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Mothership is a growing crack in the astronaut’s helmet. It’s distress beacons; escape pods; something crawling in the air ducts; hull breaches; crash sites; murderbots; I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.
It’s a tabletop roleplaying game designed like some slick proprietary software on a retro console display. It’s a game that plays like a soundtrack that comes in just at the right moment with a rising note of dread. It’s dead end jobs strewn across the cosmos, with the emphasis on dead. Survive. Solve. Save. You can only pick one.
You can judge a game about staying alive (or not) by how it deals with death. This one rule sums up Mothership for me.
Section 29.2: Death.
If your death seems imminent, make your last moments count: save someone’s life, solve an important mystery, give the others time to escape.
When you die, the Warden makes a Death Save by placing 1d10 in a cup, shaking the cup, and placing it face down on the table (covering the die). As soon as someone spends a turn checking your vitals, the die is revealed and the roll is looked up on the Death Table below. Use common sense.
- 00: You are unconscious. You wake up in 2d10 minutes. Reduce your Maximum Health by 1d5.
- 01-02: You are unconscious and dying. You die in 1d5 rounds without intervention.
- 03-04: You are comatose. Only extraordinary measures can return you to the waking world.
- 05-09: You have died. Roll up a new character.
Characteristically, Mothership offers the player advice and it re-emphasises the mantra of compromise at the heart of its play style: survive or solve or save. ‘Or’. Not ‘and’.
The Death Save is a 50% chance of straight up death. No hesitation, no niceties, move on. There’s a 20% chance you become an unresponsive burden on the party. The odds emphasise Mothership’s fundamental lethality.
But the real juice here is how the Death Save is performed. The roll is made and the character’s fate sits there waiting to be revealed. By and large the traditional mode of roleplaying sees the GM as this omnipotent arbiter, the one who has the information and dispenses it in homeopathic doses. The flow of control and surprise generally moves in one direction. But here, the player and the GM are on equal footing, and it speaks of a game that a) treats the GM like another player, and b) values tension. This tension hits different.
And it’s absolutely on theme. That single, unseen roll is leaving the airlock with a snag in your vacsuit, the tampered trajectory that leads straight through the asteroid belt, the stolen pulse rifle from the armoury. The damage is already done, you just don’t know it yet.