Character Moments for Mothership

We’ve got some character-developing moments for Mothership today, but first:

TCTC is over! Long live TCTC!

Oh, we had a little fun this weekend. Gabriel was helping out at the Compose Dream Games booth, telling folks about the Canada Roles Awards. Yours truly ran Nirvana on Fire for Mothership, Seven Sealed Spirits for Knave, and Little House on the Blood Prairie! I’ll probably do a more detailed breakdown of that last one later (I’ve run it thrice!) but for today, I’m thinking about Mothership.

I had a great talk with Dave Kenney, the writer of Nirvana on Fire, at the Con. He was a little surprised I managed to jam a week in space, plus a foray to the black clone dome, plus some town time with the abbot, plus the full chaos of the terraforming tower into a four-hour sesh. That’s efficency bay-bee!

Still, I’d love to run the module at a more leisurely pace sometime soon. It went off like a hot damn at the con; I’m not sure I’ve had a more satisfying conclusion to a Mothership module yet. The Marine, Teamster, and Scientist gave their lives to reboot the AI, just as the McGuffin finished 3d printing. The Android and the second Teamster knew none of this; they were to busy pressing their fusion drive up against the AI core from outside the station, using the opportunity to blow a hole in the whole station.

Half of them survived!

But enough play report. Let’s talk about letting those Mothership moments breathe a bit in longer play.

Slow Mothership Moments

From the moment your Mothership crew pops out of their cryopods, they’re looking at a week of cryosickness. In other words? Disadvantage on everything. Sure, you could take a stimpack to counteract the effects, but let’s be real, the company’s not going to pay for it.

When I run Mothership, I often find myself either slipping the party some stimpacks, ignoring the cryosickness rules entirely, or giving the crew a week’s worth of drifting through space, travelling from their jump point to the adventure site. 

In some cases, this works really well. Starting an Adventure like Nirvana on Fire with a slack week gives you lots of time to hit the party with Genma’s prophecies of Bishamonten. Still, it can feel artificial; you’ve got a whole week of time, and it pretty much all centres around Genma’s nightly transmissions. If you’ve got a little time to spread out in, it would be good to mix some more character-driven beats in among the insane rantings of the machine cultists.

To deliver on this pacing, here is a d10 table of shipboard scenes. These roleplay-forward scenes are meant to get the players investing in the characters in the opening scenes of the adventure. It’ll make it all the more alarming when they’re being hunted by a mass of sentient biomechanical cables later!

D10 Slow Mothership Moments

1. Who drank the last bit of coffee? What beef develops from that? What does the Android make of these chemical dependencies?
2. The Android becomes infected with adware. Who debugs them? What nonsense do they spout?
3. Gravity Plating is acting up. How do you deal with the intermittent weightlessness?
4. Someone mentions ‘the War’. How does the Marine react?
5. The crew’s Teamster begins comparing this tour of service to their last one. Is it worse? Better?
6. No one hears from the Scientist all day. What did they get obsessed with that took them away from the group?
7. The Marine temporarily misplaces their favourite gun. It just fell behind a dresser or bunk, but the Marine doesn’t know this. How do they react? Who do they think is responsible?
8. The Scientist/Android gets into an argument with the Marine/Teamster. What craziness do the less educated believe? What real-life experience does the know-it-all lack?
9. The Android starts mimicking some minor human behaviour. What routine are they aping? How does the crew react?
10. The Crew plays Dungeons and Dragons to kill some time. What classes do everyone play? Who’s the DM?

Hey, you made it to the end of the blog post! Did you like it? We have more. I’ve got some Mothership Microreviews, a fantasy version of these slow moments, or a discussion of last TCTC. Check them out, if you’ve got some time.