ə.systems

I Ran Mothership and Survived the Experience (And So Did My Players)

It's been a long time since i ran a table top role playing game. Several years in fact. And it was a basic homebrew Dungeons and Dragons 5E adventure i made myself. The group only got a couple of sessions in before falling apart. That was the sum experience of running a table i had before deciding to run a Mothership one shot for my current gaming group.

Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG. Players are teamsters, lab rats, grunts, working class types under a system of oppressive corporations with all the money and power. Space is dark and mysterious and full of horrors that want to kill you, and your death is just a number in the actuarial tables of The Company, a rounding error on the P&L charts. The game does not have a canonical setting, there's no world-building in the rule books, it's more about creating the vibe, allowing you to create your own world.

This opens it up to being the kind of space game you want to run, whether you want to do spooky space western, outer rim cyberpunk, starship heists, or full on cosmological horror. All this and more is already available too, in the extensive set of modules created. Modules are available as zines, hardcover collections, or can be as small as a tri-fold brochure, all with a maximalist space-punk design ethos. i love the aesthetic of the game which is why i've already picked up a fair number of these modules.

Because this was our first time playing Mothership, i selected The Iron Coffin, a pamphlet-sized starting adventure designed with new players (and wardens) in mind.

You're the crew of the Iron Coffin. You've been hired to smuggle a mysterious package across the system. Your employer was... short on details. Just get it there. Don't ask questions. And for God's sake, don't open the box.

I made some minor modifications to the game, in part because it was our first time playing Mothership (and we even had someone at our table who had never played a ttrpg before!), and in part because i forgot some things and had to think on my feet. This luckily led to some really good results. For example i forgot to bring up that the crew has a robot helper at the start, so when i brought Clang in later he was introduced as having been sent from The Company. Because Clang came as a surprise this built some paranoia among the players, and wonderfully misdirected them to believing Clang was the cause of the ship's malfunctions and not The Horror.

Overall we had a good time though, and delightfully our Marine failed multiple panic checks and will forever be haunted in and out of his dreams by the metallic stomping of the now deactivated Clang's feet. My only regret was that we didn't get to break out Mothership's wonderful death save mechanic, wherein nobody knows the result of the die roll, not even the dying player, until someone checks the body. All in all i look forward to running Mothership again.