Mothership: Sci-Fi Horror

As we say goodbye to the light of summer and Halloween lurks just around the corner, here’s our tabletop RPG recommendation for a one shot horror game this year.

Mothershp is a setting neutral d100 based sci-fi horror roleplaying game; as a setting neutral game, it isn’t attached to any specific horror franchise, though takes some of its major notes from franchises such as Alien, and Dead Space.

Mechanics wise, it’s fairly rules light, especially for a d100; characters roll for 4 stats: Strength, Speed, Intellect, and Combat which are the primary focus of the 4 character classes: Marines, Androids, Teamsters, and Scientists (which shows of the Alien inspiration, quite obviously).

Characters also have three save stats: Sanity, Fear, and Body, which represent how adept characters are at resisting threats to body and mind.

Each of the four classes have boost to different stats and saves, such as Scientists having +10 to Intellect and +30 to Sanity save. Each of the classes also have their own response to trauma, such as Marine’s causing everyone around them, including allies, to make Fear save checks when they Panic.

All stats are randomly generated randomly and in listed order by rolling 2d10 and adding the total to 25.

Characters choose bonus skills, beyond what is given by their class. Skills are broken down into Trained, Expert, and Master skills, giving +10, +15, and +20 to relevant skill rolls respectively. Some skills higher up the scale are obvious evolutions from one to another, such as the Trained skill Geology advancing into the Expert skill Asteroid Mining, which advanced into the Master skill Planetology.

Finally, characters receive a randomly generated amount of credits (the generic, in-universe currency) to spend on equipment beyond what they get as part of their class based starting loadout, or they can give up their starting loadout for additional credits. There’s a table of weaponry and two pages of equipment of the sort you’d see in a sci-fi horror story, comms devices, scanners, magnetic boots, etc.

Character creation is quick and easy, taking maybe 15 minutes, tops.

Resolution mechanics are simple enough, character roll d100 for all checks, whether they’re Stat checks or Save checks, comparing it to their value for that Stat/Save. Anything up to and including that number is a success, anything over is a failure, matched doubles that are successes are Critical Successes, and matched doubles that are failures are Critical Failures. If a Skill applies to a Stat check, characters add that bonus to the roll. Situational advantages or hindrances are represented by rolling with Advantage (rolling twice and taking the better result) and Disadvantage (rolling twice and taking the worse result).

Pleasantly, there’s a brief aside for players, giving them advice on how to play and engage in such a way that they’ll have fun, setting up expectations appropriately, as well as just giving some good player advice in general.

One thing I find particularly fun about Mothership is its Stress system. Unlike something like Delta Green or Call of Cthulhu, where Sanity is mostly ablative, and just a form of mental Hit points, Stress in Mothership is a gradually accumulating value, gained when characters fail Stat or Save checks, or from encountering certain monsters and horrors as determined by the Game Warden (Mothership’s term for the Game Master). Eventually, when characters need to make a Panic check — likely because of some gruesome or horrific happenstance occurring to them or an ally — they roll 1d20 and compare it to their current Stress; if they roll equal to or less than their Stress, they Panic, checking what they rolled on the Panic Table for the effect this has. The 20 results on the Panic table range from a rush of adrenaline (which is actually advantageous!) all the way through to having to Retire your character immediately. For example, if a character  had 8 Stress and rolled 7, they’d suffer the Nightmares effect, where they find sleep more difficult.

Stress can be lost by resting in (relatively) safe surroundings, allowing the character to make a Rest save using their worst save stat. A successful roll removes as much Stress as the units die of the successful check, i.e. rolling a 34 against a target number of 40 would reduce Stress by 4. Failure adds one Stress instead. Advantage can be gained for this check by engaging in leisure opportunities, such as stimulant abuse and sexual gratification, as in real life. Comparatively, very unsafe circumstances force the check to be made at Disadvantage.

Having this number be fluid and being able to work roleplay opportunities into managing is a bit more interesting to me than the purely ablative approach to such things like Delta Green and Call of Cthulhu do.

With all these ways of harming the characters, it certainly sets the tone the game is trying to find. And combat is deadly. Characters *will* die. While death isn’t as simple as HP being reduced to 0 being an automatic killer, Mothership is a lethal game. Instead, characters suffer a roll on the Wound Table instead, then reset their Health to its maximum, subtracting any carryover from the earlier damage roll. Once a character hits their Maximum Wounds, that’s when they start making Death Saves, a small table that at best leaves a character unconscious while lowering their maximum health. However, bear in mind that even the hardiest of characters is only going to have 20 Health at most, and at most 3 Max wounds. And when you consider that shotgun does 4d10 damage that should paint a picture of the kind of gruesome ends characters often come to in Mothership.

Range is represented by abstracted Range Bands; Adjacent, Close Range, Long Range, and Extreme Range, an approach I’m increasingly in favour of over a highly detailed grid breakdown of 5 by 5 squares. There are rules for toxins, exhaustion, cryosickness, bleeding, food and water, temperature extremes, oxygen deprivation, radiation, and drug overdoses.

As expected in a game with so many ways to kill and hurt you, there are some rules for recovery, both Short and Long Term; Short Term Rest is for healing regular Health damage, and Long Term Rest is for Wound treatment, with a nice selection of increasingly expensive medical care options listed.

Given the high lethality and unlikely possibility that characters will survive for the long haul, there aren’t a lot of detailed rules on character advancement, but there’s some coverage of things like paying to be taught a new skill, as well as more extensive rules for Shore Leave for downtime rest and recovery at a spaceport. As with most downtime in games, this will tend to be truncated and abstract. There are henchmen rules in the form of Hiring Contractors, as well.

Everything I’ve mentioned to this point is found in the player facing Player Survival Guide, which is available as Pay What You Want on DrivethruRPG. There’s also a Warden’s Operation Manual that has some excellent advice and guidance for shaping stories and campaigns in the genre, well beyond just applying to Mothership itself, and is worth its $20 price tag simply for having much broader applicability. However, it’s not needed to run Mothership, you can do that with just the Player’s Survival guide.

Mothership is quick, easy, elegantly designed, and deadly. It’d be an ideal game to pick up (for free, even!) to send your gaming group into the terrifying blackness of space this Halloween.30