[Study] Mothership
Login to your retro-futuristic terminal, lots of data could be extracted from that specimen: Bottom-up approach to world building, how to leverage "Anchored tables" or what makes a good twist.
The Delve section as proven suitable for my reading notes and the last entry is a good illustration of that, but it’s been a while I didn’t do a long-form review. The previous one was Lasers & Feelings, let’s continue in space, although this time, the color is different... the hopeful nuances of pink and blue fade in a monochrome black and white. Today we talk about Mothership.
First of, grab your free copy of Mothership, so you can follow along. It’s not required to thought, I put excerpts of the main sections I’m analyzing for convenience.
Let’s state the obvious, the player sheet usability is a great achievement. Each participant can create a character on their own while keeping the playfulness of this sequence of the game. Although, I think there is more to it, because a diagram convey an idea in itself. You may have guessed where I’m heading: this intertwined esthetic evokes an elegant design (shooter!) It gives a glimpse at the connections of every system and how they fit together. This by the way should appeal to most designers, and they happen to be the target audience for TTRPG books in general. That is what makes Mothership a good visual reference, in my opinion.
There is a clear separation between Attributes dedicated to Checks and the one to Saves. It got me thinking about the key differences between the two, namely, who initiate them. Checks are chosen by players, while Saves are imposed by the GM, which also implies a distinct purpose in the design. Having multiple kind of Check opportunities is desirable to encourage player agency. On the other hand, Saves are sinks for resources, increasing the tension in a way that feels fair. It makes it a great fit for Mothership that puts emphasis on the stress gauge that generate various effects as it fills up.
As mentioned in my article on Attributes, I’d rather avoid passive stats. I prefer exposing a clear threat and let players chose their poison (understand sinking their resources by themselves). In a following conversation to that article, someone raised that even if you are not actively bringing the roll, saves capability shape your actions in the fiction (e.g., I have enough willpower so, I’m confident to enter this dark and scary cave). That is certainly a mitigation but, the interpretation required by the participants is complex. There is a lot of room for incomprehension of whether they put themselves in the situation they were hoping for.
Next stop, initiative. It’s a crucial pattern for a lethal game, because who acts first, might hit first, and impair the opponent before they have a chance to do anything themselves. The system uses 2 Checks and ordering of result, which might feel too convoluted in another setting. Although, I think it as its place here, with the rolls building tension and dictating the approach.
I’m still warping my head around how to avoid relaying on a turn-based structure (if anyone as successful references, please share them). If I can’t make it work, I would probably craft something similar in my own game.
The mercenaries tend to be a bit too archetypical for my taste, even though I know it's through play that nuances appears. That being said, I want to emphasize the "Hitchhiker" (an NPC that looks for a lift and then head his own way). To get a spot, they would probably have to pretend to be useful to the crew somehow. It makes for a good twist when you reveal they are absolutely not up to whatever task and just try to run away.
To extract a general rule here, I think that providing a secret for each NPC is a recommended practice to make surprising narrative emerge from your play.
Time to get to the meat of it with the “Panic Check,” which is probably the most central system. Let me summarize it first:
Each Player character stress rises during play (dictated by fictional events)
Every time, the players are making a stress check:
On success, they reduce the stress by 1
On failure, they roll on the panic table.
The panic table is a “anchored table” constraint by the stress value. This means that the table can progress during play and tell a story. For instance, in Mothership, it starts by providing epic bonuses like “Adrenaline rush” then, fictional modifier as the “Hallucinations”, and finishes with “Instant death.” That’s the core arc that will eventually emerge from all Mothership game. The skeleton on top of which, the muscles would be player actions and the skin, the specific module you are using.
I’m cooking another article to share various flavors of anchored tables that exist. In the meantime, let me try to extract a workflow from this example:
First, you need to identify a critical parameter that generates a whole range of interesting states. In this case, the stress, that is too often a pure downside. Although, it's made more varied by taking into account that it’s supposed to be a physiologic response, increasing your chances of survival. (Which sometimes feels outdated in our current context… higher heartbeat rate and tunnel vision are not helping me to give this speech!)
You then need to consider the narrative arc it produces. As mention above, since the stress is meant to increase during play, there is a starting point and a directionality to that table that makes for a specific succession of beats. This one would be “the fall,” getting worse as the story progresses. It would be the narrative structure of a tragedy if there wasn’t another critical variable: when the scenario ends. It may happen at any point of that table and dictates the direction of the closure. The suspense it provides is key, because you don’t know until it happens if you are making a story about “Escaping at the last minute” or its counterpart “They almost got away…”
Finally, always try to simplify (make it more Elegant). Here, there are two successive checks: Stress then Panic. Although, it could be solidified in one single table. It would just require extra entries reliving stress scattered through it. Many at the beginning, then more and more sparsely as the stress increases.
Mothership as definitely a bottom-up approach to the setting. It gives details about many things, informing a mental map from which you can derive ideas. For example, you could easily extrapolate an event just by reading the “Class” and “Notes” sections of a randomly selected ship. Note that it would be even more usable if the entries were numbered.
The book is also providing lots of numbers to anchor your estimate (cost, fuel consumption, ...). Here, again, the usability could be improved by giving a condensed view of those references on one page.
Continuing on the ships, the critical hit table as a lot of great entry, but the last one especially caught my attention:
99 Fuel Line: Ship destroyed in 1d10 turns
Telegraphed fatality is an efficient twist because you can't bargain around it. Whatever your plan was to that point, you now have a new, clear objective. I think it would work better as an anchored table, however. A bit more randomness control would help to avoid the feeling of a deus ex machina.
That’s it for the core book, but certainly not for the franchise. One of the strengths of Mothership is to drive a lot of great modules with its well-defined identity. For the regular readers, you know which one got me the most excited... Pamphlet adventures !!
In the meantime, if you are already convinced, you can pre-order the full package here.
