The Girl and the Game

After receiving the Mothership box set as a birthday gift earlier this year, I’ve become enamored by this amazing little game and the very cool, very active community that surrounds it. The problem with Mothership (and this is a great problem to have) is that the third party community is so robust and there are so many intriguing, interesting looking pamphlets and modules out there that it’s hard to find resources like blog posts or write-ups about how these material play.

The Mothership discord has been extremely helpful and they have an After Actions Report channel where the community shares their experiences running some of the modules. Some of these reports will also contain tips and tricks that the Warden used in their game which I really appreciate. What I’ve noticed however is that there are certain modules and pamphlets that have become staples of the community and it’s certainly not undue. The modules are usually well written, have a hook that new Wardens and vets alike can easily apply to their games, and highlight an aspect of the game – be it the sci-fi horror, exploration in space, encounters with strange and alien objects or creatures, or create a scenario for the players to either survive, save someone or something, or solve a mystery.

I also think that more is better in this context so I’m adding my own Wardening thoughts and experiences and rating the Mothership modules and pamphlets that I have run. I’ll be looking at the following criteria: How scary the module is, or Scare Factor, the ease of prep, and whether or not the module is suitable for a one-shot.

Be warned, there will be spoilers for all of the material mentioned!

Year of the Rat

The first game of Mothership I ever ran and probably the easiest of the bunch that I’ve run for a beginner Warden and player to pick up. There is also a lot of Year of the Rat play-through content online and I watched Never Wake the Bugbear’s Youtube playthrough before I ran this myself.

Year of the Rat has a straightforward premise – your players are hired by an insurance company called FlySafe to investigate a casino ship that has gone dark and need to retrieve the black box on board. There are other things at play like dead bodies of space raiders disguised as casino employees and evidence of a shoot-out on the ship. The story of what happened on the Year of the Rat slowly unfolds through exploration but like most Mothership games, you need to give your players a good reason to stay on the casino ship and explore even when shit starts to hit the fan and that’s where Secret Agendas come into play. I use Secret Agendas whenever I run a Mothership one-shot to give players more of a reason to interact with all the weird, creepy, scary, mysterious things happening around them. I think Year of the Rat is great in its simplicity but that’s also why it could use some beefing up on the player-side.

Here are some Secret Agendas I’ve used in the past:

You’ve been hired by Nakatomi Solutions. You were told “They’ve got some kind of mascot on the ship – a rare alien creature that those idiots parade around for rich drunk people to ooh and ahh over. We want to study it. Capture it and bring it to us for 500kcr.”

You owe a crime syndicate a hell of a lot of credits and you’re about to plunder this casino for all it’s worth.

Destroy the Black Box for FlySafe in case it has exonerating evidence that would result in a full payout. – Orders from FlySafe.

You’re part of the Nebula Raiders, a gang known for bold ship heists and thefts. Your goal is to rescue any fellow gang members from this failed job on the Rat without revealing who you are.

I’ve run this pamphlet three times now – twice online and once at a convention and each time I’ve noticed players will immediately switch gears from exploring to achieving the objective and getting the fuck off the ship the moment the giant gnarly rat, the Shu Ding, shows up so I would build up the suspense and hint at the presence of a giant scary monster but maybe not reveal the Shu Ding or have it attack until the players have made it further into the ship.

Year of the Rat is a solid introduction to Mothership for new players and the pamphlet is easy for a new Warden to run. You could pretty much run the pamphlet as-is. The map is easy to navigate, the art work is sick, and if the players survive, they could potentially make it off the ship with a good chunk of cash.

Scare Factor: 3.5/5, there are some good jump-scares to be had and everyone always freaks out when the Shu Ding shows up.

Ease of Prep: 5/5

Good for a One-shot: 5/5

Decagone

Decagone has become one of my favorite modules and I’ve run it twice now, once for my Sunday gaming group and once at a convention with a bunch of strangers + one player from my Sunday group who ended up playing it twice and had a wildly different experience each time. In a sea of very cool Mothership modules with a time traveling premise, Decagone is one of the more straightforward ones to run. Like Year of the Rat, it does not require much prep from the Warden though I would recommend a couple close read-throughs for yourself before you start your game.

In Decagone, the players are a crew hired as contractors to report to a deep ocean research facility. Things immediately go wrong when their elevator gets stuck. The party is prompted to figure out a way out of the elevator and can then begin exploring the research facility. There’s a lot of fun stuff to interact with as they explore – there are robotic dogs with guns for faces, an aquarium, a walkway with a laser grid that leads to a research lab, and a 4D printer that dices organic matter up into tiny pieces and reprints them. Most importantly, there is a time loop occurring and players are “reset” every 10 real life minutes and will find themselves back in the elevator.

As player characters begin experiencing these loops, I’ve had the pleasure of watching people at the table slowly descend into madness and it’s amazing. They begin to panic, to pull their hair, to go down the rabbit hole of time travel as they try to figure out what kind of time loop this is. As the game progresses, the characters’ stress also builds and in both of my games the table reaches a frenzied state toward the end where the majority of players just want to find a way out of time loop hell and, if you’re lucky, one or two twisted individuals will want to stay behind in the deep sea lab and engage further with alien artifacts and time travel.

Overall I think Decagone is a lot of fun. I like that the scariness of the module comes from the situation the PC’s find themselves in rather than a monster or enemy entity. Like Year of the Rat however, I do think Decagone benefits from having Secret Agendas. The secret notes provided in the module are a good place to start but the Never Wake the Bugbear podcast did one better and gave players very specific agendas that encouraged them to find and interact with NPCs and different parts of the research lab. I used similar agendas both times I ran Decagone to great success.

Stress Factor: 6/5

Ease of Prep: 4/5

Good for a One-shot: 5/5

Plant Based Paranoia

I’ve run PBP twice, once in person at a convention and once online. It is similar to Year of the Rat in that the PC’s are given a mission to explore a facility and extract a MacGuffin . In this case, the PC’s are responding to a distress signal from the base. As written in the pamphlet, that’s it. That is the mission. As a Warden you’ll probably want to beef the mission up a bit – require the PC’s to locate some of the head researchers in the lab and/or retrieve research data from the servers. Maybe give one of the PC’s a personal reason to want to explore the facility (do they have a family member or loved one working there? are they secretly working for a rival company who wants the facility’s data?).

When I ran PBP I found that a straightforward mission like retrieving the research data and locating some researchers was enough to keep the game moving forward. Once players start encountering the horrifying plant monster hydra and PC’s start getting snatched through air vents and being replaced with plant-based clones the Warden can ride that momentum and gently push players toward the cryo-labs and important research areas.

The PBP map crams an impressive amount of information into a very condensed space and as a result, I think there are rooms and parts of the map layout that aren’t as useful as others. For example in both sessions where I ran PBP I condensed the cryo lab and cloning facility into one room and had Plant 42 and the mainframe just beyond that room rather than having three separate rooms. From my experience, Mothership is a game that really sings when the pacing is intentional – there should be moments between creature attacks that allow PC’s to interact with each other, to explore, and to reckon with the horrors they’ve already encountered. I find that we don’t lose tension during these times but rather, we sit in it, we let it settle over us and wonder what will happen next to break the tension and whip everyone up into a frenzy again. I’ve also found that Mothership works best with a group who doesn’t always go for the “optimal” choices and don’t try to speed-run a mission. (Not saying that’s a bad way to play but it definitely changes the overall feel of the game and I think it requires the Warden to find more ways to hinder their party in order to build that sense of tension and danger.)

PBP is a good pamphlet to have in your back pocket. The twist of having players getting snatched and potentially becoming clones can be a lot of fun .

Scare Factor: 5/5

Ease of Prep: 4/5

Good for a One-shot: 5/5