In the interest of playing more games I decided to offer to run a session of the Mothership RPG for a few colleagues… and it’s turned out to be a success so far. Four sessions in we’ve run the Haunting of Ypsilon 14 and nearly all of Another Bug Hunt (ABH).
I’ve been pretty keen to run ABH for a while as it just seems like classic sci fi fun. So far its not disappointed with plenty of opportunities for the player’s to explore and make choices while still keeping them moving towards a conclusion. My main criticism of the module would be the enemies:
Spoilers ahead!
There are couple of issues with the carcinids that I felt as a GM I had to work around:
Aside from that though this is great module and my players have had a ton of fun so far. Its got good pacing, there’s always something for the players to engage with and the decisions they make have weight to them. The locations are well thought out with different routes to the objective and plenty of varied challenges to overcome.
As for Mothership itself I’m getting into the groove of running the system now. The complexity of armor, hit points and wounds are feeling less onerous now I’m familiar with them. I would say that the “simultaneous combat” aspect and failing forward probably need better explanation in the rule book. Having previously run Blades in the Dark I’m comfortable coming up with “yes - but” results for failures, unfortunately this needs to be balanced with the genre demand for harsh consequences.
I’m not a big fan of GM fiat being the difference between:
And
This is again a minor gripe, and probably far less of an issue from a player perspective. I’m definitely prone to over analyzing these things and need to keep in mind that so long as everyone is having fun and the game feels fair it’s all gravy baby.
In other news my main group’s Cy_Borg campaign finally concluded the other week which means we’ll be starting a new campaign. I’m sticking with my theme of playing official systems for a while instead of home brewing so we’ll be running Pirate Borg!
mothership rpgs review
In the interest of playing more games I decided to offer to run a session of the Mothership RPG for a few colleagues… and it’s turned out to be a success so far. Four sessions in we’ve run the Haunting of Ypsilon 14 and nearly all of Another Bug Hunt (ABH).
borg rpgs worldbuilding
Over the course of my Cy_Borg inspired cyberpunk campaign I made numerous pretend social media posts, headlines, and other bits of world building. I’m posting them here for posterity and in case anyone finds them and is inspired for their own campaign.
mothership rpgs review
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.
review books
Written by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin (CoR) is an evolutionary sci fi novel set in a star system that humans had just begun terraforming before an almost complete technological collapse destroyed human civilization. It is a sequel to Children of Time but picks up some time after with a new cast of characters.
rpgs homebrew journal
In my previous post I’d started a campaign journal for a post apocalyptic setting. The first session went great, the players enjoyed it and then…