Mothership is the sci-fi horror RPG you’ve been waiting for! I’ve been waiting years to get my hands on this bad boy, and I’m excited to have you join me in diving into all the hidden treasures and secrets these boxes have hidden away!

Subscribe Now!

(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, is driving Mothership to my table as my next 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’ll likely be writing up a full review of Mothership after I’ve had a chance to run it a few more times, but for now I’d like to share the system cheat sheet I’ve developed for the game.

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

PAGE 3: Ports & Medical Care. (Stuff to do in your downtime.)

PAGE 4: Contractors. (I debated whether to include this page, but I really want the idea of hiring Contractors to be front-and-center for new Mothership players. It’s such an excellent way of getting them more deeply invested in the campaign.)

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

The Mothership cheat sheet currently only covers the material in the Player’s Survival Guide. I’ll likely be expanding them at some point to include the rules from the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, but for the moment I’m going to be focusing on in media res scenarios where I’m dropping the troubleshooters into abandoned military bases, butchered research labs, and drifting derelicts.

There are a few interesting mechanical cruxes I’ve had to confront when putting together the cheat sheet.

Unarmed Damage: Unlisted in the core rulebook, this was immediately an issue in my first couple sessions. I’ve pulled the value of 1d5 from Pound of Flesh, an adventure module included in the Deluxe Edition of the game.

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.

Combat: The transition from an explicitly turn-based initiative system in Mothership 0e to what seems to be a more freeform(?) resolution in Mothership 1e appears to have been pretty badly muffed. The rules and examples of play contradict each other, and support material (including stat blocks and adventures included in the core game box) don’t seem to be in sync with the mechanics. I’ll likely have more to say about this in the future, but for now I’ve simply included the combat rules as written on the cheat sheet.

I’m currently using a system of:

1. The GM threatens harm. (To use a term of art from Apocalypse World.)

2. Players declare action by going around the table.

3. GM makes rulings for how actions are resolved.

4. Players all roll dice (if necessary) at the same time. (Failures likely result in the threatened harm occurring.)

But although this is strongly suggested by the examples of play, I’m not yet convinced it’s actually working very well. (The system seems to detach from the game world, or vice versa, and every opponent kinda blurs into the same mechanical mush.) As I say, I’m going to continue experimenting with this.

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.)

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!

In the Mothership RPG, when your ship takes megadamage it advances along track where each point of megadamage also inflicts an additional effect, as described in the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, p. 35, and also on the ship manifest sheet:

00           All Systems Normal
01           Emergency Fuel Leak
02           Weapons Offline
03           Navigation Offline
04           Fire on Deck
05           Hull Beach
06           Life Support Systems Offline
07           Radiation Leak
08           Dead in the Water
09+         Abandon Ship!

Because you can suffer more than one point of megadamage per hit and you only apply the effect of the megadamage total you land on after, there is some variation within this system. But if you want to mix things up a bit more (so that, for example, you might suffer an emergency fuel leak after weapons go offline), you could deploy a basic megadamage pyramid:

You start on the top row and mark off boxes in a random order, once again only applying the last megadamage effect crossed off on each row.

Note: This pyramid is slightly less forgiving at the top end than the original rules, as it’s possible to hit Abandon Ship at 8 megadamage.

BRUTAL VARIANT: CAPRICIOUS FATE

Combat in the void is harsh and unforgiving, for this was a place that man was never meant to live or die.

In this brutal variant of the megadamage pyramid, each time a ship suffers megadamage roll the effect randomly:

If you roll an effect you’ve already rolled, it spills over to another effect on the same row. If all effects on the row are filled, then the effect rolls down to the next level of the pyramid.

While it’s possible for your ship to suffer catastrophic damage the very first time you’re hit in combat (Abandon Ship!), there is one glimmer of hope: On a roll of 00, you still suffer the megadamage, but it has no further effect.

Variant – Fast Escalation: If you roll an effect your ship is already suffering from, you instead sink down the pyramid to one of the two adjacent damage effects (determine which one randomly).