Mothership

 

Mothership

Or, more specifically Mothership Player's Survival Guide is. the 44 page zine format release, not the subsequent and more lavish v1. I ordered Mothership and a number of "supplements" on a whim in early 2023, and didn't even read it until late 2024. I was throwing together an impromptu RPG session during the winter break for my son and a couple of friends, and Mothership felt like a good choice. And indeed it was. There are three things I clearly loved about it: 

• its brevity: everything you need is contained in the 44 pages of the core zine, and then some. In fact, I didn't even touch the starship rules, and many of the random tables were not needed for my game, but look full of good ideas and flavour; 
• its design: the book and the various tools (character sheet, etc.) are really thought through to make everything the players or GM need available to them without having to look it up. My only minor gripe is the lack of a flowchart to explain stress and panic, and I feel I may need to read that again; 
• its fit for purpose-ness: one could also call this its system-matters-ness. Mothership is designed to emulate Space Horror stories a la original Alien, and delivers exactly what's on the label with not needless complications and no excessive fluff. 

As a tool for one-shots, it's really perfect. I will undoubtedly use it again. I ran Ypsilon 14 which is so short that I won't review it separately, but apart from one small element that felt contrived to me, this short adventure is perfect for one shots and again, in the short one-pager folded in three you have everything you need. 

I do feel that there's potential there for longer play, but that possibly Mothership as it is isn't as well suited to campaign play as I would like. I'm now thinking of possibly blending Mothership and Orbital Blues, whose system felt a bit bland but had a kickass character backstory creation process.