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:
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.
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.