How I run Mothership One-Shots

Or, making your player characters more Ripley and less Jonesy.

I’ve had a Mothership-heavy few months; finishing up my campaign (which started with Lair of the Space Lamb) then running a couple of playtests for a module I’ve written. I’ve also watched both Alien and Aliens for the first time in a decade, as my wife wasn’t sure if she had ever seen them (she had not, prompting the memorable line, shortly before Ash’s betrayal, “is Bilbo an alien!?”) 

The second of the playtests was at a mini-convention here in Bristol for the Apocalypse Players podcast, thus casting me as the lone Mothership Warden in a Deep One-infested sea of Call of Cthulhu Keepers. I had three players, all very keen to try out a game they had heard about but not had a chance to play.

And then something interesting happened. I got one of their characters to 20 stress. 

This is the first time I’ve done this in a one-shot, and it was achieved without using any optional rules (more on those later). 

So I thought I would write up how I ran the game, how I frame one-shots in general, and why I think it delivers a good player experience. There’s also some parts about how my thinking on Mothership has evolved since I started using the 1e beta pdfs early in 2023. 

Tweaking the Loadout

The only choice you make in Mothership character creation is selecting 1-4 skills depending on your class, and you don’t see a huge amount of stat or save variation outside of class bonuses due to the 2d10 bell curve. 

This leaves us with equipment, where I agree with the WOM (Warden’s Operations Manual), to whit:

Rolling random Loadouts helps reduce shopping time before a game begins, and also creates a situation where players don’t have everything they need at hand and must work together.

But I think the actual Loadout tables in the PSG (Player’s Survival Guide) are too variable to fully support this. The aim, at least to me, is that everyone ends up with a few different things, of which some are obviously useful, some are weaker/less applicable than you would like, and some appear (at first glance) to be completely useless. The PSG provides entries like these:

Highly variable, but also 1. We aren’t giving the marine anything more than a gun and some armour. 2. The person who rolls ‘well’ has nothing to readily give/lend the person who rolls ‘poorly’ to balance things out. I do understand that these results imply something about the character’s circumstances and background - but we have the trinket and patch tables for that (and they’re great - always roll on them!). 

I’ve experimented with a deck of equipment cards in the past (which made for a fun one-shot of Screaming on the Alexis, as I woke them up from cryosleep and sent them scavenging) but my most recent approach is just to create a new series of tables for everyone to roll on that is tailored to the module at hand. For example, for my playtest: 

You can have everyone roll once on each table, or mix it up to give 4 rolls in total. If you want less powerful PCs, limit the number of rolls or roll 1d5 instead. Almost certainly needs further refinement - but the idea is to give them a few things they can start thinking about how to use, ask questions about, describe for their character’s appearance etc.

And all that gear? It just might make them overconfident…

Establishing Questions

– Did you ever ship out with Ash before?

– I went out five times with another science officer. They replaced him two days before we left Thedus with Ash. Hm?

– I don’t trust him.

– Well, I don’t trust anybody.

Something that Quinns Smith mentioned in both his Youtube review and interview on the Bastionland podcast was the lack of rules or guidance around bonds/relationships for PCs. In a campaign (where the WOM section on framing/prepping is very good), these might emerge over time and/or be determined in Session 0*, but for a one-shot we need a shortcut.

Enter Trophy Dark and Jason Cordova’s blogpost about Establishing Questions 

I won’t repeat what’s written there, only to say that the first section (General Establishing Questions) is particularly appropriate. We, as the Warden, know what module we’ll be running in advance but not the specific player characters that will be involved (unless you’re using pre-gens, which I’ll talk about below). Thus, for Haunting of Ypsilon-14, we might go around the table and ask:

• Who do you know onboard the mining base? (You can then easily amend one of the existing NPCs)

• What’s something you always do as soon as you aren’t cooped up inside the ship? (Hopefully someone will check out the shower)

• What spare parts does the ship need that might be ‘lying around’ in a mine? (this could even be a reason to delay their departure)

• Why do you care that there’s a research vessel docked in the other landing bay? (very open-ended this one, but your players can often surprise you!) 

• When have you promised your friends or family that you’ll be back from this job? (sentimental yes, but helps underline the blue-collar themes of the module)

There’s a couple of other tools that I’ve used but bring out only in specific circumstances:

1. Pre-generated Characters. I did use these at the convention (but made two of each class) just to save as much time as possible but generally I prefer people to generate their characters. The sheet makes it so straightforward and it helps teach new players that it’s not the end of the world if a character is lost.

2. Secret Agendas. I prefer these to emerge out of the Establishing Questions - partly because it lets me check in with the players about the concept but mostly because players will be much more invested in agendas they think of themselves and pass across to me on a scrap of paper. 

So give them some stakes and goals. Build those little inter-PC rivalries and status games. It only takes 5-10 minutes but absolutely pays off when they’re making tough decisions 2 hours later. 

(*Something I’d like to write or have someone else write for Mothership is a “Session #0 Standard Operating Procedure”. You could present it as an in-game document in a manner similar to Breach of Contract and also include some lines and veils as well as a ‘what is an Android?’ section)

ABS. Always Be Saving. 

Space is deadly. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly deadly it is. I mean, you may think it’s deadly to jump in the hippo enclosure and try to steal Moo Deng, but that’s just peanuts to space. 

(With apologies to Douglas Adams)

Pages 22-23 and 32-33 of the WOM talk a lot about rolling dice, they say things like: 

• Roll as little as possible.

• What the player wants to do, they usually just do. Opening doors, talking to people, even violent actions like attacking someone, often won’t require a roll.

• You typically only roll dice when it is both unclear what would happen and the stakes are high. Tell them they can think of their Stats and Saves as a measure of how good they are when unprepared and under extreme pressure.

• Avoid rolling: 1. When the stakes are low. 2. When it’s obvious what would happen. 3. When they have the right tool. 4. When they have a good plan.

Now, as a former 5e DM and member of perception-rollers anonymous I think this is really good advice.

Well, I think it’s really good advice for stats + skills.

But saves… saves are a little different. And the reasons are partly thematic and partly because of the game engine.

Saves get less attention in both the PSG and the WOM. And I think some of what is said above with respect to rolls applies primarily, or even exclusively to stat checks specifically. For example, page 33 of the WOM gives us a whole table of (really good) examples of how failing a roll can advance the shared narrative in lots of different ways other than “the intended action doesn’t happen” - but all twelve examples are stat checks. 

On saves, we’re told:

• You have three Saves which represent your ability to withstand different kinds of trauma.

• Saves are reactions, rolled to avoid different mental, emotional, and physical dangers.

However, with the main source of involuntary PC behaviour actually being the Panic Check, sanity and fear saves in particular are often just a roll to avoid gaining stress. And honestly? It totally works in my experience. We don’t need Sanity Saves to give us the sudden swings of madness you get in Call of Cthulhu for example - where Mothership excels is the steady ticking up of stress, the small roleplay moments from a failed save (new players really take to this in my experience). You can still get an unexpected panic check from a critical failure after all.

That quote I butchered above? It’s to show that unlike stat checks, rolling lots of saves in a Mothership one shot is entirely thematically appropriate. These characters are having the worst day of their entire lives. It’s not like you make one Fear save against the killer robots and if you pass you’re never afraid of them again. The swirling strobe patterns on the vidscreens aren’t meaningfully less insanity-inducing the second time they appear. 

And also… the game works better once the PCs are at like, 6 stress or so. It just does.

At that point, you have a 30% chance of failing a panic check AND the results on the table become more interesting. To get the really dramatic ones like Doomed or Catatonic you need 10 or 15 stress respectively. These are the results that have pivoted the entire narrative of one shots for me in the past - you want them to be an emergent possibility! 

I should note that page 8 of Another Bug Hunt suggests PCs gaining 1d5 stress on a failure for a one shot, and the PSG mentions that it’s sometimes appropriate to give out stress irrespective of a roll. Both of these work to accomplish the goal of a higher stress gain - I’m just happy to have my players rolling saves more often. 

So use those saves to build stress and emphasise just how bad this world is. Attach saves to evocative descriptions of sights and sounds, to moments of narrative revelation. Give the tension of the stress mechanic a chance to prove itself when a critical failure is rolled later on. 

But what does this have to do with Alien (1979)? 

“Cats will amusingly tolerate humans only until someone comes up with a tin opener that can be operated with a paw.”

― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

Jones the cat serves mostly as a way to get the human characters into trouble. He possesses little in the way of specialist skills, and the affection the crew have for him is seldom reciprocated. He doesn’t drive the action, and ends the film much as he began it. 

We don’t want that from our PCs. We want a Mothership one-shot to produce one or more Ripleys, characters that: 

• Engage with their surroundings using both intelligence and curiosity 

• Are seen to be psychologically impacted by events that unfold

• Have varied (and tested) relationships with those around them

• Use a variety of equipment at key moments

So go forth and make those Ripleys - and give every PC the opportunity to become one. Establish their stakes in the world of tonight’s one shot, give them an assortment of tools to play with beyond their bare hands and let them get stressed. They will reward you with their own secret agendas, desperate gambles for wealth and survival, risky plans and heroic rescues.

October 27, 2024

Lair of the Space Lamb

What do you do if you want to run Arnold Kemp’s Lair of the Lamb, but you have a Mothership campaign planned for when the physical boxset arrives?

Perhaps the Lamb is somewhere new, somewhere beyond the stars.

(Note: A quick search of the Mothership Discord confirmed at least 2 people have already had this idea and run it successfully)

The Concept

Naturally, spoilers abound for the adventure (free via the link above).

This would still be a funnel, in an appropriately sci-fi environment. Items and traps would be converted based on what makes sense in the fiction, with a nod towards the mechanical drivers of play in this scenario (e.g. light being precious).

This is only a conversion of the first level of the dungeon. Eliminating the ghouls keeps things shorter (I have lots of other Mothership adventures I want to run!) and means I don’t have to try and rationalise their existence in a sci-fi setting.

I also wanted to incorporate some of Arnold’s proposed changes to the adventure from a recent AMA on the NSR Discord (will put up the link when it’s compiled). To whit:

• Remove the initial door and replace it with an elevator

• Give a hint about the drip-drip water puzzle

• Make the spiders non-venomous

• Give Akina more personality/goals

• Make the Lamb harder to kill

Then there were the Mothership (or at least, the way I run Mothership) considerations:

• The Lamb and its… produce are the only things here that defy rational explanation (I want to go elsewhere in the sector for other adventures rather than tie everything back to the temple and its artifacts).

• There should be lots of opportunity for panic and injury.

• Whilst money and treasure aren’t as important as in classic OSR gold-for-XP games, they’re still useful to trade with and as a lure.

The Set-up

The free city of Lon Barago, jewel of the plains, becomes:

Lon Barago

Size/Type: Asteroid settlement, B-Class Port (2d10 x 1kcr to convert 1d10 stress)

Equipment Availability: All mundane equipment, advanced weapons/tech are rarer — may require extra cost or time

Cultural Touchstones: The Belter settlements from The Expanse, WH40k Hive Cities

200,000 people (as per the last census, now out of date) crammed into a large asteroid (Barago, with “Lon” indicating its central significance). Barago itself is now mostly mined out, with satellite mining operations now taking place throughout the belt.

Hot, humid and cramped. The populace typically resents the corporations that jockey for control of the valuable top layer (with its docking bays, landing pads and taxation rights). No singular entity can claim to have majority control however.

Within this environment, religions and cults develop, feud and merge on a frequent basis.

And for our unlucky funnel fodder, the framing is:

Even if you are from Lon Barago/The Epsilon sector, you do not receive the protection of the citizens here. Perhaps you are an outcast of some kind, your family fell from favour or you are seen as a collaborator. Otherwise, you are an outsider — either in corporate employ/association or a rare independent traveller.

“What is the last thing you remember before you woke up here?”

I also created a d100 table to generate faction alignment, class and career. Players were free to use as much or as little of this as they wished. A sector map (based on the guidelines in the Warden’s Operation Manual) gave them some additional context.

I described the lair as a mine that has been repurposed for living (or at least, industry/storage) and shows signs of multiple decades of use. The occasional sign of bare asteroid rock but mostly concrete floors and walls. Occasional metal beams, pillars or panels but noting useful unless noting. The air is not completely stagnant, but any hint of where it is being pumped from is lost in the constant background hum that is omnipresent on Lon Barago.

The Lamb and other Creatures

The Lamb: C:65 4d10 DMG I:50 AP:0 W:3 (30)

Special: Damage reduction 3 vs. unpowered melee weapons

I used the ‘Brute’ statblock from the back cover of Unconfirmed Contact Reports, bumping up the instinct to reflect the Lamb’s intelligence and that the lair has been its home for some time. The damage reduction is to reflect the ‘as chain’ armour — it should be very hard to kill with purely improvised weapons.

“But the Lamb should kill you in one hit” — 4d10 could still potentially kill a low HP Teamster or Scientist in one hit, but most PCs will go down with two hits, after taking a cool wound (I really like the Mothership wound tables).

Everything else about it works pretty much as intended.

Little Lamb: C:45 2d10 DMG I:30 AP:3 W:2 (20)

Father Bastoval: C:60 I:60 AP:3 W:3 (15)

Inventory: Camera drone w/ night vision. Ceremonial trident (2d10 DMG). 2 x stimpack, Web grenade (produces a sticky burst that slows movement)

Milo/Bilosh: C:40 I:40 AP:5 W:2 (15)

Milio carries a SMG and Bilosh has a Stun Baton

Doors

“Locked wooden doors” become thin metal and plastic doors secured with a keypad lock. A strength check lets you kicked or otherwise break the lock and open the door in a negligible time, otherwise it takes 10 minutes to force it. Either way, it makes noise.

Access to tools to pry off the keypad and bypass the electronics with another power source will let you attempt to open the lock quietly (either Hacking or Mechanical Repair are applicable).

Steel doors cannot be kicked in, you need a blowtorch at the very least, preferably a plasma cutter.

Rooms 1-5

As per the Mothership rules, since all PCs are dehydrated they have disadvantage on all rolls.

1. The ‘bowls’ become metal-lined pits in the floor, original purpose unknown (a little like service pits for a large vehicle or access hatches for underground piping/cabling).

2. Instead of bells we have electronic ‘noise makers’ which will chime if moved too fast. Since overt harm to animals was one of this campaign’s lines, we have 3 goat carcasses strung from a ceiling beam. A metal bowl, hay and copious bloodstains suggest they were slaughtered in this room.

3. Unchanged

4. Purple lotus powder is unchanged.

The chest is now marked ‘secure magnetic containment pod’ — removing the first lock causes a warning beeping noise (think a videogame grenade/landmine), removing the second creates a bright flash of light and smell of ozone.

It contains the head of an experimental android (Unit-XC). It will attempt to absorb synthetic skin from any nearby androids (body save to avoid). If there are none available, with an hour of downtime it can reconstruct itself to move using the fragments of wires and structure protruding from its neck as tiny legs.

In this form, it can latch onto humans or androids (usually on their shoulder) and turn them into a thrall. Thralls are still playable characters, but their overriding focus is recovering the remaining parts of Unit-XC.

Removing Units-XC’s head without a full surgical suite risks 6d10 damage (reduced to 4d10 by a Success/2d10 on a Critical Success on an appropriate skill check).

5. Heavy steel elevator doors (no keypad). A battery powered lamp is hanging on the end of a metal pole, recharging via crude wiring. It lasts for 1 hour if removed and takes 1 hour to recharge. There are some pieces of wire on top of the locked metal storage box (to allow PCs to rig up charging elsewhere). Inside the box is another lamp and spare chemical battery. The chemicals in the battery are flammable, provided you open or break the battery to release them.

5a. The broom is now a mop with an aluminium handle.

Rooms 6-10

6. The acid deals 2d10 damage per round until rinsed or wiped off.

Note: I actually let this trap trigger repeatedly, in case the PCs wanted to lure something into it (of course, it doesn’t work on the Lamb, but they don’t know that). If for some reason they want to empty it of acid, it works 1d5 times.

Rather than a statue, there is a mural of a fish with hands, that has been defaced (rather than Vandoh, I’ve altered the canon such that the fish with hands was an earlier cult who occupied this space, see rooms 7 and 14 below).

7. The door cannot be closed from the inside. Room resembles a dentist’s office completely covered in grime and filth, complete with chair/throne in the centre.

Golden helmet worth 1.5kcr

3 x Elaborate ‘fish with arms’ religious vestments/costumes (bulky, flammable)

If a PC sits on the chair a rapid-acting nerve block is injected, and surgical arms descend from the ceiling. The left arm of the PC is replaced with a crude hydraulic claw below the elbow. Make a body save; on a success, it is fully functional (as boarding axe in combat, stronger than human hand). On a failure, it is damaged or otherwise not fully integrated (d10 damage, no strength benefit). The surgical unit only works once.

A recorded message intones “as the great fish evolved, so shall we”

The PCs can deduce the function of the chair, but only by spending 20 minutes clearing through all the grime and filth to reveal rotting paperwork, laminated signs etc.

8. Akina’s ring is non-magical but worth 2kcr.

Akina still very much wants to be rescued, but is not above siding with the priests if she believes they will kill the PCs. Has seen the life within the Lamb, and will appoint herself ‘Guardian of the Little Lambs’ in the event of a power vacuum.

9. Replace haunting with:

The concrete that projects out over the water is cracked and broken with rusting rebar visible in places. If 3 or more PCs stand at the edge at one time (such as if they are in desperate need of water) a section will collapse beneath one of them (50% chance that their clothing catches on the descending debris). The lamb travels here often and knows to enter/exit the water from the side.

For the water drip puzzle, I firstly changed the fountain to a malfunctioning pump, then placed another ‘acid pump’ next to it with a sparking (1-2-1-2) control panel. Plus another mural of a fish with arms.

10. Battered shield = discarded access panel with handles, AP3 if held in melee

Spear = sharp broken plastic rod, d10 DMG (adjacent), requires both hands to wield effectively

Torch = battery lamp (40mins light, not compatible with other lamps previously mentioned)

Bottle of liquid hole = cannister of hyper-cooled liquid nitrogen, weakens things it is sprayed on, but you’ll need additional force/cutting to fully break them. Damaging if swallowed, but the cannister may not break immediately.

Rooms 11-15

11. Unchanged (amusingly this makes the rat a very valuable piece of treasure if you can fully befriend it, given the cost of real pets in Mothership)

12. The roof is held up by a Legenga ™ Temporary Plastic Support Block Stack. Collapsing it on the Lamb inflicts 1 wound to it (don’t roll on the wound table — treat the ‘vulnerable whilst digging itself out’ as equivalent to this).

13. Unchanged.

14. Battery lamp hanging on the wall.

Inscription reads “Shadrakul, who showed us how life could change”

The sarcophagus does not open when you take anything from the pit below, it will need to be forced open or reset by filling it with debris.

14a. A desiccated corpse holds a glass prize for biochemistry (800cr), 3 x fear gas grenades and some cryptic notes that explain their purpose (requires 1 hours downtime to fully understand — also reveals the door code to room 7).

Fear Gas Grenades: Make a fear save or flee in terror for 1d10 rounds (still works on the Lamb, but rolling its instinct gives it a 50% chance of saving).

15. 1 spider bite causes muteness for 1d10 x 5 minutes. Each subsequent bite reduces your body save by 1d5 (death at 0 body save).

Danjo the reconstituted Weyes-Kroger Chicken substrate (now with Real Flavour) salesperson is calling out to the market on Level 8a. He has 1 knife, 3 x 20 minute batteries and assorted food packs.

Rooms 16-20

16. Unchanged

17. Unchanged (altars still have candles in the future!)

18. The shattered gazebo can now be accurately described as a fallen elevator.

18a. The portcullis becomes an old-timey concertina elevator door (diamond grid). The sword is a boarding axe and the bow + arrows are a SMG with two clips of ammo.

19. The east door no longer exists (Ghoul level eliminated) so the iron spikes are steel wedges holding the entry door closed (it can still be broken open).

+2 minimum stress if you are forcibly removed from a pool

The priests throw psychotropic urine at you in lieu of spells.

20. Vandress isn’t magical but she is mutated. Without cone of mutiliation/confusion she will spit acid (3d10 DMG, area effect) or cough spores on you (sanity save or act randomly).

Rooms 44-46

Note: Since there is no level 2, I didn’t make the tunnel from the fountain to the cistern quite as hidden or underwater — it’s just distant from the fountain platform (i.e. you can only see it if you fully explore the fountain with a light source).

44. A large water intake leads to a pump sending water up to the temple. If you manage to get the Lamb sucked into the pump you kill it and contaminate the temple’s water supply.

45. Rigid plastic boat with 2 batteries. 16 plastic water barrels.

46a/b. Unchanged. Rather than a tower, you can drop through a vent to freedom.

The Play Report

Stumbling around in the dark, the PCs were extremely lucky to have the Lamb attack the one PC with a knife, who then rolled exceptionally well to escape (and I rolled low enough that they barely avoided a wound). More exploration followed (not yet tackling the locked door to 4) and a spray of acid was likewise lucky not to take out a different PC.

Reaching the water (after seeing but choosing not to speak to Akina, who likewise was unsure of their intentions) they drank a little before the Lamb emerged from the water. Remarkably, everyone passed the resulting fear save as they saw it in the light for the first time.

Fleeing from the lamb, they hurl the gong into the pit in order to distract it, and continue their exploration. At this point, the lamp starts to flicker, and they elect to have two PCs start to search the bone pellet pile whilst the other two return to the elevator to recharge it. Feeling around in the dark, only one character is able to find the tunnel at the back and escape into it, whilst the other is grabbed and eaten by the returning Lamb. The two lamp-bearers (both marines) return to witness this and immediately panic, fleeing to the various mural rooms. Meanwhile, the scientist crawls through the tunnel and is relieved to find another lamp at the far end. We introduce a new PC (teamster) as the victim freed earlier.

Eventually, the group comes back together, correctly identifying that they have found a loop in the dungeon and a potential trap in the form of the weakened roof. Avoiding the spider-filled wall crack, further exploration reveals the weapons and rope on the ledge above the broken elevator (helped by some very good rolls for climbing). With these they feel emboldened enough to break down the NE door, finding the priests and interrogating Vandress before murdering her (and having some acid spat on them in the process).

Another encounter with the Lamb sees them wound it with sub-machine gun fire, but both sides retreat as the gun-toting marine is hurled against the wall, fracturing his skull (disadvantage on all rolls). Dragging him away, and now with the lamb licking its wounds, they break down the door in the SW and unpack Unit-XC. Unsure what the purpose (or indeed threat) of an android head is, they wire it to the lighting circuit by the elevator in the hope of getting information. Now with a decent collection of items, they head to the crack and smash a battery to burn out the spiders. Venturing inside and meeting Danjo, the scientist opts not to trade for items, instead saying “tell the priests of the white temple we’re already killed Vandress and we shall kill the Lamb if they do not let us out — they have one hour”. Returning to the elevator, they realise that Unit-XC’s head is gone.

Two PCs went to rescue Akina, whilst two others went to rescue more survivors. The latter discovered Unit-XC had drafted itself to a captured android back in the starting room, and it was requesting everyone else to serve it. With everyone reconvening by the main elevator, Unit-XC’s attempts to call it were interrupted by the Lamb, who tore the arm off one PC and consumed them as they attempted to slip past. At this point, Unit-XC commanding all the remaining survivors in the dungeon to search through the bone pellets in search of its body.

A plan was formed to kill/trap the Lamb using the collapsing ceiling nearby. Two PCs went to grab a priest from the pool to use as a lure whilst the others set the trap. After a brief distraction as one of the priest grabbers became overcome by the pink liquid (“goo is good”), the trap was sprung and the Lamb buried. At this point, the elevator doors opened and the priests emerged. Using the Liquid Nitrogen found in the bone pellets, a cloud of cover was created and the party charged in. Some good rolls later (especially from the boarding axe-wielding teamster) and they were in the elevator before Unit-XC could join them. On their way up; alarms, shouts and gunfire indicated that the temple had been stormed by an outside force… who were interested in offering the party a job to find other objects as useful as the Lamb…

Conclusions

Even with just the first level being played, I think you need two sessions for this. The nature of the module is to be particularly careful and plan your moves, even though it’s a funnel. Plus there’s ~20 rooms and a lot of (deliberate) looping and backtracking. The play report above took us about 6 hours in-game.

Two character deaths, with one of the other characters taking a serious wound, was pretty much what I was aiming for. It can easily be dialled up to have every source of damage result in death/wound and more funnelling as a result. I think the highest PC stress level was 16, which again feels about right.

Everyone enjoyed the dark, vomity horror, with players getting more into it as the dungeon progressed and there were more opportunities to plan. I would especially praise the level of interactivity Arnold put into most of the rooms here — there’s a bunch of different ways to play around with the rooms’ contents, with enough scattered ‘flavour’ rooms to make it still feel natural.

Mothership lends itself particularly well to limited equipment selection and improvisation, since aside from armour points and weapon damage every item is essentially just a piece of fictional positioning. Every combat took only two rounds to resolve, and the more freeform nature of it means it ends up being more ‘rulings over rules’ than many OSR systems you could run this with.

The Lamb is a classic Mothership monster since its tendency to stop and feed on victims is exactly the kind of hit and run encounter the system excels at (plus it can surprise PCs with its wall climbing and acid immunity).

All in all, a rousing success! I’ll be posting reviews of the other Mothership modules I’m running over the summer. First up, a visit to an unexpectedly resonant colony…

June 12, 2024

The Bell Curving Encounter Table

“You can tell you have reached civilization because you are standing on a street, and there is a beggar on it” — Archmage Hann, writing to a pupil whilst secure in his tenure

“Some describe the wilderness as a land with no law. I prefer to think of it as a place with fewer witnesses” — ‘Scarlet’ Findlayson, robber of the rich and occasional investor in smaller communities

“Not too much town, not too much mountains. Yeah, I like it here in the borderlands. You get all sorts — even had three bears move into the old cabin across the lake.” — Farmer Thrissell, interviewed during the search for a missing child.

For the purposes of this post, we’re going to talk about some very broad terms as a common shorthand for the areas your players might explore during a hexcrawl or other equivalent sandbox in need of an encounter table.

“Civilization” — There is a central authority (often oppressive) and a sedentary population producing sufficient excess to support non-subsistence occupations such as priest, merchant and landlord.

“Borderlands” — People work to gather natural resources (often traded with the nearest civilization) whilst living in smaller/less dense communities. These might be moved or rebuilt to respond to changing fortunes. There is also more space for wild creatures.

“Wilderness” — Very few permanent settlements due to a combination of unsuitable terrain, weather and other natural hazards. Vast spaces and limited knowledge of the inhabitants creates a vacuum for stories, myths and legends to arise in.

The goal here is to create a unified encounter table – one table that can be adapted to the changing geographic position of the party.

But first, a word about bell curves.

Bell Curves

Roll a single die, and you get an even distribution of results — each is just as likely as any other.

Roll two or more dice and total them gives you a bell curve distribution — some results are more likely than others. Furthermore the range of possible totals becomes larger. Let’s look at the classic example of 1d6, 2d6 and 3d6:

Lots of options to generate interesting results!

And those profiles remind me of something…

So, the genesis for a unified table:

• Roll 1d6 when the party is close to civilization.

• Roll 2d6 when the party is in the borderlands.

• Roll 3d6 when the party ventures into the wilderness.

1d6 results will be evenly split, whereas the 2d6 and 3d6 table entries should reflect the relative likeliness/unlikeliness of results at the middle/ends of the spread.

Entries that “crossover” between the different distributions should reflect the fiction of why a creature might be in 2 or 3 different regions.

Example Table

1. A quintessential member of civilization (a noble, baffled and bewildered by a mundane task)

2. The backbone of civilization (a farmer, tired from driving sheep to market)

3. A product of civilization (giant rats, grown plump on an unguarded cornfield)

4. A beneficiary of civilization (a merchant, suspicious of armed adventurers)

5. A guardian of civilization (soldiers, asking for spurious fees and taxes to pass them)

6. An interloper from the borderlands (bandits, roaming for easy loot)

7. A beast wary of civilization (wolves, hunting isolated creatures)

8. A representative of the borderlands (foragers, using unusual traditions to avoid danger)

9. A borderlands scavenger (wyvern, hunting for carrion)

10. A roaming creature of the borderlands and wilderness (ogre, hungry)

11. A wilderness traveller (nomads, distinct from you with their mounts, weapons and culture)

12. A herald of the wilderness (harpies, luring with song into dangerous terrain)

13. A wilderness lurker (giant spider, waiting patiently in a web)

14. An exile from civilization (cultists, performing dark and forbidden rituals)

15. A wilderness predator (a chimera, feasting on a huge elk)

16. A wilderness legend (a giant, striding through the landscape with ease)

17. A sign of lost civilization (automaton, wandering with incomplete instruction)

18. A mythical creature of the wilderness (a dragon, searching for equally wondrous prey)

Further Experimentation

You could do one or more of the following:

• Roll different dice sizes when the environment is ‘in flux’ (possibly due to player actions)

• Create different tables for different regions

• Create multiple entries, activities or motivations for the more likely results

• Modify the reaction roll based on where a creature is from

January 26, 2024

A call has gone out asking for resolution mechanics this January and it feels like a fun exercise. However, the main system projects (as opposed to adventures and other content) I have lined up for this year are a slight tweak on 24XX and using a d20 for FitD-style resolution (similar to Realms of Peril’s approach to PbtA).

Clearly, neither of these are sufficiently new and novel.

So instead, here’s:

1, 2, MAXIMISE

(where possible I aim to make my mechanics sound like rejected Venture Bros episode titles)

Rolling

For any risky action, you always roll two dice. Typically, these are your ability die and your skill die. Certain circumstances may swap one or both of these dice for others such as:

• Hireling die

• Equipment die

• Ally die

• Magic die

• Diety die

All dice range from d4 to d12.

Roll both dice at the same time. If:

• Either die shows a 1, this action has failed

• Either die shows a 2, this action has resulted in a mixed success

• If both dice show a 3 or higher, this action is a success

• If both dice show their maximum values, this action is a critical success

Maximising

Certain character abilities will allow you to maximise a die of a particular size or range of sizes. When you maximise a die:

• Set it to its maximum value

• Raise the stakes of the roll by accepting a worse consequence from the Referee if you roll a 1 or 2

You may only maximise one die per roll, never both.

As a default, the players as a group are allowed to maximise each die (d4,6,8,10,12) once per session.

Analysis

The odds of fail/mixed/success look like this:

As you can see, the odds of a critical success are extremely low (compared to other systems) once you start rolling anything other than a d6 or d4. Here’s where the MAXIMISING comes in:

By limiting maximised rolls, and raising the stakes of them, we focus the table’s attention on these rare single die rolls.

What might this be used for?

Despite the mixed successes, I think their lower frequency compared to PbtA/FitD suggests this might be less suitable for a purely narrative game (where you want plenty of them to drive the action). Instead, I think we’re into complex NSR territory — lots of places on the character sheet to pull dice from and potentially have them “break” or become unusable for a time.

But of course, it’s not up to me — go forth and do with this as you will!

Pictured: Crowd chanting “Maximise! Maximise!” at the 2032 live actual play for popular vid-stream ’1, 2, Die!”

January 14, 2024

Mothership, for all the attention it (rightfully) gets for its layout, strong sense of theme, atmosphere and mass appeal etc, doesn’t seem to elicit much mechanical discussion or hacking. In particular, the Panic Die/Table rules, and the associated trauma responses for each player class.

Pondering this has meant I’ve had a draft post entitled “Mothership panic die, but for supply?” sat on my Google drive for a few months. I’m trying to blog more this year, so I decided to actually flesh it out and choose a theme. Thus, I present:

The Panicking Pirate Supply Die

Why Pirates?
I think this mechanic works best for shared, rather than individual supply. An isolated, irregular assortment of resources also fits the unpredictable nature of this. A merchant caravan, or a Battlestar Galactica-style pursuit would also work well.

Note that this deliberately doesn’t mention gold, treasure, booty etc. It is assumed that anything valuable is also functionally useless for survival or that the GM can make rulings if, for example, you need to break open the valuable brandy keg to restore morale.

These rules aren’t intended for any particular system, so feel free to adapt the tags etc as you see fit.

When you start the campaign, each character takes a ship role and chooses a need (see below).

When you begin a voyage, set your supply based on the location you obtained resources from:

20: Large port

18: Small port

16: Captured merchant vessel

14: Uninhabited island

12: Wrecked ship

10: Scavenged flotsam

Reduce supply when you:

• Spend a night at sea

• Repair damage to the ship

• Take on board passengers (or captives, if you treat them well)

Make an Inventory Check:

• Every morning at dawn. 

• When you survive a storm or similar hazard.

• When you take back your ship after it has been raided, captured etc

• Whenever crew morale becomes critical (this can be triggered by results on the table)

Roll a d20 - if the result is equal to or lower than your current supply, nothing happens. If the result is higher than your current supply, consult the table below:

20. Overlooked cache. Gain 1 supply.

19. Inefficient storage. Lose 1 supply.

18. Missing keepsake. A random crewmember is [Disgruntled].

17. Critical spare part. The ship’s speed, navigation or cargo capability is damaged. This cannot be repaired this voyage. 

16. Ink pot overturned. Any logs, maps or charts you make will be short and provide minimum information.

15. Unspiced. D6 crewmembers become [Disgruntled] as the taste of their food can no longer be disguised. 

14. Last of the stolen wine. All high status food and drink has been consumed. This may impact diplomacy. 

13. Thieving mascot. Lose 1 supply. d6 crewmembers are [Disgruntled]. If you discipline the parrot/monkey/pig/other remove [Disgruntled] from the crewmembers and apply it to a different group of d6 crewmembers instead.  

12. Infestation. Spend time and effort to exterminate pests or lose 1d3 supply.

11. Cracked lens. Your telescope’s image is distorted and there is no replacement this voyage.

10. Running dark. You have no more lamp oil or torches this voyage.

9. Hard tack and water. You are down to basic survival rations. 2d6 crewmembers are [Disgruntled]. 

8. Limeless. The crew become more vulnerable to disease, especially scurvy. 

7. Rope, cloth, nails. You can no longer repair the ship beyond minimum functionality.

6. Disorganised. All subsequent inventory checks are made at disadvantage.

5. No medicine, only rum. Halve the rate of any [Healing] onboard ship. 

4. Nowt but weevils. The ship has no food remaining. Crew will become [Impaired] tomorrow and perish in 3d6 days (roll separately for each). 

3. Out of powder. Each cannon/musket can make one final attack before becoming useless.

2. Rum dry. You have no alcohol left. Entire crew is [Disgruntled].

1. Water, water, every where. No fresh water. Entire crew is [Impaired]. Each crewmember will perish in 1d6 days (roll separately for each).

Ship Roles:

• Quartermaster: Gain advantage once per voyage on a single Inventory Check

• Bosun: Once per voyage, repair a ship element to full functionality (irrespective of any table results).

• Cook: Once per voyage, delay a food-based result on the table for d6 days. 

• Captain: Suppress [Disgruntled] or [Impaired] on d6 crew per day. 

• Barber Surgeon: Ignore the effect of a healing or alcohol-based result for a single crewmember once per day.

Needs:

Your character needs one of the following to be fully functional and use all of their skills/abilities:

• Alcohol

• Fresh food

• Healthy crew morale

• An undamaged ship

• Light

• Accurate position/navigation

• Medicine

• A loaded firearm

January 7, 2024

Breaking the curse of the Investigation Roll

As someone who is a lore curious, deductive type of player, the phrase “roll investigation on the room” weighs heavily upon me from years playing and running 5e. The following suggestions (especially the rules concept at the end) are not intended to be universal, rather justified for a particular combination of players, setting and campaign premise.

So, there’s been murder. Or a kidnapping. Or a theft. You get the idea.

Most player dice rolls in TTRPGs are either to:

• Avoid failure (saving throw vs. Death, Into the Odd saves)

• See what degree of success you achieved (any damage roll, BitD gather information)

• Both (5e attack roll, PbtA 2d6, Mothership d100 etc)

And a system with decent advice for the referee will add some variation on:

“Don’t roll unnecessarily, be clear on the stakes of a roll”

And for the most part, this works really well. Endless perception checks are avoided. Players can collaborate to avoid risky rolls with good planning and clever thinking, whilst maximising their advantages with tasks that can only be resolved by picking up the dice. 

But there are a few player actions that stand a little apart, and the one I find my mind drawn to is investigation.

In an ideal world, any kind of investigation roll probably wouldn’t be necessary (and many systems don’t include it). A referee describes a location in flawless detail, and the players respond with logical, plausible actions within this space that perfectly reflect their characters’ knowledge and abilities. All while asking intelligent questions and complementing the referee on their new haircut.

And for many OSR/NSR games, having no specific mechanics works just fine to solve puzzles in dungeons, find secret doors and so forth. Indeed it’s clearer and easier to rule on than the more widely used alternative, the aforementioned 5e Investigation skill:

[Excerpt from the 5e Player’s Handbook describing the investigation skill]

However, in my experience the go-to OSR advice of:

“players should describe how they interact with the fictional space - opening desks, turning over bodies, looking for gaps where something might be missing”

Becomes less effective when some or all of the following apply:

• The setting involves a lot of sci-fi tech, magic and/or niche real-world knowledge

• 1 or more players struggle to imagine the world in a way that allows for such specific interaction.

• The campaign has an investigation/mystery-solving focus (this exacerbates the previous two points).

Game design has already produced a number of solutions to this beyond simply adopting the 5e skill roll model:

1. You can assume that players find a minimum level of information as used in GUMSHOE and its hacks (I do find that this system is slightly misrepresented in posts like this - it’s not quite as straightforward as “hand all the info to the players” - they still need to be in the right place with the right skills to gain additional knowledge). 

2. Or perhaps the players make theories, and rolls are to determine their truth as seen in Brindlewood Bay and others. 

3. Finally, you can take credit for both rolls and actions - players can choose whether to interact via dice mechanics or description of what their character is doing, with the referee adjudicating accordingly. 

[1] is interesting - I think there’s a lot to be learned from the approach, but ultimately I want failure to be an option, just like in the real world. 

[3] is my preferred solution. If I run an investigation campaign I want players to feel their characters have distinct abilities far beyond their own (which I find rules out the baseline OSR/NSR approach) but as a referee I enjoy creating a Blorb mystery scenario with landmark, hidden and secret information for my players to unpick. This rules out [2] where the clue placement is entirely different. 

But here we run into another couple of problems…

Spam and Failure

Whilst there are many ways to generate time pressure in a mystery scenario (the killer might strike again, you are unofficial investigators and the legitimate ones will be here soon) eventually this strains plausibility. In such a scenario some players (and I have occasionally had to stop myself from this) will go at a fictional space like they’re in Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. No stone will be left unturned or indeed checked to see whether it’s a fake stone, a magic stone and what happens if you throw the stone out the window.

Regardless of whether you’re using the stone turner skill or describing your lifting and turning in great detail - you’re spamming. There is no in-game consequence to failure to find information, so the referee has to step in at some point and say “you’ve learned everything you can here, please leave the victim’s relatives to their grief”. 

But to defend the players in this scenario - they are well aware that failure is an option. If they keep looking in the wrong place, and not finding anything, then there’s an out of game consequence - and it’s that the game grinds to a halt! So they’re highly motivated to search for everything.

How do we solve both these problems?

You can, of course, build on the time pressure element and widen it to include all sorts of complications. The aforementioned Brindlewood Bay does this in classic PbtA fashion by allowing the Keeper to make all sorts of moves on a player failure using the Meddle Move.

Cthulhu Dark also has a neat solution to spamming - the more you roll the more likely you are to “see too much of the Mythos” with all the consequences that implies. Brute forcing your way through that game at the cost of your sanity is practically encouraged. That seems very specifically Lovecraftian but you could run a dark, real-world game that way - perhaps where it represents the stress of the job. However, that might not be all that much fun. What we’re trying to evoke here is the trope of the world-weary detectives and private eyes in a city of crime more than career burnout and obsession. There are the easy solves, the day-to-day simple motivations… and then there’s the cold cases, the baffling murders. 

Firstly, I would always frame this sort of campaign as one with multiple ongoing mysteries at once and almost certainly run a percentage of them like GUMSHOE scenarios - you’ll always find something, it won’t be too difficult to put the clues together. 

This means that failure is an option. And that events can take their course in the fiction to keep a particular case open (the thief strikes again and steals something even stranger/more valuable). This isn’t a novel solution - for example almost 5 years ago to the day, Sean McCoy proposed it (along with an interesting idea of structuring deduction for the players).

But we also need something that encourages players to consider ending their time at the crime scene early - something that makes “we’ve got enough to work with” the cue for the next scene more than “we have wrung every possible piece of information from this place and its inhabitants”.

And as a bonus, ending scenes earlier saves time at the table (always at a premium).

A Mechanical Proposal

The Insight Pool

The players have a shared pool of insight, represented by tokens. When the players take on a case add insight to the pool (1 insight per player). 

Players add insight when they deliberately make their investigation more obvious, personal or otherwise complicated. Examples:

• You ransack the room as you search it, even though this will make it obvious that you’ve been here. 

• You know someone with specialist knowledge - but they are an academic rival who despises you. 

• You realise the victim pulled you out of a bar fight years ago, time to repay an old debt.

1 Insight can be spent to ask the GM “is there information we missed that would be helpful here?” If the GM cannot offer anything useful, your Insight is not spent and is instead returned to the pool.

(Note: I suspect Insight can be used to boost skill rolls or equivalent as well, representing the additional motivation of the complications pushing the players to dramatic success. Plus it prevents a pool of tokens hanging around uselessly when you already know whodunnit but you need to act on the information and bring them to justice or the nearest equivalent). 

The Pressure Pool

The referee adds to the pressure pool when the players exhaust a line of inquiry or otherwise fail to learn new information - be that from skill rolls or simply from interacting with the fictional space. 

(Note: Failures from non-investigative skill rolls do not add to the pool - they have their own consequences.)

The GM can spend:

2 pressure: remove 1 insight or amplify an obstacle (see examples below)

• The Chief is on your back about questioning the Mayor’s Son - leave the kid alone or your ass is on the line

• Even though you know he didn’t do it, the person arrested for the crime starts bragging for the notoriety - and the citizens want a swift hanging

• Venris the Bloody is tired of your words and turning over of stones. A trial by ordeal shall settle this matter in front of the Gods.

Two metacurrencies!? In this economy!? My original thinking was to do Pressure with a Blades in the Dark style clock (or the Brindlewood Keeper moves mentioned earlier), but I think tokens give the referee more flexibility to choose when they deploy them, whilst the 2:1 exchange means players can’t ever be sure they’ll have all their Insight to spend (and encourages them to keep the pool low).

The intention is to make players hold off on scrutinising every detail and generate those “information flashbacks” that are so common in the third act of crime dramas. Note that it still has to be information that the players could have encountered - we assume a failed roll in the past means they glossed over a detail that now becomes relevant. And it’s a shared pool since it should be a group decision to ask for a hint.

The “amplify an obstacle” phrasing also ties into the Blorb principle. Rather than “introduce a new twist/plot element” we build on the established setting - it could even be specifically detailed in advance as part of the Referee’s prep. The additional entanglements and complications are then shifted more onto the players - either to gain insight or as specific consequences for non-investigation rolls.

So there you have it - in the New Year I’ll be attaching this to a basic skill engine (perhaps 24XX) and sending players on some low fantasy mysteries. I’m thinking “Inverted Lies of Locke Lamora” - a group of truth seekers and vigilantes working in a loose hierarchy to determine what justice looks like for them and the people the so-called “law” of the city doesn’t care about.

December 7, 2023