Mothership: Player’s Survival Guide by Sean McCoy is a role playing game supplement published by Tuesday Night Games. This is essentially the core rulebook for Mothership, a sci-fi horror RPG stated to currently be in beta.
The supplement is available as a 44 page Pay What You Want PDF from DriveThruRPG. One page is the front cover and one the Contents.
Character Creation explains how to create a character. There are four classes; Teamsters, Androids, Scientists and Marines. Different classes handle Stress and Panic differently. Characters also begin with a loadout, trinket and patch. An example of a completed character sheet follows. Character creation is comparatively easy, though other sections need referring to.
Dice, Stat Checks, Advantage & Disadvantage is the fundamentals of the game. The system is d10 based and it can use a lot of them. The three types of roll are xd10, xd10 underlined which multiplies by 10 and d%. There are crtical hits and failures, which are when doubles are rolled on d%.
Skills has a list of the different skills, with Trained, Expert and Master skills. Anything beyond Trained needs a lower level skill to be acquired first to unlock it.
Saves covers the saving throws; Sanity, Fear, Body and Armour.
Survival covers what’s needed to survive, including Crisis Checks, food & water, oxygen and money. Everything costs money and ships are really expensive.
Combat covers the combat sequence, including such as surprise, turns, attacking, other actions, cover and movement.
Hit Location, Damage, Healing Death is pretty self-explanatory, and it also includes a way of determining hit locations, if needed.
Weapons starts off with ammunition and how to track it. Range, reloading and automatic fire are next, along with special weapon abilities. This is followed by various illustrated guns.
Armor has four types of armour described.
Equipment has a list of equipment and its costs, followed by two d100 tables of trinkets and patches.
Hiring Mercenaries starts with covering their stats, how mercenaries can level up and the cost of different types. A d10 table of Scum lists mercenaries you can hire if no-one decent will work for you and there is a table of mercenary motivations.
Stress is on how this is gained and relieved and leads into Panic & Resolve. Panic can have an effect, and often a lasting one.
Space Travel, Hyperspace is on jump drives.
Basic Ship Classes has a table of different ships with details. This is followed by an example of ship creation.
Ship Design then covers ship creation in detail, including the different modules.
Ship-to-Ship Combat covers combat between ships.
Finally, Experience Points covers gaining these and levelling up.
There are also a number of reference pages; weapons, ship construction, ship design, player’s cheat sheet and two for the character sheet.
Mothership: Player’s Survival Guide in Review
The PDF lacks bookmarks and is long enough that these would have been useful. The Contents is reasonably thorough but lacks hyperlinks. Throughout the text are references to different sections to lookup for reference; sadly, these aren’t hyperlinked either. Navigation is quite poor. The text maintains a two-column black and white format (in some cases, white on black text; a nightmare to print) and appeared to be free of errors. There are a lot of illustrations, all custom by the looks of it. Presentation is good.
This is a comparatively simple game to learn, as the underlying system isn’t too complex. Not huge amounts of skills, simple classes, pretty simple rolls for everything. Though if you lack a bucket of d10s, it might be tricky playing it. Characters are quite fragile and intentionally so; this is supposed to be a horror game. Entering into combat can turn quite lethal, quite quickly. Combat is best avoided if at all possible.
Though this is technically all that’s needed to run the game, it is a player’s guide which means it lacks a lot of the GM stuff. There’s no advice on how to create monsters or adventures, nor is there any real advice on creating a horror feel. This is not quite standalone, though it’s unclear what else might be needed, as most of the other supplements are adventures. However, the game is interesting and it’s not as if you have to pay for it before you can check it out. Mothership: Player’s Survival Guide can be found by clicking here.
Leave a Reply