Our cyberpunk campaign has reached a season finale and as such needs the full group present for the next session, this meant that we ended up having enough players to play but not enough for cyberpunk.
Fortunately I’ve still got a huge stack of Mothership modules that I’ve yet to run, so we played Helium Hysteria from the Hull Breach anthology. Additionally for the first time we played using the Mothership system, instead of Alien TRPG or my sci fi home brew.
Helium Hysteria is a fun concept. Marines in training on an isolated moon are involved in a disaster that threatens the base, all while everyone is questioning whether they’ve been exposed to psychosis inducing helium. There’s a really nice “solve” aspect to this, unfortunately I can’t go into details without spoilers.
The module itself is pretty well laid out and stocked with flavourful NPCs and random tables. I didn’t find we needed all of the NPCs in the end, but they helped give me ideas for the kind of characters the party would meet.
My players did a great job of leaning into the horror vibes, with some hilarious role playing of their descent into madness. In the end they managed to both solve and survive (though with one comatose party member).
One thing I did have to tweak though was the reactor fire/explosion. I couldn’t think of a satisfactory reason why the reactor exploding wouldn’t just instantly destroy the base.
Definitely worth running as a quick and frantic one shot - though if you want to get it done in one evening you’ll probably want to pre-gen characters and hand them out.
If you’re interested in more work work from the same author (David Kenny) you can check them out on itch.
This section isn’t going to be a full in depth review of Mothership, partly due to time and partly because I want to run a few more sessions.
The system did its thing and got straight out of the way, letting us enjoy the sci fi horror movie experience. The mechanics are generally simple and easy to understand and when you do roll the dice feel impactful.
As most people have said the stress system really is the ticking heart of Mothership and I think that for my players watching that number go up really helped them get into the headspace of their panicking characters.
We used foundry for this and the mosh system was very slick. Incidentally I’ve swapped to hosting with sqyre - the people who run it are awesome and I really recommend them as hosts, maybe more on that in future.
I’ve been hesitant to run Mothership for quite a while, mostly because I viewed the damage mechanics as clunky and complex. This turned out to be a correct observation as the combination of rolling combat checks and then rolling damage led to a lot of GM fiat and work in order to make combat quick and each dice roll mean something.
Mothership stresses that dice rolls should be minimal and that combat should be deadly, but when a pistol does an average of 6.5 damage before armour and PCs have 11-20HP (and then wounds on top of this), regular combat can seem a bit meh. It’s even worse if the players are shooting at NPCs as even though I gave each only 10HP there were several cases where a combat check was passed and only did an inconsequential amount of damage. This left me scrambling to find some other benefit to give the players from their successful roll. You could perhaps solve this by asking players for objectives before rolls, but it’ll still fall down if their objective is “kill the guy with the gun”.
Though the above seems like a rant, in reality it was a small thing only really visible to me as the GM. My players didn’t mind the extra roll for damage and I managed to come up with good enough alternate benefits when they rolled low. I can’t help but feel that the player facing combat rolls in Mothership don’t mesh super well with the damage mechanics. Blades in the Dark certainly did them better and I think that’s largely down to the more free form nature of its combat.
Gripes about the damage/combat mechanics aside, Mothership is a slick and fun system. It has just enough mechanics aimed at addressing just the right things. Combining that with the production quality and aesthetics of the rules and it’s a clear winner. On top of that the module support is out of this world. There’s over a hundred well written modules you can pick up and play right now which makes this a dream for GMs with time constraints.
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Our cyberpunk campaign has reached a season finale and as such needs the full group present for the next session, this meant that we ended up having enough players to play but not enough for cyberpunk.
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