Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG. Think Alien, The Thing, Pitch Black, or Annihilation. The core boxed set of the game comes with two amazing resources.

First, Unconfirmed Contact Reports, which is Mothership’s equivalent of a Monster Manual. It includes a fair share of ghouls and greys and husks, but also even more terrifying threats like The Good and Granny and Sally in the Screen.

Second, the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, which notably includes a dozen ships with full specs, illustration, and maps, like the Sato GS Grail VI executive transport:

I love this kind of raw adventure fodder. Stuff that’s prepped and packaged so that you can just drop it straight into session and take off running. You need to put in zero work, because everything you need is already on the page. You can just use it. And often not just once, but over and over and over again.

You’d think this sort of stuff would be the rule rather than exception in RPGs, but this is surprisingly not the case. You’re far more likely to get a bunch of “adventure ideas” that you need to flesh out. Or you’ll get something like a ship described in broad terms, but without the concrete tools you need to bring it to the table with rock solid confidence.

Because Mothership gives you these great resources, though, we have an opportunity to leverage them to even greater heights.

DERELICT ADVENTURE RECIPE

Scenario Hook: The PCs find a derelict spacecraft floating in space. Or they answer a distress beacon. Or they’re sent as a salvage crew.

Step 1 – Ship: Pick a random ship from the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit or roll on this table.

Step 2 – Monster: Pick a random monster from Unconfirmed Contact Reports. This monster is onboard the derelict (and is almost certainly why it’s a derelict).

Note: Not every creature in Unconfirmed Contact Reports is equally likely to work well with this adventure recipe, so I’m not including a random table here. (If you want to roll randomly, you can flip to a random page or roll a random number on the book’s Index.) Don’t forget the Five Quick Horrors on the back cover of the book!

Step 3 – Monster Sign:

• Pick three ship compartments. Place a hint suggesting the horror that was unleashed here in each compartment.
• Pick three more compartments. Place a clue revealing the monster’s identity and/or abilities in each compartment.
• If the monster has a special weakness, add three clues that reveal this weakness anywhere in the ship. (One of these clues may be found while encountering the creature itself.)

Step 4 – Confrontation: Either…

• Pick a compartment where he monster is currently located.
• Roll 1d6 each time the PCs enter a compartment. On a roll of 1, the monster finds them and attacks.

Or both.

And that’s the whole recipe. As you can see, you can probably spin up the whole adventure in less than fifteen minutes. (I’d say you could it while the players are rolling up their characters, but that’s probably not true only because character creation in Mothership is so insanely fast.)

LARGER SHIPS

Some of the ships described in the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, like the Northstar Paragon exploration vessel, are very large. Using the basic recipe on these ships will result in adventure content being spread out too thinly across the numerous rooms.

Option 1: Increase the number of hints and clues. For example, you might use the guidelines above for every deck of the ship instead

Option 2: Run the ships as a sector crawl, reading “sector” in the recipe everywhere that it says “compartment.” (Conveniently, the ships in the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit are already mapped in sectors.)

RANDOM DERELICT SHIPS

The adventure Dead Planet, which can be found in the deluxe edition of Mothership or purchased separately, includes a Random Derelict Ship Generator, including stuff like random cargo and, even more importantly, a random deckplan generator.

How incredibly useful!

Instead of selecting a ship from the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, you can obviously use the Random Derelict Ship Generator to provide an endless variety of ships for this adventure recipe!