MOTHERTEETH: IN SPACE, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU PUBLISH TOO MUCH INDIE RPG MATERIAL
Hello, you.
Apologies for the delay in this week’s newsletter, I had the exciting opportunity over the weekend to accidentally brick the motherboard of my work PC, destroying any and all progress I had intended to make this week. So that was deeply galling. Needless to type, my computer has been returned to the lands of the living by the arrival of a newer, more innocent motherboard. We pray for its future.
ANYWAY: last week saw the arrival of our assassins-go-to-the-ball standalone adventure BLOOD COTILLION, which seems to have gone down rather well! We’re thrilled. If you haven’t yet seen that or NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN, then please do pick them up and let us know what you think. A few people have commented that “one shot” probably doesn’t accurate describe the amount of material therein, and they are correct. BLOOD COTILLION possibly a two-shot, so apologies for that specific marketing ambiguity only.
The link man cometh!
LINKS
THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH caught our eye this week. And having been watching THE TERROR, we’re very much in an arctic sort of mood. Although this is antarctic, which is the opposite, while also being exactly the same: “The Last Place on Earth is a tabletop role playing game inspired by the Heroic Age of Exploration and by Robert F. Scott’s fatal 1912 expedition to the South Pole. It’s a game about the hardships of Antarctic exploration and the arrogance of men who believe that they can and must conquer the natural world.”
Here’s another pleasing thing: RIPE. “An RPG of Elder Adventurers fighting against the Harvest. When you turn 70... Your Harvester emerges from the skies to take you away. If you manage to kill your Harvester it comes back next year even stronger than before. You can’t do this alone.”
Oh, and we’re obviously deeply into horror wilderness entertainments, so this Kickstarted reprint is right down our seldom-trod goat-track.
While you’re in a crowd-funding mood, do take a look at Chris Bissette’s latest: Treasures Of The Troll King. It’s a MÖRK BORG adventure, but compatible with other swordy systems, as I understand it. We’ve not played the big MB yet, but as regular readers will know, we’re huge fans of umlauts, so it seems inevitable.
Research this week led us to the lost medieval nation of The Kingdom Of The Isles, which sounds like the fantasy land you made as a kid, but is actually an independent Scottish country which existed for several centuries. Okay, so that’s not our usual weird or grotesque research, but we have to have a gentle week sometimes.
Not much to say about TEETH this week, except this piece of art.
And now here comes Marsh to talk about MOTHERSHIP, which we’ve been playing with our Monday night crew for the past few weeks. I’ll follow up (but not interrupt) with brief commentary! -jim
MOTHERSHIP
There are a few TTRPG settings and rulesets floating around at the moment that are meant to evoke the sort of blue collar space horror of Alien or the celestial nightmare of Event Horizon. There's Mothership, Death In Space, the official Alien RPG, and at least a couple of others I have conflated with these or forgotten. In these settings, pointedly ordinary men and women venture into the lonely vacuum on interstellar jalopies, at the behest of uncaring corps, encountering things beyond human reason, and, often, dying horribly as a result.
I am into it - up to a point.
I'm a huge admirer of Alien - not just the film, but the entire kitchen-sink-in-space aesthetic of it. The believable, overlapping patter of the characters, the immediately recognisable mundane humanity of their actions as they endure routine, skive and cite protocol. Alien very intentionally dialled the exoticism of its setting back, grounding the near-ish-future setting like little else within its own franchise, let alone in science-fiction more broadly.
But these trappings feel, to me, quite apart from Event Horizon's bad space-magic. Alien's peril is rooted in unknowable alien biology - with, among other things, its terrible parody of human birth - and while it is found in the husk of near-mystical alien technology, that never threatens to pitch Alien beyond the fastidiously credible, much less towards some histrionic, semi-religious revelation. Bundling these things into the same setting is a terrible mistake. Someone should tell Ridley Scott.
Which is to say that I approach a setting which advertises its support of both with some trepidation. If off-brand-Alien is to work, the stakes need to feel small, almost claustrophobic, with mechanics that evoke the blue-collar aspirations of hapless astro-berks trapped beneath a fused silica glass ceiling. If Event Horizon is to work, then the scope widens to include the entirety of Space Hell metaphysics.
Mothership doesn't quite manage this transition: the sprawl of its material ends up defocusing any one part of it. The first-party module we ran, Dead Planet, offers terrifyingly bungled salvage missions, cultish nightmares, pseudo-zombies, moon cannibals, giant crab things, flying golden skeletons and more. It would be a major challenge for any GM to find an ingenious through-line that makes sense of this material. I felt it tended towards the whackily inchoate - which I also enjoy, generally, but doesn't necessarily make good on the setting's promise. The other first-party modules, though less inchoate, do all seem to blur the boundaries between hard-sci-fi and cosmic mysticism. It's not quite what I'm after.
But, perhaps more importantly, the mechanisms behind it didn't entirely come together for me.
The character generation is interesting: it spits out absolutely useless pieces of shit. That's totally fitting for a setting like Alien in which characters may easily be flawed mediocrities, or indeed worse. But for a long time in our multi-session campaign, there was no action I could take which had a better than 50% chance of success. Most actions were way lower. I don't particularly want to be some sort of superman in roleplaying games, but if my character simply cannot act upon my agency as a player, then there feels little point being a participant: I might as well just have Jim tell me a story. (Luckily for me, Jim is an excellent story-teller, but even so, this felt unduly frustrating and inevitable.)
Wiser roleplaying folks have suggested that we were simply rolling too much. In this, and other games that make up the Old School Revival movement, reliance on mechanics should take a backseat to the spontaneous narrative inspiration of the players and GM. Ideally we should have only been rolling in situations of extreme crisis, failing, and dying abruptly - as per the horror idiom. Instead, however, we rolled more often, at perhaps lower stakes than we should have, and so the game felt like a slow death march.
And yet, whatever our misguided instincts, the Mothership sample module nonetheless places characters in situations where a test of their skills feels unavoidable: say, in combat against multiple nightmare creatures. This figures large in the module's latter part, somewhat disregarding expectations set by the genre. It's a curious weighting, as the game suggests many non-combat specialisms for your character to take, almost none of which are likely to be tested in the sample module, and while being useless in the face of unimaginable space peril evokes the setting, it also dampened our ability to meaningfully participate.
Amusingly, things then get even worse as events takes their toll, and you roll against bewilderingly synonymous stats for Sanity, Fear and Stress at increasing disadvantage. In a neat mechanisation of Bill Paxton's meltdown in Aliens, the mental state of characters affects those around them: seeing a supposedly-fearless marine jibber in terror can make others wig-out, for example. It's a great idea, but there is a danger that it simply leads to a cascade of psychological implosions and anti-climactic player paralysis. And what then? It's game over, man. Game over.
Jim says: There’s lashings of fascinating design in this game, and I came to rather like Mothership’s systems by the end, but I have to say that juggling the terms Fear, Panic, Stress and Sanity all in one system did make me do a frown. That’s too much vectors for psychological peril! Also, it does, as Marsh mentioned, get difficult in other ways. I ended up making use of some suggested house rules from blogs such as this one, as well as doing some lovely things to make everything come to a horrifying denouement in my massaging of the panic rules. What’s most appealling to me about this setting is not, actually, the promise of an Alien-like, but that the writers have been so creative with the amazing range of first and third party modules that accompany the game. You are obligated to check it out, if you haven’t already. Honestly, it’s legally binding that you do so.
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Love you! x