Go to Part 1

Airlock is a series of systemless SF horror adventures created by James Floyd Kelly. I grabbed the first four in the series with an eye towards using them in my Mothership campaign.

All of the adventures in the series are two-page trifolds. The presentation is fairly standardized and they’re all designed with white text on a black, star-speckled background. The result is evocative, but not very friendly on the printer ink. (I actually jumped through some hoops to invert the files before printing them.)

(You may notice that the Mothership logo appears on the cover images for these adventures on DriveThruRPG, but they are definitely systemless and do not use Mothership’s mechanics.)

AIRLOCK #1: THE SIGNAL

The PCs are sent to pick up two data technicians from an isolated, long-term data vault being run by the Kars-Sundar corporation. When they arrive, however, they find one of the techs dead and the android survivor acting erratically. If the PCs investigate, they’ll likely discover that Abbi, the android, was corrupted by a distress call received by the station.

The concept is straightforward enough that you should be able to hack a playable experience out of this one, but The Signal is near-fatally flawed by it continuity being all over the place:

• Kars-Sundar is shutting down the long-term data vault… except then it isn’t any more.
• When the PCs find Abbi alive and Steven missing, Abbi tells them her fake story of what happened… unless it’s a significantly different fake story that’s only implied elsewhere in the adventure?
• As the crew arrives, a radiation storm will knock out the comms and prevent Abbi from exposing them to the Signal… but also she plays it for them when she first meets them.
• Is Abbi’s goal to reach the origin point of the Signal or is it just being randomly destructive and murder-y?

This adventure is supposed to have a direct connection to Airlock #2: Distress Call (which ostensibly takes place at the location where the Signal originated), but it turns out this just creates even more weird continuity glitches.

I’d like to say that all of this makes The Signal a kind of grab bag that a GM could pick elements from build their own version of the adventure. But it’s really just a vague, barely usable mess that becomes more confusing the more time you spend trying to unravel it.

What I want from an adventure – whether one I buy or one I prep myself – is rock solid continuity. I want to know exactly what the situation is, so that we can then inject the PCs into that situation and play to find out the result. So this one misses the mark pretty wide for me.

GRADE: D

AIRLOCK #2: DISTRESS CALL

Following some dubious experiments, the AI core of the Fractal Dream has taken over the ship and killed the crew. Unfortunately, this leaves the AI stuck in space, so it sends out a distress signal to lure in some suckers (i.e., the PCs). Now Katie, the AI, needs to take over the PCs’ ship so that it can escape.

…which would make sense if the crew of the Fractal Dream had managed to disable the ship’s engines before Katie took over. But they didn’t. Instead, shutting down the engine is something the PCs are expected to do.

Maybe the intention here is that Katie is just pretending to be stranded to lure in the unwary? But this would seem to contradict other sections of the text and it’s all very vague. In fact, the biggest problem here is that a lot of Distress Call is just waving generally in the direction of an adventure.

This also means that there’s a lot of blather on the page. For example, there’s four different paragraphs scattered around this two-page trifold, each explaining how Katie has broken free of her programming, is no longer bound by her safety restrictions, and so forth.

But because so much space is wasted on blather, it also means what should be the actual meat of the adventure is short-shrifted. For example, there’s a bit where Kelly writes, “Katie has plenty of offensive weapons – shocks via metal surfaces, electrical overloads, temperature control, and many more.” The adventure would be considerably better if a lot of its blather was placed with actually giving Kelly a concrete, fully realized toolset of fun, dynamic actions the GM could deploy in response to the players.

What’s here isn’t really a firm foundation that you could use to build a playable version of the adventure. It’s more like a quick sketch of what a blueprint of that foundation might look like.

Expect to put a lot of work into this one.

GRADE: D-

AIRLOCK #3: CRYO – SWEET SCREAMS

Cryo: Sweet Screams is a really frustrating adventure to use. (Or, at least, try to use.)

First, the scenario is incorrectly sequenced. There’s a section called “Running the Scenario” which is positioned, on the page, to seemingly be read last, but which has essential information necessary to understand large swaths of the rest of the adventure. But, upon closer inspection, it turns out that reading this section first won’t work, either: There’s no correct reading order here. It’s just a big jumble.

The scenario also promises the GM certain tools, only to fail to deliver on them. Take the “Cast of Characters,” for example. It would be super useful to have this authoritative reference for each character in the adventure,  but it turns out that every single character write-up lacks the essential information for the character (e.g., “she’s the bad guy”).

Once I untangled the adventure, though, what I discovered was something that seemed hopelessly overwrought:

The PCs are sent to intercept and redirect a medical intervention ship whose comms array has been damaged.

But that’s not all! The corporation is also reprogramming the ship’s android to get up to mischief, and that obviously goes awry and causes the android to start acting erratic (as androids are wont to do).

But that’s not all! The android isn’t the real bad guy. The real bad guy is the human member of the crew, who has ALSO been infected with a (biological) virus that makes her a psychopath.

Even if you want to roll with this “it’s viruses rewriting personalities all the way down” premise, though, Cryo: Sweet Screams has deeper issues.

The crux of the adventure is, “Durden will slowly exhibit strange behavior once he wakes.” But what is this strange behavior? No idea.

Later, if the PCs watch the news and learn that the vaccination program at the ship’s last stop was botched, “this news will trigger actions in Durden and Talisha.” What are these actions? No idea.

Furthermore, the medical ship’s shuttle “will have some issues that need to be addressed by the crew.” This is, in fact, stated no less than three times across the six panels of the adventure, and the idea is that this will give the PCs something to do while the unspecified “strange behaviors” are happening.

But what are these tasks the PCs are supposed to do?

No idea.

GRADE: F

AIRLOCK #4: DEAD WEIGHT

I’ve concluded, after reviewing dozens of these adventures, that the trifold format is a tricky one. Creators really don’t seem to understand how to organize their information. The front page is often used as if it’s back cover text (which is kind of waste of space in a format where space is quite limited), and then, once you flip open the trifold, it’s a complete crapshoot which order you’re supposed to read the other five panels in.

Some creators seem to have decided to just wave the white flag and simply not include any sort of orientation for the GM. For example, no matter where you begin reading Dead Weight, the text will always just blithely assume that you know what a GH3 is.

If you, too, are wondering what they are, after trawling the text and reassembling the scattered bits of information thrown around with wild abandon, I’m fairly certain the answer boils down to, “A large tribble with legs and teeth.” The GH3s breed incredibly rapidly, and will quickly overwhelm any station or ship they find themselves on, rending every bit of flesh they can find along the way.

As another example of the white flag being waved, take the NPC named Mitchell. In one section he’s been placed in cryosleep. In another, there’s an offhand comment to him “having his own programming.” From this, I assume you’re supposed to conclude that he’s an android, but the adventure never actually says that. There’s a lot of this kind of stuff scattered around the text, creating countless booby traps and lacunae.

Taking a step back, the scenario hook for Dead Weight is that the PCs detect an intermittent signal coming from an abandoned space station which has drifted into deep space. When they board the station to claim the salvage rights, they awaken the GH3s, which have survived in a state of advanced hibernation.

The core premise seems to be that the PCs will conclude that it’s impossible to kill the GH3s faster than the GH3s reproduce! They’ll have no choice but to flee and/or blow up the station!

… except the reality is that the GH3s double their numbers every 8 hours. That’s quite aggressive for a biosphere, but rather less terrifying to a PC with a flamethrower. (In contrast, an ochre jelly in D&D is terrifying because it can split multiple times per round. If it, like the GH3s, split once every 8 hours, it would be considerably less intimidating.)

In fact, this is another example where it’s difficult to understand how the time scale of this adventure is supposed to work at the table: What are the PC supposedly doing during the hours and hours of time the GH3s need to become a meaningful threat? This is something you might be able to solve by prepping some time-consuming guidelines for how long it takes to effectively salvage the station – e.g., repairing thrusters takes 4 hours, etc. – but you’re really swimming uphill at this point to force this adventure into a satisfying experience at the table.

GRADE: D

Note: This adventure should not be confused with Dead Weight, an unrelated Mothership adventure written by Norgad, which I previously reviewed.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

There are a lot of problems with these Airlock adventures, and they’re pretty consistent throughout the series. The impression I’m mostly left with is that all of them are more like the concept of an adventure, each remaining, sadly, undeveloped in any meaningful way while the poorly organized trifold format is instead filled with vague, often directionless and repetitive blather.

I was really hoping that these were going to be great. I was very excited when I found the series, which has almost a dozen installments. I thought I’d found something that would keep my Mothership open table supplied with adventures for potentially months.

Unfortunately, I found these first four installments to be essentially unusable and I’ve given up on the series.

Go to Part 1

TURN BACK THE CLOCK

Turn Back the Clock by Kyle Tam is a thinly disguised roman a clef of Arthur C. Clarke’s and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. The PCs receive a distress call sent from a ship thought lost for centuries: Mankind’s first expedition to Jupiter. It’s been knocked loose in time by the presence of the Star Child Flux Child. The original crew is experiencing Annihilation-like transformations, and if the PCs aren’t careful, they’ll similarly become lost in space and time.

Conceptually this seems really interesting. Unfortunately, it’s the execution that kills this one.

First, imagine adapting 2001: A Space Odyssey, but you aren’t really sure how to do that, so the structure of your adventure is just punching the Flux Child in the head until it’s “felled,” freeing you from the ship. But, also, that’s basically impossible because the Flux Child does 5d100 damage, 20 maximum Wounds, and you forgot to include a Health score.

Second, I frequently found the text confusing. For example, “the crew is not technically in danger,” but they were currently fusing with the furniture and/or have pieces of their bodies falling off, plus they will shortly cease to be sentient. Hmm. I feel like I have a radically definition of “danger” than the author here.

Finally, there are more fundamental design problems here. For example, a core structure of the adventure is, “The longer you spend onboard the Charon, the more of yourself you lose. Each day, make a Sanity save or else roll on the [Distortion Table].” But the adventure is keyed as a pointcrawl with three briefly described areas.

This is a problem I frequently see in published adventures. I’ve discuss a similar problem in Running Background Adventures. There’s simply not enough narrative material to fill the time necessary to trigger this structure.

“Clarke’s Star Child does body horror” is a cool concept. But, sadly, there’s nothing on the page in Turn Back the Clock that I would actually use in bringing that concept to the table. This is a disappointing miss for me.

GRADE: F

The PCs are hired to pick up a secretive shipment from an automated shuttle. The only problem? An experimental combat drone – the Synthetic Predator 1^st Design, 3^rd Revision (or SP-1D3R) – has stowed away on the shuttle to escape the facility where it was being tested. Desperate for energy, it begins draining the power systems on the PCs’ ship.

This is another good concept with shaky execution.

Designer Nikolaj Gedionsen describes the adventure as “a claustrophobic game of cat-and-mouse aboard a failing ship where an intelligent machine predator turns the crew’s familiar home against them.” Which sounds great, but immediately runs face-first into a ship map that’s entirely linear. It’s hard to play cat-and-mouse on a balance beam.

The Plea also frequently relies on overriding or ignoring the core rules of Mothership. In my experience, this sort of thing doesn’t work because the players get frustrated at the bullshit “threat” that’s arbitrarily being thrust upon them.

The adventure includes its own mechanical superstructure in the form of a Power Drain system (modeling and tracking the SP-1D3R taking over and depleting the ship’s systems), but I have a difficult time believing it was ever playtested. The core of the system boils down to:

1. Start with 12 Power.
2. -1 Power when the drone connects to a system.
3. If the PCs power down a section, it can’t be Power Drained and also save 1 Power per turn.

The math just fundamentally doesn’t math here. Nonetheless, I’ve done several dry runs of the system using various interpretations of what it might have meant (did you mean -1 Power per turn? can the drone be attached to multiple systems simultaneously?) and it just doesn’t work.

All of these issues, I think, explains why a significant chunk of this adventure is a section called “The Vibe.” Ultimately, that’s a pretty good summary of The Plea: It’s a concept running almost entirely on vibes.

GRADE: D

TESSERACT

Pyry Qvick’s Tesseract initially threw me for a loop because (a) it’s called Tesseract (a cube extended into fourth-dimensional space in the same that a square is extended to become a cube in three-dimensional space) and (b) it features a bunch of non-Euclidean cube-shaped rooms. So my brain kept trying to make the adventure work as an actual tesseract… but it isn’t.

Which is OK. I mention this only in the hope it might help you avoid the same pitfall and get straight to appreciating just how cool this adventure is.

Things kick off in Tesseract like this:

Your ship passes a massive metallic cube. After a moment, your ship passes by a massive metallic cube. Again and again. Your navigation shows no progress made.

On the cube’s surface, a hatch opens.

Crawling inside the cube, you discover a dozen of the aforementioned cube-shaped rooms, all arranged on a map that makes it easy for you to run as the GM, but devilishly complex for the players to unravel. (If they ever do.)

The rooms themselves are consistently themed, but each one is varied and intriguing. In addition to the navigational puzzle of the non-Euclidean map, exploring the cube is also deeply satisfying because the rooms present an interconnected mystery that allows the players to slowly piece together what’s happening here (and, hopefully, undo it). This is very much the adventure that Turn Black the Clock wanted to be, but dropped the ball on.

Season to taste with the creepy cube-droids which infest the place.

The net result is a creepy, well-designed adventure I am sure will leave your players disoriented, paranoid, and thrilled.

GRADE: B-

Rather than the trifold modules we’ve been reviewing, Dead Weight by Norgad is a twelve-page micro-adventure.

The PCs are crewing a cargo ship when an alien artifact in one of the ship’s holds activates, causing all dead bodies in the area to rapidly accelerate towards. It starts with all the meat in the ship’s galley, which rips through the crew currently eating dinner. The dead bodies of the crew, of course, are added to the mass of meat and bone, which rip through the hull of the ship, causing lockdown and atmospheric pressure doors to trigger throughout the ship.

As the investigation and emergency repairs begin, a crew member mortally injured in the initial incident dies, inflicting more damage… and that’s when corpses start arriving from outside the ship. Can the PCs figure out what’s going on and jettison the artifact before the asteroid the artifact was taken from arrives and annihilates the ship?

The concept of Dead Weight is elegant in its horrific simplicity. The execution is simply beautiful.

Just look at this map:

(click for larger image)

Each of the vectors here show the trajectory of damage from the scripted meat projectiles, and you can see how simple it would be to draw your own vectors and immediately understand the resulting damage as events play out at the table. This map is simply fantastic as both a reference and a structure of play, and Norgad has also included player handouts (without the GM-only info) that you can print out for the players.

The ship key itself is equally polished: Nested descriptions make it easy to master the adventure, while creating satisfying layers of investigation for the PCs. Clearly delineated post-incident shifts in the room descriptions make it a breeze to keep the potentially complicated continuity and dynamic environments of the adventure crystal clear in play.

I have only one quibble with the whole package: It’s not immediately apparent why the adventure track ends with the asteroid 98-Gobstopper crashing into the ships. Careful reading suggests that the asteroid – composed of “banded layers of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, and phosphorus, with some other trace elements” – is actually the compacted remains of the countless dead attracted by the artifact at the asteroid’s core. But it would have been friendlier to the GM to just spell that out.

This quibble, of course, scarcely detracts from the whole package. Dead Weight went straight into my open table rotation. I adore it.

Note: When you run your own session of Dead Weight, I recommend taking the time to frame up and play through more of the back story that sets up the First Projectile incident. These events are well detailed in the text of the module, but I think it will work better if the players actually experience those events for themselves and then see the payoff.

GRADE: B+

Go to Part 5: Airlock Series

As I’ve begun expanding my Mothership open table from sporadic one-shots to a jump-cluster with persistent continuity, the economy of the game has been giving me endless headaches.

PAY

A simple question, for example, would be: How much money should the PCs get paid for doing a job?

Unfortunately, the answers given in official books are vague, contradictory, and vary by multiple orders of magnitude for little or no apparent reason.

The Warden’s Operations Manual, for example, bases everything around the concept of salary.

• You calculate a monthly salary in credits based on what skills a PC possesses (e.g., 1,000cr/month for every Expert Skill). This generally results in a salary between 3,000 and 5,000 credits.
• Some jobs pay Hazard Pay, which is generally 2-3x your salary.
• You get a 1,000 credit bonus per Jump made through hyperspace.
• Pay might increase by 10% to 50% based on the crew’s rep, etc.

So the pay for jobs would be listed as “6 MOS SALARY” or “3 MOS SAL + JUMP PAY.” This would seem that most jobs would pay a few thousand credits.

This makes sense for regular employment, but gets pretty vague for a job like “assassinate the head of the Wittgenstein cartel.” (You also get some weird interactions with the default travel times in Mothership, which are a whole different issue.)

Which may be why none of the official adventures or supplements seem to use this system. Many don’t include details about pay at all, while those that do are all over the  place:

• Gradient Descent pays mostly in the form of retrieved artifacts, which generally range from 1,000,000 credits to 250,000,000 credits.
• Chromatic Transference: If you retrieve the McGuffin, you can earn 30,000,000 credits.
• Pound of Flesh: The Babushka offers jobs from 2,000 to 40,000 credits. Tempest Company offers jobs from 500 to 5,000 credits, but if you can earn a higher rank your jobs jump up to 50,000 to 500,000 credits. Canyonheavy missions range wildly from 10,000 to 750,000 credits, plus one big outlier at 30,000,000 credits.

And, of course, without any clear guidance from the official supplements, third party supplements are all over the place when it comes to pay.

Let’s rephrase the question as an order of magnitude. In general, should Mothership PCs be earning:

• Thousands of credits per job?
• Tens of thousands?
• Hundreds of thousands?
• Millions?
• Tens of millions?
• Hundreds of millions?

The answer, obviously, will have a profound effect on how the game plays. But, frankly, Mothership seems really uncertain about what the answer should be. Broadly similar jobs can pay radically different amounts of money.

COSTS

And it turns out that this is unsurprising, because the costs in the game are ALSO separated by orders of magnitude.

In the core game, there a few different categories of purchasable stuff.

Weapons range in price from 50 credits to 1,400 credits.

Armor ranges from 2,000 credits to 12,000 credits.

Equipment mostly ranges from 20 credits to 8,000 credits, with a few key exceptions:

• Exoloaders cost 100,000 credits.
• Jetpacks cost 75,000 credits.
• An organic pet costs 200,000 credits.

Starship supplies (fuel, etc.) seem likely to cost 50,000 to 500,000 credits. (I need to explore this a bit more.) The starships themselves can be hundreds of millions or even billions of credits, but these costs are far more likely to be handled through alternative systems rather than spending individual credits.

Contractors cost roughly 1,000 to 10,000 credits per month.

Shore Leave gets interesting, because the average cost basically steps up through orders of magnitude:

• C-CLASS — 1,000 credits
• B-CLASS — 10,000 credits
• A-CLASS —100,000 credits
• X-CLASS — 500,000 credits
• S-CLASS ­— 1,000,000 credits

Looking at these numbers, what becomes apparent is that there’s a roughly tiered experience here: In order for a group to be making choices about shore leave, for example, the need at least 10⁵ credits. If they have that much money, though, then decisions about basic equipment become essentially meaningless: They can trivially buy anything and everything they want.

And then there seems to be another tier at 10⁶ credits, where you can access top-tier shore leave and begin doing ship-ownership stuff.

A POUND OF FLESH

The A Pound of Flesh supplement adds several new categories of things you can buy: cyberware, slickware, and drugs.

The prices for drugs all hang out in the same range as basic equipment, but cyberware and slickware notably have prices that seem to be significantly divided by these tiers:

• 10³ credits: holoprojector, loudmouth, lumatat, prosthetic, slicksocket, tattletale, terminal jack, looky-loo, twitchbooster
• 10⁴ credits: big switch, deadswitch, fangs, handcannon, hotswap, huntershot, little switch, OGRE, panic button, panzerfist, revenant protocol, scapegoat system, god mode, espernetic feedback loop, holopet, vox box
• 10⁵ credits: retractable nanoblade, spidermount, spinal rig, machine code, sentinel system, skillslick (trained)
• 10⁶ credits: remote uplink, sockpuppet, subdermal armor, whiplash injector, skillslick (expert/master)

The biggest thing to note, I think, is that there doesn’t really seem to be a smooth spectrum of costs in these price lists. Rather, perhaps encouraged by the system denoting costs in cr, kcr, and mcr, there are distinct phase shifts.

CONCLUSIONS: SETTING JOB PAY

With all this in mind, my tentative conclusion is that we can break job pay into three echelons, each of which can be multiple by hazard pay.

Basic Jobs pay in the echelon of 10³ credits — roughly 1,000 to 10,000 credits. Hazard pay can multiple this base rate, though, to 10⁴ credits, up to 50,000 credits. At the low end, these jobs give you enough money to cover your costs and seek treatment for your wounds/stress. At the high end, after one or two of these jobs, you can probably buy a really nice piece of equipment.

Restricted Jobs pay in the echelon of 10⁵ credits — roughly 50,000 to 500,000 credits. Here you can start buying some really nice stuff, but you also start unlocking some really powerful character advancement options (training skills, better shore leaves, etc.). The trick is that you can’t just grab these jobs off the street: You need to unlock them in some way. That might mean gaining ranks in a mercenary outfit; earning a high enough reputation score; or just having the right connections.

Windfalls pay 1,000,000 credits or more. These might be rarely offered as jobs (to even higher ranks, etc.), but are more likely to be lucky opportunities PCs can stumble into or pursue (like the artifacts in Gradient Descent). This is the stuff that, literally, makes you a millionaire: There’s a thin layer of massive luxury goods that unlock at this level. This might also be the point where you can make a down payment on a ship. Retirement options (WOM 51) also unlock here.

(For both ships and retirement options, I want to give some deeper thought into how these could be made compelling and interesting options, particularly in an open table.)

OPEN TABLE

For my open table, I think this means I want to create a jobs board that includes a selection of basic jobs.

This jobs board represents the Phoenix Contracting Mesh, which will further divide these jobs into:

• Green List, which are simpler, safer jobs. In most cases, in fact, these jobs can be rapidly resolved, leaving enough time for another job to be selected for the evening. This allows cash-desperate PCs a pathway for earning the credits they need to, for example, treat their wounds.
• Green List – Complicated, which look like simple green list jobs, but when you deliver the mining equipment to Ypsilon-14 – whoops! Aliens!
• Black List, which are jobs offering hazard pay and incentive bonuses. These are more direct links to adventure content,

(I will likely also be adding Bounties to the board once the Wages of Sin supplement is released.)

To these basic jobs, though, I’m going to want to figure out how to add higher paying restricted jobs. I’m currently thinking this might include:

• Red List, which are jobs on the Phoenix Contracting Mesh jobs board that can only be accessed via a Reputation system. (You’d earn rep by successfully completing jobs, which also gives me an additional opportunity for rep-based incentives and/or complications.)
• Direct follow-ups, where being part of the team that completes one job may cause your employer to offer you a “follow-up” contract at higher pay.
• Patrons, which PCs might hook-up with in any number of ways. These might be independent employment offers, or maybe just personal relationships that unlock red list jobs that would otherwise require higher reputation scores.

Finally, windfalls will be scattered semi-randomly. I’m also planning to include Gradient Descent in the campaign, which would also give players the opportunity to proactively decide to seek windfall payments in an extremely hostile environment (and possibly without any guaranteed base pay?).

OPEN TABLE SALARY

The other thing I’ve been workshopping for my open table is salary.

By the book, salaries for starting characters are:

• Marine: 2,000 credits/month
• Android: 2,500 credits/month
• Scientist: 4,000 credits/month
• Teamster: 2,500 credits/month

In a standard Mothership campaign, I think the idea is that you earn this salary by taking jobs.

For my open table, on the other hand, I’ve been letting PCs earn their salary during downtime (with the assumption that they’re working various jobs between sessions). The problem is that, due to a confluence of factors (including how travel time is calculated in Mothership), the PCs are simply earning too much money: The multipliers yeet them straight out of the basic jobs tier, which rapidly causes the entire game table economy to collapse.

I’m pretty sure the solution (or, at least, the next thing I’m going to playtest) is to effectively reduce these salaries to 1/10^th their value:

• Marine: 200 credits/month
• Android: 250 credits/month
• Scientist: 400 credits/month
• Teamster: 250 credits/month

In practice, the character is still earning their fully salary, but most of it is being chewed up by basic living expenses (rent, food, etc.). (This is fairly similar to the guidelines on saving money, WOM 51.)

I might actually combine this with an actual Lifestyle system, but I think I’ll wait and see if these values are broadly working before adding another layer of complexity.

ADDITIONAL READING
Mothership: Thinking About Combat

(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 an alpha version of this cheat sheet. I’ve made a number of corrections based on your feedback, added additional rules (notable the rules for spaceships), and refined the content and presentation to reflect usage at the table.

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 Violent encounters. (Most of the core game play loops are covered here.)

PAGE 2: Violent Encounters and the Threat System. (See below.)

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.

Having run character creation for Mothership a couple of 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.)

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, 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.

Second, 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.

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. (This simple sheet, however, will simply fit directly into the four-panel screen.)

I’ve been thinking about jump travel in Mothership. Here’s a quick summary, as described in the core rulebooks:

• Jump points are rated from Jump-1 to Jump-9.
• Utilizing a jump point requires a jump drive of equal to higher rating.
• For the crew of the ship, the jump always takes 2d10 days.
• Jumps usually seem to take the same amount of time for the rest of the universe, but each jump carries the risk of an unusual time dilation: Ships might disappear for months or even years instead of days.
• The longer/higher rated the jump, the more dangerous and severe the time dilation appears to be. It’s possible that some of the Jump-9 deep space exploration vehicles that have gone missing will reappear a thousand years in the future.

The rulebooks, however, leave these time dilation effects up to the GM’s discretion. I thought it might be useful to instead resolve the mechanically.

TIME DILATION

When a ship performs a jump, roll 1d10 per Jump rating (e.g., if a ship is making a Jump-3, roll 3d10).

For each 1 rolled on a d10, the actual trip duration increases by one step:

• days
• weeks
• months
• years
• decades
• centuries

If you’re making a standard Jump-1, you have a minimal risk of the trip taking 2d10 weeks instead of 2d10 days. If you attempt a Jump-3, on the other hand, there is a 1-in-1000 risk that you’ll roll three 1’s and return 2d10 years later.

Note: This does not change the subjective time experienced by the ship. For the crew, a jump trip seems to take 2d10 days, regardless of how much time passes in the wider universe.

Other Chaotic Effects: At the GM’s discretion, each 1 rolled on the time dilation check instead triggers a different chaotic effect. Examples might include:

• a crew member is replaced by a completely different person
• time dilation is inverted (the trip takes minutes or seconds instead of days) or reversed (they arrive before they left)
• subjective time experienced by the crew is dilated instead
• strange hallucinations or manifestations
• crew is unexpected awoken from cryosleep during the voyage
• the ship arrives in the wrong place

ASTRONAVIGATION

Calculating a jump requires an Intellect (Hyperspace) check. This check is made with [+} if the astronavigator remains awake during the jump, monitoring the astronavigation computers.

Success: You made it!

Critical Success: Roll one fewer d10 when making the time dilation check for the jump. For a Jump-1 trade route, roll 2d10 and only have the ship experience time dilation if both dice roll a 1.

Failure: Something goes wrong! The GM chooses one:

• Double the number of dice rolled for the time dilation check.
• The ship arrives in the wrong place. (1 in 10 chance you arrive back where you started after 4d10 days, having traversed a Calabi-Ricci spacetime loop.)
• The ship is damaged by jump turbulence, roll a Repair (SBT, p. 39).

Critical Failure: You could have killed us all! All three consequences of Failure happen simultaneously.

TRADE ROUTES

According to the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, “regular Jump-1 trade routes seem to wear down the chaotic effects” of jump travel. Navigational calculations become more precise with each additional jump that’s recorded along a route, and ships traveling through the jump point can effectively wear a “groove” into spacetime.

At the GM’s discretion, ships jumping along a route which has been “worn” by regular travel reduce the number of d10s rolled for the time dilation check by one. For a Jump-1 trade route, roll 2d10 and only have the ship experience time dilation if both dice roll a 1.

UNCHARTED JUMPS

Most interstellar travel happens along charted jump routes: Jump points that have well-plotted navigational solutions (even if they shift slightly due to stellar drift) and are known to be stable.

These are not the only jump points in space, however. Once you’re away from planets, asteroids, and stations, it turns out there are many unstable points in the fabric of space which are constantly being created, destroyed, and shifting according to complex spacetime geometries.

The GM determines the base Jump rating of the uncharted route. (This can usually default to the total value of all Jump-ratings along the known path from the current system to the destination system. For example, if you could normally get to the other system through a known Jump-1 route, the base Jump rating for an uncharted route would also be Jump-1. If you would normally need to make a Jump-1 followed by a Jump-3, then the base Jump rating for the route would be Jump-4.)

Plotting the uncharted jump requires an Intellect (Hyperspace) check. This includes identifying the location of the jump point you need to use, which you will then need to travel to (as shown on the table below). If you’re in the Inner System or in orbit around a planet, increase the time required by one step. (Weeks become months.)

Success: Add 1d2 to the base Jump rating. This is the Jump rating of the uncharted route, which is then resolved normally.

Critical Success: -1 to the base Jump rating (minimum 1). In addition, roll 1d10. On a roll of 1, the jump path you’ve discovered is a new stable route. (Depending on the value of the route, selling the location of this new jump point might be worth thousands or millions of credits.)

Failure: Add 1d5 to the required jump rating. If you roll 5, roll again and add the result to the jump rating. If the result is 10 or higher, you have been unable to find any jump points leading to your desired destination.

Critical Failure: You thought you could get from here to there via a safe jump, but you were very wrong. Your Astronavigation check automatically fails. In addition, determine the jump rating as per a Failure, but you attempted the jump no matter what the result is. If the result was higher than the rating of your Jump drive, your ship suffers 1d2 MDMG and emerges from hyperspace in a completely random and unexpected location. (This is a good way to end up adrift in interstellar space.)