many hours we spent on the project, but we have a shiny silver medal and a lot more experience under our belts than we started with. Perhaps most importantly, I got to feel first hand the joys of collaborative community effort I'd only heard rumors about from the glory days of G+. My efforts to make some stuff and share it with other rpg people paid off and became something more than I could have envisioned.

If you're curious to check out the finished product, here's links to Moonbase Blue's DriveThruRPG page and Itch.io page.

If you found this post useful or at least interesting, please let me know! Thanks for reading.

Moonbase Blues Play Report

I recently ran my scenario Moonbase Blues with a few players from the Mothership discord who had never played the system before. They did an excellent job getting into the spirit of sci-fi horror, and I had a great time playing with them. Our mini-campaign ran for two sessions, over the course of about 6.5 hours.

The Players:

• James playing: Sam Lodes (she/her), Teamster
• Adam playing: Chian Lang (he/him), Scientist
• Jamie playing: Kew-15 (it), Android

The players wake in the Security Room of Azure Base, an isolated astronomical research outpost on a small moon. None of them recall exactly how they arrived, and I discussed some potential backstories with each player as their character began to make sense of the situation.

• Kew-15, a walking terrarium-bot with experimental plants covering its dirt-filled exterior, was nominally assigned to the base as a botanist for its greenhouse but carried a secret mission to report back to Azure Horizons HQ on the outpost's status. 
• Chian Lang, an Azure Horizons-employed mathematician by trade with an intense interest in the mystical, heard some corporate rumors about a secret research project with mysterious aims and pulled some strings to get himself assigned.
• Sam Lodes, a freelancer who ran afoul of Azure Horizons following an engineering mishap, was gently coerced into long-term deployment to one of its facilities by the corporation's lawyers to pay off her debt.

The players explore their surroundings, discovering a ransacked armory and a barricade blocking passage deeper into the base. The security computer terminal helpfully directs them towards several menial jobs that need doing around the base, including a disconcerting message to "GO OUTSIDE IN 4 HOURS 32 MINUTES 9… 8… 7… SECONDS AND LOOK UP." Kew takes note of the countdown while the humans stress out. On the terminal they also discover maps of the base, normal operations logs that turn suddenly morbid then cease dated 1 week ago, and systems logs that indicate periodical power surges throughout the facility.

Player-facing map of the main base

The players scavenge what's left in the room, finding just one of their loadouts in a duffel bag--Lang's, and an unmarked, outdated punch card for a computer hidden underneath a locker. They divvy up the gear, dismantle the barricade, and press on.

In the Greenhouse, the players find several colonists behaving strangely. One intently counts down seconds in the thousands. Kew does the math, it's the same countdown from the terminal. When Lang calls out to ask what's going on, the colonist loses its train of thought and begins to panic. Kew jumps in with the count that's been running in its processors, helping the colonist to find its place and diffuse the situation. The players carefully creep their way through the Greenhouse, noting the unnatural size of the plants and avoiding the other colonists who are each preoccupied with its own pursuit. One's unblinking eyes slowly trace the path of some unseen thing through the floor, others' faces are buried in vegetation.

The players move on without further incident, heading across the base to the Observatory. Inside they find a gruesome altar traced with strange geometries and surrounded by brutalized corpses beneath the telescope. In the adjacent Geology Lab, the players find a meteorite fragment glowing with blue light. The plants attached to Kew perk up when bathed in the light, but the humans do their best to avoid it. This is a bad place, and they only stay here long enough to push the punch card into the lab's terminal and learn that it contains a fragment of a wavelength.

Lang, who's been scanning the comms channels for signs of life, finally picks up a signal. The crew gathers around the communicator to hear a garbled local weather report predicting meteor showers. They don't like this.

By this point, they're thoroughly scared and stressed out and want out of this place. They head to Habitation in search of vaccsuits. Along with an obviously tampered-with stimpack, they find them. Everyone suits up, including Kew who does so to protect its plants despite not requiring protection from zero atmosphere itself, and head through the massive main airlock.

Out on the moon's surface, the players take stock of their surroundings. Through Lang's binoculars, they spot a drop-pod crash site to one side, and an array of solar panels partially obscuring another structure to another. Kew checks the time remaining on the ominous countdown--under 2 hours. They decide to head for the structure, which should be the Mechanics Bay according to their map. Lodes does her best to give the novice crew a moonwalking tutorial, but it's for naught. Halfway to the solar panels, Lang misjudges a jump and goes headfirst into a crater.

Cracked helmet, not good. Lodes does her best to patch it up, but there's still air leaking and now Lang can't see for shit. They press on, now in haste, with Lang attached to Lodes via her vaccsuit's safety line. [END SESSION 1]

Past the solar array, the players find the Mechanics Bay crawling colonists--without vaccsuits. Kew finds this most unsettling of all, but after being shaken out of it by Lodes fires off its flare gun towards the crash site. Some of the colonists follow, but 2 remain. As the players approach, they see one with bloody arms prostrating itself in the direction of the main base and crying over its imperfect, red blood. 1 hour remains. The other has scintillating prisms where eyes should be and a rigging gun in hand, and demands the crew stop and face the meteor's rise. Lang tries to play along and chants in his best impression of a madman, but the others take action.

A shot from the flare gun streaks past the mad colonist's face and for a brief moment the area is cast in dazzling light from the prisms. Lodes goes for the airlock panel, but is pinned down by the rigging gun. She decides to slash open her vaccsuit to free herself from the harpoon's filament, hoping she can hold her breath long enough to get inside. Kew jumps on the harpoon before the colonist can retract it again, throwing it off balance and pulling it down from its perch atop the building. Lodes hits the airlock panel. Locked.

A voice comes over the intercom, "this better be a rescue." It doesn't sound hopeful. When Lodes responds, the voice sounds shocked and the airlock begins to slide open. The crew pack inside, but Lodes is suffocating. Agonizingly long seconds pass as the airlock cycles and pressurizes. Lodes feels like she's dying, but then air fills her lungs. They're safe, for now.

It's pitch black inside, and the light from the crew's headlamps sends several light- and food-starved colonists scrambling to shield their eyes like cockroaches. It's a mess in here. Empty MRE packets and other refuse from days of survival litter the room. Geometric lines reminiscent of those at the telescope-shrine line the floors, walls, and ceilings--scratched into the metal and concrete. Accusations fly between the survivors.

The players don't understand why the survivors have kept themselves in the dark. Did the power surge knock out their lights? One of the survivors responds that it's the only way to be sure there's no blue light coming in. They don't want to end up like the rest. Lodes gets to work repairing the rear axel of the rover that dominates the room. Kew tries to keep the peace between the survivors when it discovers a cache of food one was hoarding. Lang checks the computer terminal for a connection to the station's comms satellite--the reason why they came here. It's damaged, smashed by a meteor when it first arrived according to the colonists. It's running on minimum power and needs manual repair to get a signal out beyond the base. They'd need to get up there to have any chance of rescue.

With just minutes to spare on the ominous countdown, the players decide to take the now-repaired rover and head for the crash site to see if the drop pod has any fuel. Maybe they can use it to get to the satellite. None of the survivors want to head out during "the event". As Kew drives the rover into the airlock (under the theory it would be the safest driver because androids might be immune to the light, subsequently proven correct), the crew can hear one of the survivors over their shoulders, "those guys are fucking dead."

Almost immediately, long shadows begin reaching across the surface of the moon. Moon dust flecked with blue kicks up from the rover tires. The Meteor rises. Unaffected by its supernatural pull, Kew still marks it as one of the most beautiful things its ever seen. Lodes ducks for cover behind a seat and Kew pushes Lang's face down into crash position, but it's too late. Both have seen the light, and both begin to change. Lodes does her best to fight it, straining against her impulse to become one with the Blue. Lang, so close to uncovering the mystical truths he seeks, goes off the deep end. He grabs the wheel, and the rover goes flying off the lip of a crater.

Under the wreckage of the rover, Lang peers out in awe at the Blue Meteor. He pumps himself full of the tampered stimpack he found earlier, filled with corrupted blood. A blue-painted hand reaches inside the wreckage and pulls Lang out. He's with them, now. The others almost panic at the sight as they struggle to escape. They manage it working together, and roll out from under the chassis just as a colonist with a hand welder brings the whole thing crashing down.

Kew and Lodes fight for their lives with the colonists they'd distracted with the flare earlier and the thing that used to be Lang. Both suffer injury in their desperate attempts to disentangle themselves from the mad colonists and make it to the drop pod, pursued by Lang. Kew pulls a tranq pistol from its duffel bag of gear recovered in the pod and uses it to pacify their former crewmate. They put the thing into cryo and head outside to dig out the half-buried pod under the light of the Meteor.

The crew takes off from the surface of the moon. A last gasp of the pod's fuel reserves pushes them within EVA range. Lodes rushes to manually angle the satellite's remaining solar panel towards the Meteor in the hopes that she can harness its power to send out one last message. She fails. The meteor passes behind the surface of the moon, leaving the fuel-less drop pod, dead satellite, and sleeping madman in the cold blackness of space.

Review: The Black Heart of Paradise

This 48 page setting and adventure for Mothership is both one of the best TTRPG books I've ever read, and possibly the least usable. It flips the spirit of OSR on its head, requiring scrappy and inventive problem solving not from its players, but from any intrepid Warden who attempts to run it. Its use of language is obtuse, its maps and other visual aids inscrutable, its organization haphazard, and yet I like it more than any other Mothership material I've read.

The easiest and perhaps the best way to run The Black Heart of Paradise is as a surreal but welcoming destination for rest and recuperation, without any of the horror (more on that later). The Planetary Trader Skaana, the module's setting, hosts all manner of destinations for recreation and stress relief. Each delights and intrigues more than the next:

• Tour classic ships docked in port, complete with hokey, larping employees and goodie bags.
• Indulge in a glut of dining experiences, drugs, comics, and film.
• Stroll in the Skaana's bizarrely landscaped and architectured walkways and parks
• Visit my favorite attractions: A whopping 7 karaoke bars, each with its own theme and multiple songs complete with lyrics for your players to sing!

Last and potentially least are the 10 casinos which dot the ring-shaped strip surrounding the Skaana. Each encourages your group to play an out-of-character mini-game to represent the games of chance played inside. You'd expect to find these games in the pages of experimental RPGs and lyric games, but here they feel somewhat out of place. Many involve physical tasks, and range from standing pencils on end to playing popular-media-spoiler chicken. The success of these games depend largely upon the tone of a given campaign and the people at your table. For some groups, the extra-diegetic break from typical Mothership horror will provide levity and much-appreciated psychological relief, and for others it will fall flat.

Stopping here and using only the abovementioned material, a Warden gains an invaluable tool for between-adventure R&R and a location players will adore. There's more than enough material here to make each trip to the Skaana memorable and supremely charming. I cannot stress how much I enjoyed reading and look forward to running this portion of the module. Idiosyncratically evocative writing breathes vivid life into the Skaana and its many attractions, and I've rarely wanted to visit an imagined world more than this. It's weird and specific in a way rarely found outside intensely artsy indie video games and poetry. That said, beyond lies madness for both you and your players.

Details of the horror that befalls the Skaana hide in the text, requiring thorough investigation on the part of a reader who hopes to make sense of it. Nuggets of critical information intersperse unrelated sections throughout the book, and unsourced references to as-yet-undescribed people, things, and events abound. This will not make sense on a first read through, and it's still fairly fuzzy on my second.

The thing is, the horror is really good. It's disturbing and fascinating and I really want to run it to see how players handle it. I'm just not sure it's worth the monumental undertaking required to make it usable. I'd need to re-write large sections and re-organize the entire sequence of events to have any hope of running this successfully. I just might do it, and I'll be sure to post my notes if I do, but the prospect is daunting. Below lies spoilers.

The setup for the horror is genius. A religious manufacturing plant produces a new line of parasitic prayer-aid chips called "Motherchips" that burrow into your skin and foster divine communication. Of course, things go awry when the chips call forth a terrifying creature from another dimension rather than any god conceived by humans. This "Hermit Horror" arrives near the Skaana, warping time and space and spawning a host of horrific chimeras of beast, man, and machine to ravage the pleasure station and other surrounding vessels.

Beyond the eternally confounding organization of the Horror's arrival and the catastrophes that follow, the implementation of a few key elements left me somewhat disappointed. The instigating Motherchips themselves provide paltry mechanical benefits rather than something more open ended and interesting that you'd expect. Here begins a pattern of design that I tend to associate with D&D 5th edition play: overuse of mechanical effects rather than descriptive ones and railroaded plot. The PCs in Paradise are often treated as VIPs for no discernable reason beyond being the PCs. They're made privy to important information and tasks with little to no preamble. Things happen at them constantly and monumental decisions hang on their whims.

But you'll recall that I said that the horror was good, and it is. It begins with a pod of hybrid orca and shadow-spiders arriving on the Skaana and consuming everything in sight. More equally frightful chimeras follow, and the station descends into panic. My favorite part from this section are the tools the module provides to help establish atmosphere. The players witness scenes of horror caused by the extra-dimensional visitor on viewscreens. In the midst of these stressful events, the casinos and bars (those still in tact) stay open to service patrons such as the PCs, and the module includes several spine-tingling scenes witnessed from inside the windows of such establishments. This stuff is gold.

There's a whole section dedicated to assisting a pregnant woman's birth aboard a ship that crashes into the Skaana during the infestation. It's both morbid and sweetly human and I think it's a brilliant inclusion amidst the carnage. At the end of it all, if your players haven't died or fled the Skaana, they'll have the opportunity to either engage the Hermit Horror in ship combat or delve inside it to put an end to this madness.

The Hermit Horror dungeon is a microcosm of the module's strengths and weaknesses. There's a procedure for rooms moving around that I still found confusing even after a user on the Mothership discord helpfully broke down the process. The map is unhelpful, to say the least. The space is poorly defined and rooms vague in shape and size. The things in those amorphous rooms are some of the best material in the book. Bizarre creatures and machines found within are the stuff of nightmares, and would make for an unforgettable session even if the GM failed to rise to the task of describing and managing the space.

There's more I could talk about here, much more than I could reasonably contain in a review. The ascii art and maps that both define the module's unique aesthetic and compound its problems with clarity, for instance. Reading over my review, I fear that I was too negative. I think I've been fair in describing the module's shortcomings, but it's difficult to put into words exactly why I loved it so much.

The Black Heart of Paradise reads like something uncovered on a forgotten, haunted forum or deep within the files on a hard drive left in the woods. To wrestle with its language and navigate its eccentric structure is to ply the labyrinthine strip and battle aberrant creatures aboard the Skaana. Its distinct voice and aesthetic are inseparable from the mayhem of its complexity. The deeply intimate prose enveloped me in an atmosphere all its own, and I soon felt at home nestled in its peculiarities.

If you enjoy RPGs of any kind, you should buy and read this. It pushes the boundaries of what RPGs and RPG writing can be. It will inspire you, and there's plenty here to lift directly into your games even if you don't feel up to the task of running it in its entirety.

The Black Heart of Paradise was written by Schwa Kyle and is currently available in PDF form for $4 on DriveThruRPG. Here's a link: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/267469/The-Black-Heart-of-Paradise
Buy it.

Mien Mothership NPCs

Last year, I ran a Troika! campaign for several months and adored using its particular brand of reaction tables: Mien tables. As running distinct and memorable NPCs is definitely a weak point in my GMing ability, I've started creating some resources to help me quickly generate interesting characters and behaviors on the fly.

NPC Generation

Best used in conjunction with the great NPC tables found in Dead Planet, Pound of Flesh, and the Player's Survival Guide.

Ritual

1. Keeps a pet snake in their vacsuit.
2. Runs an office pool for first crewmember to bite it, bets against themselves.
3. Pours out a little air from O2 tanks when starting an EVA.
4. Brings a Revolver into Cryosleep.
5. Writes a new will for every expedition. Leaves best gear to favorite crewmates.
6. Insists on drawing lots for shit duties.
7. Gives everyone a new callsign.
8. Takes mementoes from dead crewmates.
9. Gets on good terms with the crew's Android(s).
10. Writes proverbs on their Cryosleep pod hood.

Vice

1. Fresh, real food.
2. Always smoking, including in vacsuit.
3. Pain Pills and Stimpaks.
4. Kills unnecessarily.
5. Cryosleep dreams.
6. Kleptomaniac.
7. Adrenaline junkie.
8. Intercepted comms voyeur. Always listening.
9. Fanatical religion.
10. Cosmetic biomods.

Tactic

1. Drops a live grenade on death.
2. Always goes in last.
3. Puts an extra bullet in any seemingly dead non-human.
4. Runs in to fire at point blank.
5. Goes for the legs.
6. Takes risky shots--fires past allies.
7. Always aims first.
8. Plays the environment--brings down ceilings, shoots red barrels, etc.
9. Pacifist. Does not fight unless convinced.
10. Protects favorite crewmate at all costs.

Mien

Use these tables to determine the initial disposition of an NPC, or to see how they respond to PC actions. Roll on the most applicable table if an NPC doesn't precisely fit the mold of the 4 core Mothership archetypes (e.g. Marine Mien for a pirate or Teamster Mien for a common civilian).

Marine

1. Self-Sacrificing
2. Professional 
3. Philosophical
4. Resigned
5. Overcompensating
6. Green
7. Wasted
8. Ornery
9. Mutinous
10. Berserk

Teamster

1. Keen
2. Reliable
3. Stoic
4. Jaded
5. Sardonic
6. Sinful
7. Cagey
8. Shifty
9. Rapacious
10. Broken

Scientist

1. Quixotic
2. Driven
3. Pragmatic
4. Pensive
5. Cold
6. Neurotic
7. Paranoid
8. Harrowed
9. Egomaniacal
10. Infected

Android

1. Obedient
2. Saccharine
3. Curious
4. Blunt
5. Impassive
6. Mocking
7. Punitive
8. Glitchy
9. Corrupted
10. Assimilated

The Fall of the Vagabond: A Play Report

This week I ran a pick-up Mothership game for some friends on short notice. Despite running from very little prepared material, we all had a pretty good time. I thought it might be an interesting exercise for me, and possibly helpful to some people new to running Mothership, if I wrote up a play report that described my thought process as I was running the game, as well as post-mortem observations. Please let me know if you find this at all interesting or helpful.

Check the Conclusions and Summary at the end!

The Scenario

What follows are the notes I prepared before our game:

Fall of the Jump-9 Colony Ship Vagabond

• Comes out of warp near a watery terrestrial planet.
• Ship hit with a spear thrown by a giant from the planet.
• Crew just woken up from cryo--explosions and warnings telling everyone to get to the escape pods.
• Crew can immediately recover their gear.
• Every 10 minutes: Roll a ship critical hit.
• Route to the pods:
• Hydroponics: Dozens of Androids restrained by overgrown plants and begging for help
• Cargo Bay 13C: Mech loaders staged in poses of battle. Tally marks on the walls.
• Main Computers: Enormous, rough hewn wooden shaft bisects the hall. Zero-G. AI listing procedures broken by ship's Androids during the trip in a glitchy, annoyed tone.
• Stateroom Wing Alpha: Blanket tents and pillow forts.
• Escape Pods: Crew desperately piling in.
• Alt Routes:
• Med Bay: Gory remains of failed Android-human hybrids.
• Recreation Hall: Androids performing The Producers while others watch loudly.

The Report

NOTE: If the length of the following play report looks too daunting or you want to skip to pithy takeaways, jump to the conclusion at the bottom of this writeup.

I began the session by describing the massive, multi-tiered Cryobay from which thousands of colonists awoke to a monitor-projected view of their new home planet. The Vagabond was still in orbit. The PC crew--3 marines named Sylvester, Marcus Lilith, and Jessica Boggs--marched to the galley to grab some grub and their gear, though I forgot to ask their names or anything else about their characters until much later.

The ship lurched to one side and rocked with internal explosions as it was skewered by the giant's spear (a fact the players didn't yet know). I should have called for a d5-failure Fear Save, but this too I forgot. The crew grabbed their duffel bags of gear and headed towards the nearest escape pods. I described the most direct route, the one I had prepared. I had no ship map handy, so I planned to offer the Alt Routes or and begin winging it once those were exhausted if they decided to deviate from the main path.

I described the deafening noise and panic in the ship's corridors as all the other colonists surged towards the escape pods (missed Fear Save #2). The players asked if they could pinpoint exactly what damage the ship had sustained, I responded that the PA system was reading out dozens of warnings concurrently. The damage was significant, but the situation confused. The crowds blocked the crew's path towards Hydroponics and ignored their shouts to get out of the way, but parted when Sylvester unloaded his Pulse Rifle into the ceiling. At this point, I had not called for a single dice roll. Burning an entire magazine to clear this obstacle was enough of a sacrifice to progress.

Inside Hydroponics, the crew discovered the overgrown plants and the Androids trapped within (missed save #3, this time probably Sanity). The crew paused for a moment to investigate here. Because they did, I rolled a ship critical hit as the internal damage from the spear cascaded throughout the ship. Some Cryopods got taken out, and the players heard more internal explosions (missed [Fear] Save #4). Jessica and Sylvester suspected the plants might be alien, but I explained they all looked familiar and weren't lashing out to grab anyone. Marcus freed an Android using his hand welder, and was thanked with glitchy, nonsensical babble before the Android fled (missed [Fear] save #5). All the evidence of strange Android behavior pointed towards dramatic software degradation over the centuries or millennia-long voyage, so I tried to play into that.

The crew moved on into the Cargo Bay and chuckled at the mech loaders and tally marks. Here I remembered that I didn't know any of the character's names so I paused and let the crew introduce themselves. I rolled another ship critical hit--a hull breach. I decided the breach should occur in this room, particularly given it was adjacent to the spear. The far wall began buckling outward. This time I remembered to call for a Fear Save: one Marine failed and gained 3 (1d5) Stress, the other critically failed and gained 6 (1d10) Stress, then made a Panic Check which they passed. Only Marcus carried a vacsuit in his duffel bag, so the others began scrambling for safety. "Are there any other vacsuits floating around?" I made a luck roll--50/50. Failure, no vacsuits. Jessica asked which mech seemed like it had won the most battles, and critically succeeded an Intelligence + Rimwise roll to locate it: A 3-seater behemoth with enclosed cockpit and adorned with dozens of Android-skull trophies. One player asked what the Android heads were saying, and I said they were all cycling through traditional war cries from different human cultures. The crew climbed into the mech and braced for decompression.

The far wall ripped away and the sudden decompression sent the other mechs flying out of the room and away into space. The absent wall afforded a view of the spear's shaft (missed [Sanity] roll #6) and the ruins of the main Computer Bay. The crew debated the best course of action to cross the massive rift the spear head had left in the hull. They asked if the mech had any tools equipped, and I said they could pick one. They chose a jackhammer--it never came up again. The mech mag-booted to the edge of the rift and the crew looked around for useful floating debris. Could the infrared goggles pick up any survivors? Failed luck check said no. How about a Rigging Gun? Success on this luck check. I have players call high or low when I roll for luck checks. It's a fun and simple way to resolve situations with uncertainty, but don't involve player actions.

I told the players their mech's pincer arms were far too large to manipulate a human-sized rigging gun trigger, and prompted them to come up with a solution. The crew carefully manipulated the mech's arms to thread a loose computer cable through the Rigging Gun's trigger (successful Speed + Heavy Machinery check), and pulled the loop to fire a wire across the room. They hauled themselves past the rough-hewn spear shaft and made their way towards the far airlock. This mech was too large to fit though the airlock, so they opted to rip an arm off to make room. The operator failed an Intelligence check, so they pulled off several other critical components along with the arm (missed [Fear] save #7). I took this as an opportunity for the players to fail forward, so they managed to shrink down their mech to airlock-size but severely damaged it in the process.

The mech's remaining arm punched the single-door airlock and rushed through as air and debris began flying at them from the Staterooms. The arm-operator critically succeeded a Speed test to shield the mech from debris. I couldn't immediately think of any bonus to give the player for her critical, so I asked her what she wanted. She asked if she could grab any useful equipment that flew at her as the hall decompressed, so I described a vacsuit with women's clothes stretched over the exterior and a face pained on the helmet in makeup (the Androids were playing house). She caught it, and the legs-operator shoulder-checked the keypad on the opposite side of the airlock to close it. The crew disembarked from their damaged mech for fear of it exploding and searched the Staterooms for survivors and things of interest. They discovered a survivor stuck in a ruined pillow fort wearing a vacsuit clothed with a tophat and black-tie suit--Simon, a frightened Geologist. I had just recently named another character Simon in a game I had run for a couple of these players--I'm terrible with on-the-fly names. After learning Simon didn't know anything more about what was happening to the ship than they, the crew moved on with him in tow. On their way out, they opened a room filled to bursting with gleefully babbling Androids which spilled out into the hall (failed Fear Saves, +1 Stress).

The crew made their way to the pod bay, a long corridor full of desperate people openly slaughtering each other for the few remaining escape pods (missed [Fear] save #8). Sylvester cleverly tossed an unarmed grenade over to the crowd surrounding one of the pods, calling "fire in the hole." Under normal circumstances that would have easily been enough to disperse a crowd without involving a roll, but in this case I thought the settlers might be desperate enough not to run. I rolled "resigned" on a reaction table I had handy, so the crowd ignored the grenade. If they couldn't make it off this ship, they were dead anyway. I could have interpreted "resigned" another way, but that's what made sense to me at the time.

A player asked if there were any catwalks or other methods of approach, and I described a mezzanine overlooking the pods. The crew headed up a ladder and moved towards a nearby pod with the fewest number of people trying to get in. They used their Rigging Gun (successful Combat + Military Training check) to create a zipline over to the top of the pod, where there was an entrance hatch. Marcus and Jessica made it down the zipline, their weapons sliding perpendicular to the top of the wire, without issue and without rolling. Sylvester had become attached to Simon at this point, and had him hop on while they ziplined together. I called for a Strength check to see if Sylvester could hold on, which he failed. They both went sprawling into the crowd.

Atop the pod, Marcus attempted to disperse the crowd with threats. Normally I don't like to call for rolls for social situations, as I prefer to play things by common sense and require situational leverage for difficult attempts at persuasion. However, the player's roleplay was so fearsome and the outcome was uncertain enough that I called for a Combat + Military Training roll to intimidate the crowd away, which failed. Meanwhile, Jessica jumped down to find Androids patiently waiting in 3 of the pod's 6 total seats, and a Marine fighting with a Teamster to push back the crowd and close the door for takeoff. Jessica alerted the humans to her presence, doing the math that the pod could hold both her friends and these capable-looking folks who might be helpful when they landed on a strange planet. Again, I rolled on my reaction table and this time got "Infected". I took a second to consider what that might mean, then remembered the brutal cyborg experiments I wrote up for the ship's Medbay. I described the Teamster and Marine's faces as flayed, exposing crudely implanted circuitry and wiring (Fear Save, +1 Stress). The crew proceeded to cut down both their cyborg foes and the surging crowd with military efficiency, and not a little help from their Pulse and Smart Rifles. They retrieved their lightly trampled pal Simon from the floor, cleared out the cyborg bodies and defective Androids from the pod, and hit the "GO" button. The crew escaped from the Vagabond with no casualties.

Conclusions and Summary

• You can prepare a successful play session with scarcely more than a few lines of notes.
• You can make tons of mistakes and still have a great time. If you followed along with my missed Fear and Sanity Save count, you'll know that I missed at least a whopping 8 opportunities to load my players up with stress over the course of the session. Despite that, there was still a good deal of tension as the scenario felt inherently dangerous, mysterious, and claustrophobic.
• Call for more Fear Saves, Sanity Saves, and Panic Checks! Clearly it's something I need to work on, but it's a good thing to keep in the back of your mind as you run Mothership.
• Mothership works great if you want to go for Aliens more than Alien. This was easily the most action-packed Mothership game I've ran or played in, and it still felt right at home in the system.
• Failing forward is a great way to keep the session moving while layering on consequences and dangers.

20²⁰th Century Blues

A toolkit for time travel incidents, alien abductions, or long jumps to unexplored space. Though inconceivably distant time travel is the assumed conceit, the horrors of the Homo Sapiens Museum could also occur within an alien mothership's medical bay, or the Outdated Future-Weapons could be used as contemporary, experimental military-tech.

Future Societies

1. A harmonious concord between many disparate species. Customs too peaceful to the human mind to stand. Shame of human failings in the face of its beauty too much for human dignity to bear.
2. Perfectly pastoral and apparently uninhabited worlds conspire to exert an eerie will. Haunting mother nature.
3. Multiple warring singularities engaged in perpetual total war. Fractal architecture wiped out and replaced with new patterns by new masters almost instantaneously--a daily occurrence.
4. Beings with the form of thoughts, infinitely mutating according to their whims. The universe a kaleidoscope of abstract art.
5. Insectoid swarm that manifests broken and conflated human anatomies in off-putting attempts to communicate.
6. Countless clones of an apparently human original, its genetic material so deteriorated from countless reproductions that only the barest hint of vestigial humanity remains in its features, behavior, and ritual. Still-functioning and perfectly loyal machines obey every strange whim.
7. Beings too large to behold more than a small fraction of at any one time drift momentously through the cosmos, dining on planets and stars.
8. All matter is liquid, sloshing upon itself. A great lava lamp with countless layers in all directions.
9. 4th- and higher dimensional beings, worlds, and more--poorly processed by human brains. Nauseating optical illusions and painful reckoning.
10. A blank slate, wiped clean by a disappointed god.

Alien Weaknesses

1. Susceptible to human-borne disease.
2. Views humans as non-threatening.
3. Incapable of recognizing lies.
4. Defenses ineffectual against human biology.
5. Threatened by a mortal foe, a balance of power easily tipped.
6. Desperate for entertainment. Highly values the crew's lives.
7. Apathetic to destruction.
8. Ignores Androids entirely, leaving them free to act.
9. Easily poisoned by human ideas like hate and prejudice.
10. If the crew holds out long enough, the long running server cluster of this simulated universe shuts down. The higher-ups correct the error that sent the crew outside of their home cluster.

Homo Sapiens Museum

They put you with other relics of the past and quaint, human curiosities. The only shred of familiarity in an unrecognizable universe.

Outdated Future-Weapons

Grim reminders of a barbaric past long since evolved beyond, displayed behind glass.

1. Non-lethal bullets that stimulate rapid nerve growth to inflict pain far beyond natural biological capacity.
2. Device instantly destroys air within 1,000 m³, creating vacuum.
3. Micro time travel sword--skips in time to pass through a parry.
4. Undetectable nanomachine swarm, targets programmable by demographic.
5. Jump drive powered sniper rifle, mini-wormhole optics for target acquisition up to Jump-5.
6. Finely tuned EMP device eliminates human trauma suppression, triggering perfect recall. Intolerable.
7. Chemical reactant triggers solar supernova within 1 day.
8. Clonesuit: Liquidates deceased inhabitant, rapidly regrows clone from fetal state to full development inside sealed suit within a few hours. Psychological deterioration an accepted side effect.
9. Universal Android self-destruct tone.
10. Near-infinite range homing beacon for once-unstoppable alien threat.

Future Horrors

Trapped in a cold and austere cage, handled indelicately by beings who care not for your comfort, you suffer daily indignities and tortures while you bide your time to escape.

1. Served more food than you can possibly eat. Force-fed to the point of bursting.
2. Medical procedures involving total disembowelment, skin entirely removed, etc. Always put back together in a seemingly correct order, but something feels off.
3. Impossibly complex cognitive tests with painful negative reinforcement for failure.
4. Forced, confused historical reenactments: Moon landing crossed with American continental colonization.
5. Repetitive busywork fueled by increasingly powerful drugs.
6. Brain enhanced to match alien capacity, then reverted. Agonizing loss.
7. Simulated escape attempt. Convenient opportunities, lucky breaks, then crushing reality.
8. Stretching exercises devised with poor understanding of human anatomy. Pops and snaps.
9. Android benchmarking and overclocking to dangerous extremes.
10. Fight provoked between the crew. Last one standing receives the cure for a fictitious deadly infection.

Moonbase Blues

Dai Shugars of GMDK posted an excellent prompt for a Mothership scenario that I couldn't help but follow up on. Initially I just wrote up the Light Hazards table, but eventually I fleshed out a whole scenario around that concept. Here's the prompt:

Outpost on an asteroid or small moon. Players wake up from stasis to find themselves in a blockaded security room and a cheerful computer voice detailing their daily tasks. Logs show that things were going normal up until a week ago, when a strange blue meteor showed up and drove everyone crazy. The meteor makes a pass every 7 hours, and the PCs must find a way to get off the station or somehow block the light from entering (restore power to shutters? gouge eyes out?)

Without further ado, here's what I came up with:

Moonbase Blues

Map Key

1. Drop pod. Contains [# human PCs] Cryopods, empty.
2. Habitation. Crew quarters and galley. Signs of struggle. 1d5 Meteor-Mad Colonists. Scattered with blue therapy lamps that attract Mad Colonists. Binoculars stashed in a toilet in restroom B.
3. Observatory and Science Bay. 1 Mad Colonist, piles of bodies.
4. Security room. Blockaded off from Habitation. PCs wake up and begin scenario here. Functional computer: logs describe normal operations until the Blue Meteor arrived 7 days ago. See: Corporate Messages.
5. Greenhouse and Medbay-Solarium. Undamaged.
6. Solar panel array. Base's only source of power.
7. Garage. 1 rover, in disrepair. Remaining sane colonists, in total darkness and out of supplies.
8. Satellite. Damaged by meteor. Base's main communications array.
9. THE BLUE METEOR. Passes every 7 hours, visible from base for 1 hour. Causes Meteor Madness.

Encounters

Every hour, 50% chance encounter 1d5 Meteor-Mad Colonists.

Apologies for my artistic talents

Corporate Messages

TONE… Your friends at Mars Instruments would like to notify you of a meteorological event. Please stay calm and avoid windows while performing your corporate issued dutIES:

1. Unclog the toilets in Habitation restroom B.
2. Perform routine maintenance on solar arrays 3 and 4.
3. Replace the rearmost axel on the rover stored in the Garage.
4. GO OUTSIDE IN 4 HOURS 32 MINUTES 9… 8… 7… SECONDS AND LOOK UP.
5. Make the beds in Habitation Barracks. Messy, messy!

Light Hazards

For each meteor cycle, roll 1-3 times for active light-related threats. Or, use all of them at once.

1. Metal storm shutters, open. Actuated via password protected keypad.
2. Half-dome skylight. Partially obscured by torn-out book pages and tape.
3. Bullet holes filled with translucent sealant.
4. Solar panel mirror array on surface pointed directly at habitation. Magnifies meteor effects, pierces the smallest of cracks.
5. Scattered reflections from satellite and debris in orbit. Produces low-level Meteor effects from hours 3-6. 
6. Fully glass greenhouse. Contains only remaining food on the station.
7. Telescope automatically tracks meteor when in range. Light reflects from eyepiece.
8. Meteorite fragment in Science Bay. Trail of particulate from main airlock to bay. Produces constant, but dulled meteor effects.
9. Corpse nailed to wall conceals small porthole from sight. Does not block light.
10. Survivors stranded in distant housing unit. Radioing for help--besieged by 1d10 Meteor-Mad Colonists in Vaccsuits.

Meteor Madness

Stage 1: Claustrophobia, memory loss. Disadvantage on Intellect checks.

Stage 2: Blue obsession, delirium. Every hour, roll Body Save. Failure: Black out, violently incorporate BLUE into your person. Take 1 stress each minute until you do, then recover senses.

Stage 3: Become a Meteor-Mad Colonist. The warden plays your character.

Roll Sanity saves as appropriate when directly or indirectly exposed to the BLUE METEOR. Use Disadvantage/Advantage to reflect degree of exposure. Progress 2 stages if directly exposed or watching an event through the telescope.

Meteor-Mad Colonists

They have seen the light and it is good.

Combat: 40%   Speed: 25%   Instinct: 50%   Hits: 2 (25)

Damage: Rigging Gun 2d10 OR Hand Welder 1d10 OR Tranq Pistol 

Special Abilities

Erratic Movement: Ranged attacks against it at Disadvantage without computational assistance (smart-link).

Blue Zealot: Inured to pain. Immediately takes an action after taking a Hit.

Tactics: Forcefully compels the unenlightened into the BLUE GRACE. Prefers live prisoners.

Meteor-Mad Characteristics

1. Half-swallowed a therapy lamp. Jaw broken to accommodate the tubular bulb still jutting from mouth.
2. Eyes slowly track the path of the asteroid, even though the ground. Unblinking.
3. Naked, unevenly covered with blue paint.
4. Open chest wound, stuffed with android component pumping blue lubricant.
5. Veins ruined by gouges and stab wounds. "RED? RED!? IT WAS BLUE!"
6. Prisms jabbed into eyes.
7. Pinned down with foam. Eating its way out.
8. Counting down the seconds until the next event. Passive unless count disrupted.
9. Floating, giggling with childlike joy.
10. Apparently sane. Coldly treacherous.