(click for PDF)

Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG. Think Alien, The Thing, Pitch Black, or Annihilation.

Its calling card is an old school approach wedded to red hot innovation:

• Blazing fast character creation.
• Brutal systems for Combat and Stress.
• Tons of sandbox support and tools in the Warden’s Operation Manual (the GM book).
• An overwhelming amount of adventure support, including both first party books and a deluge of third-party support.

This last point, in particular, convinced me to make Mothership the basis for my current open campaign. Not only is there a ton of adventure support, a lot of it is designed so that you can spend 15 minutes reading through it and — presto! — you’re ready to go. My expectation is that I’ll be able to rapidly build a stable of adventures that will easily let me run the game with minimal or no prep.

I previously shared alpha and beta versions of this cheat sheet. In addition to several minor corrections, the two big changes are adding several key reference tables (wounds, panic effects, etc.) and the full skill list. (I’d previously been relying on the official GM screen and character sheet to provide theses references, but I’m now moving towards using a custom screen featuring only my cheat sheet.)

WHAT’S NOT INCLUDED

These cheat sheets are not designed to be a quick start packet: They’re designed to be a comprehensive reference for someone who has read the rulebook and will probably prove woefully inadequate if you try to learn the game from them. (On the other hand, they can definitely assist experienced players who are teaching the game to new players.)

The Mothership cheat sheet, in particular, works very well in conjunction with the GM screen(s) for the game, which are excellent. (There’s both a standard screen and a larger deluxe screen, which each come with the respective boxed sets.)

The cheat sheets also don’t include what I refer to as “character option chunks” (for reasons discussed here). In other words, you won’t find the rules for character creation here.

HOW I USE THEM

I usually keep a copy of the cheat sheet behind my GM screen for quick reference and also provide copies for all of the players. I have two copies of the Mothership rulebook at the table, too, but my goal is to summarize all of the rules for the game. This consolidation of information eliminates book look-ups: Finding something in a dozen pages is a much faster process than paging through hundreds of pages in the rulebook.

The organization of information onto each page of the cheat sheet should, hopefully, be fairly intuitive.

PAGE 1: Basic Mechanics and Skills. (Most of the core game play loops are covered here.)

PAGE 2: Violent Encounters and the Threat System.

PAGE 3: Survival. (Most of the miscellaneous rules in the game.)

PAGE 4: Ports & Medical Care. (Stuff to do in your downtime.)

PAGE 5: Ship Stats & Space Travel. (All the rules for operating ships except for ship-to-ship combat.)

PAGE 6: Ship Repairs & Contractors. (Not a big fan of these two sharing the same sheet, but they ended up being two half-pages without good companion pieces.)

PAGE 7: Ship-to-Ship Combat.

PAGE 8: Wounds, Panic, Death Save, and Damage tables.

CRUXES

This cheat sheet has not quite reached its final form. There are still several elements I’m experimenting with. A few things to note:

First, some rules from first-party supplements have been included. These are marked in red. There are additional rules (like those for cybermods) that I suspect probably belong on this cheat sheet and may be added in the future.

Second, these sheets include my personal house rules. With the exception of the Threat system (which I’ll discuss in a moment), these are marked in blue. Some of these are original rules, others overwrite the published rules. When I release the final version of the sheets, I may or may not do a version which is strictly the published rules of the game, but for now this is my working document and what I’m using at the table. If you want to strip these house rules out on your own, here’s a copy of the Microsoft Word file I used to create the cheat sheet so that you can easily edit it:

Mothership Cheat Sheet – Microsoft Word

Note that you’ll need to track down the relevant fonts.

Third, the sheet includes the Threat system, which I first discussed in Mothership – Thinking About Combat. Based on actual play, the system as presented here has received some refinement (and I’m still tinkering with it).

For the moment, this has also resulted in the “Violent Encounters” section of the cheat sheet appearing on both the first page (paired with Basic Mechanics) and the second page (where it appears with the Threat system for a complete combat reference). Partly this is because I’m still experimenting with the Threat system. Partly because I’m still trying to figure out the final layout of the sheets. And partly so that those not interested in the Threat system can simply remove that page of the cheat sheet and still have a fully functional packet.

I previously discussed an additional crux:

Androids & Oxygen: The rules state that androids don’t consume oxygen when life support systems fail, but there are separate rules for vacuums and toxic atmospheres (which require rebreathers or oxygen supplies). Should androids be affected by exposure to vacuum or toxic atmospheres? My ruling is No.

I have not included a resolution to this particular conundrum on the sheet. In my personal campaign, we’ve been developing a wide variety of androids and I’m still figuring out if different types will have different features and, if so, how they interact with things like the Atmospheres rules and hyperspace travel.

Having run character creation for Mothership many times, the sheer speed at which it happens turns the limited number of rulebooks at the table into a significant choke point. I’m going to continue experimenting with how that should be handled, and probably trying to figure out which pages from the PDF need to be printed out to help everyone zip through. (I’ll report back when I know more.)

MAKING A GM SCREEN

These cheat sheets can also be used in conjunction with a modular, landscape-oriented GM screen (like the ones you can buy here or here).

Personally, I use a four-panel screen and use reverse-duplex printing in order to create sheets that I can tape together and “flip up” to reveal additional information behind them. I’m still experimenting with exactly how I want the Mothership pages arranged on my screen.

Go to Part 1

I scooped up a handful of Mothership trifolds today with an eye towards restocking the jobs board for my Mothership open table. I’m beginning to dive deeper into the vast sea of Mothership content, which may mean a few more misses, but also the opportunity to uncover hidden gems and a few diamonds in the rough.

RECLAIMER

The PCs has been hired to “scavenge usable resources from the Galloway Outpost, a long-abandoned mining and research facility on the desert moon Kara-9.” Coincidentally, despite this outpost being “long-abandoned,” another corporation has hired another team to scavenge the outpost at the exact same time. The PCs will need to compete with this other team to “secure and extract as many undamaged resources as possible.” Even more coincidentally, the whole place collapses two to three hours after the PCs arrive.

Despite the inexplicable string of coincidences, this is a pretty solid concept for a scenario that’s anchored to a pretty good map that’s well xandered and ready for potential conflicts to break out between the rival salvage crews.  (Although for some reason the map depicts a space station with a docking bay instead of the land-based outpost from the scenario’s introduction, just one of a surprising multitude of continuity errors.)

Unfortunately, Reclaimer is senselessly hostile to any GM wanting to run it.

First, it’s designed for a custom micro-pamphlet format that requires you to print, cut, and then origami the PDF. The result is cute, but completely impractical: Among other things, it splits the map of Galloway Outpost across multiple spreads, making it painful to use.

The map also uses a number of custom symbols, all of which are unkeyed. You’ll probably be able to figure out most of them, but some remain complete mysteries to me.

Once you work your way past the unfriendly formatting, what you’ll discover is that the adventure is functionally unfinished:

• There are no stat blocks for the rival crew.
• Colored keycards are used to unlock various areas of the base, but the keycards not included in the key. Instead, the GM is instructed to “spread keycards around the outpost and allow crews to find them through exploration.”
• There’s a potentially interesting little mini-game where power has to be rerouted to different areas of the base… except it’s unclear why the PCs would need power restored to any of these rooms.

Perhaps most importantly, the central dynamic of the adventure is scavenging on a time limit: How much can you salvage before the competing team arrives (unless they got here first in yet another continuity error) and before the base collapses?

The collapse of the base is put on a specific time limit described in six stages from Minor Structural Damage to Total Collapse. Which would be great, except no guideline for the time required to salvage material is given. And although a list of salvage types is given (industrial fuel, raw minerals, rare electronics, etc.) these are keyed to the map in only vague, incomplete, and, yet again, contradictory ways. Also missing is any sort of value for this salvage.

Most of the adventure, therefore, simply isn’t here. If you want to run Reclaimer, you’ll need to be prepared to do most of the design work yourself.

GRADE: D

MEAT FARM

A lone hacker has suborned the computer systems of Cibus Station, a corporate research station. They’ve freed the experimental subjects, killed (almost) everyone onboard, and are demanding a ransom. The PCs’ corporate overlords want them to board the station and regain control.

Pyry Qvick’s Meat Farm is another adventure that does a great job of layering threats: The hacker will turn the station’s automated stations against the PCs; a suborned android has gone homicidal; and the station is overrun with dangerous/weird/disturbing experimental animals.

What will make or break a creature feature adventure like this are, of course, the monsters, and Qvick delivers a nifty combo pack, including turret gooses, parasite pigs, and albino mammoths, among others. These are stocked in minimal-but-vividly keyed rooms, which are both varied and interesting.

The only real problem I have with Meat Farm is the pointmap itself, which is maddeningly vague to the point of incoherence. I’ve had this problem with vague pointmaps in other Mothership adventures. The problem is that, yes, the pointmap is meant to be an abstract representation of the game world. But it still needs to represent the game world. If I look at your map and (a) I have no idea how to describe the game world to the players and/or (b) the connections between rooms appear nonsensical, that’s a problem.

So when I run Meat Farm, I’ll be taking the adventure’s room keys, but rearranging them into a coherent map.

GRADE: C

CARRION PROTOCOL

Here’s another adventure of experimental meat. (I’m tempted to connect them in some way.)

In this adventure by Stella Condrey, author of the Rimbound series, the PCs answer the distress call of the FUV Irene only to discover that the ship’s meat labs — designed to provide fresh food for the crew — have catastrophically malfunctioned. Multiple compartments have become overgrown by semi-sentient flesh and violent fleshhounds are wandering through the ship.

Carrion Protocol is short, creepy, and fun.

The only real problem with the adventure is the lack of a clear vision of what, exactly, happened on the ship before the PCs showed up. There are a bunch of “clues” thrown around (blood trails, corpses, etc.), but none of it seems to add up to a coherent narrative, which makes the scenario unnecessarily difficult to run. (If I, as the GM, don’t understand what happened, it becomes much harder to answer the questions the players are asking consistently.) Somewhat related to this is a continuity issue where “every 10 minutes a room adjacent to meat growth is overgrown.” But at that pace, the entire ship should have been overgrown long before the PCs could have answered the distress call.

Also, the adventure is presented a pamphlet, but every PDF is screwed up in a different way so that you can’t actually print any of them and get a functional pamphlet, which is rather frustrating.

These problems are not terribly difficult to fudge your away around, however, and as a pay-what-you-want title, this one is worth checking out.

GRADE: C

BURYING GROUNDS ON PAVEL THETA

Rebecca Bennett’s Burying Grounds on Pavel Theta is a Pet Sematary riff: On a newly terraformed world, the corporation has lost contact with the team who was supposed to be establishing a base camp and the PCs are sent in as the backup team.

Unfortunately, it turns out that any corpses buried in the ground become reanimated undead. This includes Mikey, a member of the original team who died and was buried by his teammates, and a bunch of undead opossums.

Conceptually, I really like this adventure. The undead opossums are incredibly creepy and Bennett includes a great pacing mechanic for them.

Where it unfortunately falls apart is, once again, the details. Like Carrion Protocol, Burying Grounds desperately needs an authoritative background: The previous team is missing, but (other than Mikey) what happened to them? Where are they? Where did the opossums come from? How did they get buried?

It’s a lot of cool stuff, but it kind of all falls apart when you look at it… which, of course, the players will definitely do.

The adventure also includes three recorded audio logs you can share with your players, but they appear to be performed by voice generators with a flat intonation, so they’re probably not worth using.

GRADE: C-

QUANTUM CARGO

Researchers on the FMV Dirac have been attempting to perfect quantum duplication technology, allowing the Quantum Dynamics Corporation (QDC) to collapse multiple quantum states of an object simultaneously, functionally creating a perfect copy. Dr. Flora Ciama attempted to steal the prototype device, accidentally triggering a quantum collapse.

From the outside, the ship appeared to vanish only to reappear several weeks later broadcasting multiple distress signals. The PCs have been dispatched to retrieve the top secret research (although, of course, QDC doesn’t trust them enough to tell them what that research is). They arrive at the Dirac and find it trapped in a quantum flux: At ground zero, three different versions of Dr. Ciama carry out the heist against and again and again — one succeeding, one failing and triggering the quantum explosion, and one stuck in the quantum core chamber.

Quantum Cargo has a few issues — like Burying Grounds on Pavel Theta, for example, it could really benefit from a definitive crew list and a slightly more coherent explanation of what’s been happening on the ship — but the incredibly clever structure of its core premise, in which four different zones of random quantum effects dynamically combine with a location key filled with reality-bending set pieces, make this adventure something special. And despite a few lacunae, there’s also a lot of loving attention to detail here, which includes providing detailed player maps.

GRADE: B-

Go to Part 1

The Rimbound series by Stella Condrey is a set of twelve Mothership trifold supplements and adventures. These are pay-what-you-want and also available for free download. (However, while they’re available on a variety of platforms, it seems that the series has only been partially uploaded to many of these platforms, so you may need to poke around a bit to track them all down.)

I’m reviewing these in the order I read them in. I admit this is quite idiosyncratic, but I wrote these reviews as I went along, and when I reorganized them into numeric order I discovered it was like giving a presentation after dropping your notecards on the floor and shuffling them into a random order. So you’ll just have to join me on this journey.

RIMBOUND #6: REDSCREEN

One of the challenges with executing a micro-supplement, whether trifold or otherwise, is making sure that it offers something of value beyond the basic pitch. This is something that Redscreen: A Disease for Androids unfortunately struggles with.

The basic concept is that Redscreen is a virus that infects AIs (including androids) and makes them murder humans.

And now that I’ve told you that, you don’t need to buy Redscreen, because you already know everything in the trifold. Ostensibly there are three sample infected AIs, but these largely have no actual value: One full panel (out of six) explains in laborious detail that a space station AI could turn off the life support systems. Another full panel goes into great detail about how a ship AI could slam automatic doors to hurt the PCs. If you can make the intuitive leap from “infected AI wants to do harm” to “will use computer-controlled systems to do harm,” you’re good to go here.

The other challenge is making sure your micro-supplement includes all the necessary information to use it. Here, too, Redscreen struggles. For example, guidelines are given for what to do “if a PC becomes infected with Redscreen,” but it forgets to explain how the PCs could get infected in the first place.

GRADE: D-

RIMBOUND #11: UNDER THE DUNES

Under the Dunes is a pretty solid foundation for a cool adventure: While scanning a desert planet for ore deposits, they stumble across the buried wreck of a spaceship. As they breach the wreck, a sandstorm rolls in: It’s going to be hours before they can leave. What mysteries, dangers, and wealth will they find inside?

Opening up the trifold, there’s a good map and a functional key.

Unfortunately, with this foundation in place, it seems as if Condrey wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it. I’m left with the impression that she just started throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something would stick: The ship is from three years in the future! …and maybe one of the PCs could find their own dead body? It’s a cool moment, but there’s no explanation for how this happened and no real development of the idea.

Okay, so there’s a squad of military fleshbots onboard! They’ll activate and attack the PCs! … but why? And also, what are they doing on an ore transport vessel?

In short, there’s a bunch of ideas here, but nothing fully developed or coherent.

With that being said, I’m slipping Under the Dunes into the stack of adventures for my open table. But it’ll need a little TLC to build something compelling on top of its foundation.

(While Under the Dunes provides the sample desert world of Euthana, it would be pretty easy to locate this adventure on The Desert Moon of Karth, among others.)

GRADE: C-

RIMBOUND #9: UNDER THAT BLACK SKY

The clever thing that Under That Black Sky does is taking TWO cool concepts and combining them into a single adventure. If an adventure only has one big idea, it can be easy for it to run out of gas, but when you combine ideas you usually end up with something greater than the sum of its parts as you combine and contrast them in countless ways.

The first idea here is a colony planet with a cloud cover so thick that no visible light can penetrate, so you can only see what your artificial lights illuminate.

The second idea is that this planet was once the bioengineered hunting grounds for an alien species, and now something has awakened the ancient xenofauna generators, unleashing horrific beasts into the wilderness.

These aren’t just cool sci-fi concepts, they’re both unique vectors for horror.

Here’s the problem:

Why are there are no monster stat blocks or descriptions?

To let the beauty of your imagination create your own Hyades V, dear warden.

So you completely failed to actually write the scenario, but you’re pretending it’s a virtue?

Well… That’s too bad.

GRADE: F

RIMBOUND #7: GEAR FOR A SPACEFARER

The central feature of Gear for a Spacefarer is a couple dozen pieces of new equipment for Mothership. I quite liked this. Items like airlock foam, jerry cans, an algal starter kit, and trail cameras provide a nice blend of unique functionality and gap-filling. There are several times, while reading through the equipment list that I realized something should obviously be available for sale and even more where I said, “Ooh! That’ll be fun!” Like all good equipment lists, therefore, this one both adds tangible depth to the game world and great gameplay options.

I would, however, recommend reviewing the listed prices. Many of them seemed a little wonky to me, with the worst example being a drone listed at 2% the price of a drone from the core rulebook.

Gear for a Spacefarer also includes the Cadwal Trade Depot, a caravan of vessels providing the services of a C-class starport. This is only sketched in with the broadest strokes, but does include a fun 1d10 table of plot hooks that immediately started inspiring my creative muse.

GRADE: B

RIMBOUND #10: COLD OPENING

Twelve years ago the PCs were placed in cryosleep onboard the Thelma 2. Three months ago, the ship went off course. Two minutes ago the ship’s AI woke the PCs up.

You’ll be shocked (shocked!) to discover there’s an alien predator called the Cretin onboard.

Nothing wrong with a good trope. (Although I will note that this particular trope can be troublesome to pull off in Mothership since android PCs don’t enter cryosleep.) The problem here is that nothing makes sense: Why is this journey taking twelve years? How did the Cretin get onboard? Why are the PCs being woken up now?

As with Under the Dunes, I’m overwhelmingly left with the impression that a bunch of random, undeveloped ideas were just randomly dumped into the adventure key in the hope that something would stick: The Cretin turns out to be a robotic creature, but someone smeared feces all over the airlock. There are “yellow-tinged eggs” in the antigrav generator. There’s religious ramblings in an unknown xenolanguage scrawled across the rooms of the reactor room. A seemingly unrelated religious organization engraved a metallic cube with a message and stuck it inside the Cretin. And so forth.

Perhaps the kindest thing I can say for Cold Opening is simply Unfinished. This one doesn’t make the cut for me and I won’t be running it.

GRADE: D

Go to Part 8: More Trifolds!

Here’s a piece of bespoke terminology that I often teach my players: low stakes test.

It’s not at all unusual for a roleplaying game or storytelling game to gives PCs a resource that they can use to improve their action checks. This might be a meta-currency, charges from a magical item, or some kind of exertion mechanic. Some games will even make this a central element of the resolution mechanic. (In GUMSHOE, for example, spending points from your skill pools is the only way that your character’s skill will have an impact on the check. This is less true in the Cypher System, but most checks will still see the PCs spending points through Extra Effort.)

The trick is that, when I’m GMing, sometimes I like to interrogate the system for stuff that would be kind of a rip-off if the players decided to spend limited resources on the check. If it’s a situation where I can clearly describe the stakes of the roll before the roll is made, no problem. (The players can decide for themselves whether it’s worth spending resources on.) But sometimes this would be awkward, inappropriate, or anticlimactic.

For example, the PCs might all be searching a room together and I want to figure out which of them finds the hidden tiara. I could make an arbitrary decision, roll a flat random check, or even elide past the question of who actually finds the tiara, but in this case I want the focus, reward, and/or factoring of skill that comes with an action check.

If I call for Find Hidden checks, however, one or more of the players might decide this is worth spending Perception Points on, which I know would be silly because they’re guaranteed to find the tiara – the check is just providing focus, a little bit of color, and a potential roleplaying prompt for one of the players (“Look what I found!”).

This is where the low stakes test enters the picture. Instead of saying, “Give me Search checks,” I say, “Give me low stakes Search checks.” This just literally means, “This check isn’t a big deal and I don’t think it’s worth spending points one.”

Players can, of course, still spend points on a low stakes test, but now I’ve done my due diligence and nobody will ripped off when the true stakes of the check are revealed.

It’s a small difference, but I’ve found – once I’ve taught the players what it means – that it greatly streamlines these interactions. (Some of my players probably think this is actually a published term of art in the games we play: It’s not at all unusual for me to include it when I’m explaining the rules of the game.)

MEANWHILE IN MOTHERSHIP…

In Mothership, every failed check causes a PC to suffer one point of Stress. This is a fantastic mechanic which constantly ratchets up the tensions and helps provided perfect pacing for every session, but it also largely removes small, incidental checks from GM’s toolkit.

I know some will cry out that this is, in fact, the point. I get it. But after a dozen or so sessions, I was still feeling handicapped by the loss of these checks.

So, once again, I’ve introduced the concept of a low stakes test, this time indicating to the player that they shouldn’t mark Stress if they fail the check. And, once again, I’ve found it incredibly useful for streamlining these table interactions, even when I’m running an open table and have to frequently introduce new players to the terminology.

This is very much a finesse technique (like the ones I use when collecting initiative), but it’s another example of how small improvements in your GMing can really add up.

If you’re an Alexandrite member of the Alexandrian Youtube channel, you can check out the latest After Action report from my Mothership open table. This one has bloodwights!

WATCH NOW!

I’m also releasing another video tonight: An unboxing video for The Crooked Moon, which you can find over on my Patreon!

You don’t need to be a member to watch this one, but I’ve decided not to release this unboxing video on Youtube because our previous unboxing videos have performed very poorly and they seem to torpedo the algorithm.

But I did want to spread the word about The Crooked Moon, which I think looks really, really cool. Unboxing this one got me very excited to dive deeper! So we’re going to see how hosting videos on Patreon works out.

WATCH NOW!