#Mothership RPG

[chrisairgames]

When in Rome

Right, so I write for Mothership RPG, yeah?

It was basically a professional obligation for me to go see Alien: Romulus on its opening weekend.

Short review: Cool. Though I wish directors would make a new alien horror movie instead of new Alien movies.

Lemme tell ya, I might have designer brain disease, but this movie really is a series of problems for a sci-fi adventure, haha. My favorite thing about this movie was the smart, player-skill level problem solving the characters came up with. I was actually impressed. The film made me want to put my friends through the same ringer, and write up a similar scenario.

So I did.

When in Rome is a 20pg Mothership RPG adventure module with two player handouts, obviously heavily inspired by Alien: Romulus. I started last weekend, and released it yesterday. (What’s wrong with me, right?). That is: writing, playtesting, Mothership 3pp approval, peer review (thanks Josh Domanski, Christian Sorrell, Iko and Allen Hall!), hiring Brandon Yu “Chaoclypse” for the sick art, revising and putting into layout.

So yeah, this module is basically an adaptation of the film, but it does have some very notable (read: legally distinct) differences.

It's free for the next five hours, and I would love to hear what you think, and how your PCs fare on Caesar/Augustus.

Click here to download the module on itch.io. Note that I’m still working on the plaintext file and VTT asset updates. I would love to hear what you think, and how your players’ crews fare on Caesar/Augustus.

Good luck.

[anim-ttrpgs]

I'd love to know what some of the team's favourite indie ttrpgs are (apart from Eureka, of course. Otherwise, it'd be at the top of the list, I expect.)

Yes of course Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, but for non-Eureka indie and small-press games, here are a few of the team's answers

@sirobvious:

Mothership. Hands-down.

@chaospyromancy:

mork borg

@ashweather:

Ash's Picks (AKA the "get more literate in the medium" pack) (Most of these are small- or medium-press not strictly indie but ya know)

Burning Wheel Seventh Sea (1st edition) Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok Mothership Don't Rest Your Head Troika! Hillfolk (aka DramaSystem) Savage Worlds Masks

@theblackwarden:

A Dirty World PATROL: The Trench Raiders Triangle Agency Paranoia Mothership A World of Dew

[norgad-art]

DEAD WEIGHT, my new module for Mothership RPG, is live on Kickstarter now!!

[popfizzles]

i deal with upsetting circumstances with humor

[original]

[christiansorrell]

Cloud Empress Rulebook FOR FREE!

Several months ago, I did development work on Cloud Empress, a standalone, Nausicaa-inspired TTRPG by worlds of watt. It's full, beautiful rulebook recently went up on DriveThruRPG FOR FREE so I think folks should check it out. I'm really proud to have taken part in the project and think the end result is tremendous! Plus, there's so much more coming for it in the near future!

Get your copy HERE!

[lil-tachyon]

Armed guards oversee crowds in the streets outside of the Baronial Palace.

Interior art for Tide World of Mani, the long-awaited sequel to Desert Moon of Karth by Joel Hines. Crowdfunding starts soon so bookmark the kickstarter here!

[sootchild]

Playing a special spooky session of the TTRPG Mothership. I am a Teamster named Vivian "Viv". I hope I don't die on this research ship that is over taken by super powered teens. One of which really really loves to collect people's arms. 😱

[tabletoprpgenjoyer]

Every horror TTRPG should start making their monster stat/lore books in the same way as Mothership. "Here is a collection of sci-fi horror flash fiction that will genuinely creep you out while you're reading. Now make your players face these horrors. Have fun!"

[peregrine-coast]

Milk Bar: sci-fi OSR roleplaying in post-Communist Poland

Bełchatów exemplifies what the paypigs called Total Fucking Vertical Integration. They dug out coal from a hole in the ground 300m deep and 10km across, wheeled it 17km across a field, and burned it to produce 50TWh of energy a year. The city, this city, sprang up around it to keep those functions and those conveyor belts alive at any cost; total fucking vertical integration.

Eventually, the coal ran out. The Soviets found a more lucrative source of energy in the south and they would wheel it back here to justify keeping hundreds of thousands of people in the middle of nowhere. An explosion at the plant sent them reeling, leaving only you—the Communards—to pick up the pieces. 

🧑‍🔬sci-fi OSR roleplaying in the vein of Cairn and Mothership 🇵🇱 set in an alternate timeline, post-Soviet Communist Poland 🏠 unique progression system tied to basebuilding 🥟 pierogi

Coming soon! Follow the project on Kickstarter to get updates 👀

[whydotheit]

I love when TTRPGs give completely useless definitions or rulings for their own rules, and instead choose to produce pure vibes.

For example, here is Cloud Empress' definition for the "Dance" skill. Mind you, they're not all like this. Every other skill is a definition of the skill, including a use or two beyond the obvious. Only the dance skill is like this.

[anim-ttrpgs]

Re-Introducing the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club & FAQ

Alright, so, we have this discord server called the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. A discord server, run by the A.N.I.M. Team, for reading, analyzing, and playing TTRPGs. It’s free to join, and at the time of writing this it has a community of nearly 200 members.

Also at the time of writing this, for a limited time, you can get a FREE PDF of the July 11th update of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy just by joining the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club! This is a huge upgrade over the free May 10th version!

Here’s how the book club operates:

Nominations. Members nominate RPGs they wanna play.

Voting. After we finish the current RPG, we vote on what the next one will be. You can vote for as many nominations as you want, and nominations with the most votes wins.

Reading. We encourage you to buy the winning game to support the developers, but if you can’t for any reason, we will find a way to get you a PDF. A rough deadline is set that will allow everyone to read the rulebook at a rate of about 10 pages a day, though reading faster or slower is okay.

Playing. We assign GMs on a volunteer basis, and players are assigned to groups with GMs based on schedule compatibility. Each group plays the same adventure module, so each group will have commonalities in their adventure that they can talk about and compare their experiences with, even with different GMs, players, and characters.

Repeat. Voting begins anew with the nominations that we have accumulated in the mean time.

A.N.I.M.’s current Patreon goal is also tied to the Book Club. If y’all can raise our Patreon income to $310/month, that will allow us to set aside manpower to carve out and organize a small additional space within the ANIM TTRPG Book Club server for other games which do not fit the nomination criteria for the main book club! At the time of writing this, it sits at $259/$310. Signing up to the patreon grants you access to monthly rulebook updates as we continue to finish the game, adventure modules, short fiction, and our patreon discord server.

Below is a bit of an FAQ as an attempt to quell any concerns or hesitations

“The Book Club games probably don’t fit with my schedule.”

They might! Because we assign multiple different groups based on schedule compatibility, the book club games are actually very very schedule-flexible! You might be surprised!

And if they still don’t, even just reading the rulebook and joining in on discussions is a valuable form of participation!

“I’m afraid to play with strangers.”

They won’t exactly be strangers if you hang out around them in the book club long enough! Yes we do get what you mean, but there’s nothing to worry about. The A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club is a safe community, and we have rules and, more importantly, procedures designed to make playing with relative strangers as smooth an experience as it can be!

“What if I don’t like the RPG that wins the vote?”

While we encourage you to step a little out of your comfort zone, participation in any given round of the book club is not mandatory, there’s no punishment for sitting out! It’s cool to just hang around in the discord server and discuss virtually anything if you want to.

Elegantly designed and thoroughly playtested, Eureka represents the culmination of three years of near-daily work from our team, as well as a lot of our own money. If you’re just now reading this and learning about Eureka for the first time, you missed the crowdfunding window unfortunately, but our Kickstarter page is still the best place to learn more about what Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy actually is, as that is where we have all the fancy art assets, the animated trailer, links to video reviews by podcasts and youtubers, and where we post regular updates on the status of our progress finishing the game and getting it ready for final release.

Beta Copies through the Patreon

If you want more than just status updates, going forward you can download regularly updated playable beta versions of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy and it’s adventure modules by subscribing to our Patreon at the $5 tier or higher. Subscribing to our patreon also grants you access to our patreon discord server where you can talk to us directly and offer valuable feedback on our progress and projects.

The A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club

If you would like to meet the A.N.I.M. team and even have a chance to play Eureka with us, you can join the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club discord server. It’s also just a great place to talk and discuss TTRPGs, so there is no schedule obligation, but the main purpose of it is to nominate, vote on, then read, discuss, and play different indie TTRPGs. We put playgroups together based on scheduling compatibility, so it’s all extremely flexible. This is a free discord server, separate from our patreon exclusive one. https://discord.gg/7jdP8FBPes

Other Stuff

We also have a ko-fi and merchandise if you just wanna give us more money for any reason.

We hope to see you there, and that you will help our dreams come true and launch our careers as indie TTRPG developers with a bang by getting us to our base goal and blowing those stretch goals out of the water, and fight back against WotC's monopoly on the entire hobby. Wish us luck.

[bionicle-necron]

LETS GOO ITS HERE

I AM SO READY TO DIE IN SPACE

EXPERIENCE HORRORS BEYOND MY COMPREHENSION

BE TORN APART BY LIFE NOT YET SEEN

QUESTION MY OWN HUMANITY

[pawseds]

Sloane Mallory Croix is a Nobody.

Sloane is a nobody. She was born in Belgium to her immigrant Congolese parents, then was uprooted at 14 when her family moved to the US. Always on the move, she never found a home and never found herself. She had nowhere to root her identity in except one constant in her life: nature. Whether it was a marsh behind a parking lot, the weeds beside a playground, or an old tree in the backyard, there was always a little ecosystem with plants and critters to be found. No matter where she was, they were always there, and they were always there for her. The second constant in her life was the emptiness of never being at home, and of never being oneself -- you can't be what you don't know. And since nature was all she knew, nature was all she pursued until she obtained her PhD. But despite her passion, all it got her was a dead-end research job that was more underfunded by the year until it was fully cut. Jobless, her parents began nagging about how she, someone who was supposed to be a fully functioning adult by now, couldn't keep secluding herself in her own world and ecosystems forever. They told her she needed to find a job even if she hated it, that she needed to ground herself in reality. Sloane's answer to her parents' pleas came from the stars. Project MORPHO was the perfect opportunity for Sloane: researching brand new ecosystems and securing artificial, terraformed ecosystem on a distant planet far, far away from what never was home was perfect. The project became her third constant, and she sunk her roots deep into it. She did everything she could to meet Hartwell Corp's qualifications, spending months and months on specialised training. For the first time, she felt true excitement. The loneliness she endured, the emptiness she carried, the diligence behind her degrees: it all would have finally been worth something. And maybe this time, she could start anew. Maybe this time, she could finally start living. Until she wakes up too late 300 years later.

I joined a Mothership RPG westmarches that started this morning at 7am, and I had to rush like hell to come up with a character because I've been so busy. So here's Sloane! She's extremely Southern Cross inspired. This was rushed but I'll work on her design slowly over time (1 year campaign and all)

[technicalgrimoire]

We got to play Cloud Empress last night!

It's a Nausicaa inspired gritty adventure through a dangerous world. I feel like we're just scratching the surface.

Excited for our next adventure!

[kurakuh3do]

This is my mercenary named Erika Meyer for a Mothership campaign with friends.

A mission that went FUBAR causing her contract's termination with the mercenary organisation she worked on, she became a freelance gun for hire until she met a Captain and his crew..

[chrisairgames]

Who's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Scoundrel?

So I'm a massive sf-lit nerd, and I'd love to dig into y'all's favorite sci-fi scoundrels! I'll start with perhaps the 2nd most obvious: Mal Reynolds from Firefly.

I recently learned that the show was directly inspired by Classic Traveller! You can read "the evidence" on Sci-Fi Stack Exchange, here.

So what is this all about?

Not Enough Scoundrels. My new Mothership RPG supplement of smugglers, space truckers and the space ships they live and die by.

Launching for Mothership Month.

This zine contains a framework for a space trucker campaign featuring a simple spacecrawl procedure that's totally compatible with the Shipbreaker's Toolkit.

For each Fuel spent, roll for a 1d100 Void Event.

Upon arrival a space station, roll for a 1d100 Trade Event.

If relevant, make a Trade Save and roll on the Supply & Demand table.

Inspired by sci-fi smuggling truckers, from the Nostromo crew to Serenity, and the Bebop to the Millennium Falcon, the space trucker campaign sets up a challenge to win a massive contract that takes PCs all over the Outer Rim, meet a web of nasty 1d100 Scoundrels and carry the 1d100 Contraband that lands them in trouble.

As the campaign trucks along (har har), I'll be doing a tournament style poll between the Favorite Scoundrels that people mention here and elsewhere!

Follow along with Not Enough Scoundrels on BackerKit