Roll to Save
Three middle-aged nerds dive deep into the golden age of tabletop RPGs, covering the classics from the 80s and 90s that shaped the hobby we love today. Iain and Jason banter their way through gaming history while Steve desperately tries to keep them on topic—and occasionally succeeds.
Whether you're a grognard who lived through THAC0 or a newcomer curious about what to do with all those lovely polyhederal dice you've aquired, we've got you covered with historical deep-dives, roundtable discussions fueled by questionable nostalgia, and actual play episodes where our players' competence is... variable.
All of this released on a schedule that can charitably be called "flexible" at best.
Grab some dice and join us for a trip down memory lane—just don't ask us to commit to when the next episode will drop.
Roll to Save
Unboxing the Terrors of Space: A Deep Dive into Mothership RPG Kickstarter
Discover sci-fi horror as we unwrap the Mothership RPG Kickstarter rewards and share our candid reactions. Picture the tense corridors of "Alien" and the haunting void of "Dead Space" as we analyze the game's system, designed for hair-raising one-shot adventures. Our friend Ryan hops aboard for this interstellar discussion, comparing editions and debating the impact of components from GM screens to cardstock figures on your gameplay experience. We also delve into the community's response to the game's delays and additional costs, highlighting the patience-testing journey from pledge to play.
Navigating the oft-overlooked seas of shipping costs, we recount the tales of European backers grappling with exorbitant fees and the logistic loopholes that inflated delivery prices.
Wrapping up with a look under the hood of Mothership RPG's gameplay, we discuss the stress mechanic's ability to ratchet up tension and the strategic decisions it imposes. The rulebook's approachability for rookies and richness for veterans receives its due praise, along with GM advice on creating an enthralling atmosphere.
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HOSTS: Iain Wilson, Steve McGarrity, Jason Downey
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page).
Welcome to Roll2Save, the RPG history podcast. Mothership Kickstarter review. previously on Roll to Save, recorded in January 2022. That's over two years ago. That elapsed time will become important for what follows.
SPEAKER_02:I also backed the Mothership RPG. Me too. Still waiting for the backer fit to come in for me to give my address and everything. They're getting worried that it is going to be much later than they say that it's going to be. But I'm excited for that. I told some friends about it and kind of gave like a general concept of what it is and they seem very excited to play too. So I think I'm probably going to end up playing that one first because it's also shorter and much simpler. It's not a full set. I mean, it's a full set of rules, but it's not as complicated as 5e or anything like that. So that's pretty much the two things I've done.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, Mothership is one I'm definitely looking forward to. I love the whole space body horror setting.
SPEAKER_01:I was tempted. I didn't do it, but I was tempted.
SPEAKER_00:I'm going to go to the deluxe edition.
SPEAKER_01:Of course
SPEAKER_02:you are. I think I got the deluxe at least got the box set I was very excited about that
SPEAKER_00:but it's you know it has that whole alien vibe like the original alien it seemed
SPEAKER_01:more of a bit sort of dead space to me yeah it is
SPEAKER_00:yeah it's that kind of setting and it looks fantastic I'm excited to play it as well I think it's it's one of these settings that sets itself up nicely for one shots yeah exactly you're not supposed to live you're not doing a campaign in that you
SPEAKER_01:like games like that you seem to have a little bit of a a punch on for that kind of game
SPEAKER_00:I'm a lazy GM that's why they're writing a campaign I'll write a one off and you guys can have fun in that little box until they get bored and have you killed Oh, how optimistic we were. The Mothership RPG arrived in April 2024, and at the time of recording, it is May 2024. Hello and welcome to a special episode of A Role to Save. I have with me friend of the podcast, Ryan Mossbadger. How are you, Ryan? Hi, I'm doing all right. I
SPEAKER_02:finally got Mothership.
SPEAKER_00:finally get Mothership. That is what we are here to talk about today is Mothership because back in at the beginning of 2022 we did our 2021 year in review which I predictably released four months late but part of it was me and Ryan here getting very excited about Mothership and talking about well it's been through a rough patch but it's going to be coming soon and two years later we finally have
SPEAKER_02:it. Two years later and a$20 in shipping later
SPEAKER_00:yeah well I mean that's something we'll come on to when we talk about the Kickstarter but for those of you who don't know Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG very much in the mould of Alien but also you can really run any sort of horror sci-fi RPG it's designed to mimic the likes of Event Horizon or Dead Space or Alien or any of those other sci-fi films in that genre. At the level of the Kickstarter we backed, Ryan and I both went for the Deluxe set, which comes in a lovely box. But before we get into what's in the box and what we like about it and what we don't like about it, let's just talk a little bit about the Kickstarter itself. So, Ryan, when did you first back this Kickstarter?
SPEAKER_02:I think, I mean... I think pretty soon after it launched, it was like November, 2021. Right. Um, I think is when it launched. And I, I knew that there was like a game called mothership out there. There was like some beta rules and stuff like that. I had never played it, but I was this, I was still using Facebook at the time. And I guess the Facebook, uh, advertising algorithm was, it was locked onto me and that it showed, it showed mothership. And I was like reading through, it's like, Oh, this kind of sounds great. Cause at that time I was starting to get into other tabletop RPG I was moving away from solely doing Dungeons& Dragons. So I was like, oh, this sounds great. Sci-fi horror tabletop RPG. I love sci-fi horror. Let's get it. And at the time, too, to get the box set, it was only... I was like, oh, that seems reasonable,$60. I didn't know better at the time. And it just seemed very attractive to me. And then when I did look into it and ask some people about it, they're like, oh, Mothership is a lot of fun. It's a pretty flexible... OSR style framework. It's D100. Very simple to run. Very simple to play. They already have adventures and stuff for it. So I was like, oh, that's perfect. This will be out in like six months and I'll grab it and then I can start playing it.
SPEAKER_00:I think that's what fooled me as well that it already existed and this was our we're going to send it to print and it'll be amazing it's always a red flag to me when a Kickstarter doesn't have the material produced but this seemed to have it all there as you said there's adventures as well there's a whole community around it then there were delays and I get that the guy running it he was pretty good with his communication but he was saying oh we've got a lot of sickness in the family and various things have happened and you've got to show a bit of compassion to that but I do get the impression it was a complete one man band job in terms of getting that out there the actual content as opposed to the production
SPEAKER_02:yeah I don't like I've gone through a couple of Kickstarters. So to put in perspective, I think this is one of my first Kickstarters that I backed. This is maybe the 10th Kickstarter I have received. A lot of games have finished and shipped to me. Yeah. Like another one that, I mean, honestly, within the span of a year, Eat the Reich, I think I bought into some point in the last year. It's already here. I got all my rewards. I got all my stuff. Like it came. I got the, they put out PDFs and everything. I think they did put some put out some pdf for mothership um as they were working through it but like that was i think that whole cycle was less than a year if i remember correctly this and what was it there's other ones i did um there's been a couple of morkborg type things that i've backed less than a year there was a girl by moonlight which is a like blades in the dark but sailor moon game that i got talked into that one was less than a year i mean but that's evil hat productions or whatever so they have like a whole a thing but still like i It did feel like it was maybe like one person. I mean, I don't know how big Tuesday Night Games is. I don't know if it's just the main writer and maybe a bunch of people that they hire on for whatever they're doing, like Sean McCoy. I don't know if that's just a Sean McCoy. I mean, because it looks like there's a lot of people. I'm looking at the front of the book, The Warden's Operation. There's a lot of people in here for developed and written by and edited. It didn't feel like it at the time. There's a lot of people
SPEAKER_00:working on it. I don't know if Sean was the only one who kept rolling out to the angry being Kickstarter mob to say, you know, communicate what was going on. But you're right about other Kickstarters. And I know it's not always fair to compare them even, but we were talking about this in a previous podcast. There's a company I always recommend. They're called the Merry Mushmen and they make a supplement called Knock, which is like a little bric-a-bac of stuff for fantasy gaming. How about their
SPEAKER_02:most recent one? That
SPEAKER_00:one was like a couple of months. Yeah, it was like four weeks to get there. Those guys just turn that around. I've got the book here next to me. It's a thick old book, but they produced it in those times. I don't know why I'm holding a book up to a camera for people to listen to in a podcast. That makes no sense. It's
SPEAKER_02:a thick book. It's filled with art. It's got a lot of user-based submissions and stuff. It's a lot of really fun ideas. I think the difference is that I've seen some people, because I know a few people that have run Kickstarters, there's people that make the Kickstarter at the beginning of the project and people that make the Kickstarter at the end of the project. And I think this may have been somewhere either in the beginning or in the middle. And
SPEAKER_00:you brought up earlier shipping. So shipping is, we talked about this on our Call of Cthulhu round table, but shipping is the bane of any Kickstarter. People don't think about it. And when I was looking into the sort of the reading for this and I looked in the comments,
UNKNOWN:Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:The shipping in other parts of the world was insane. It was like a guy in Greece who was just kicking off because it was something like$190 to ship it. And he pledged, I think,$40. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I saw that. I was reading the comments because I was like, wow,$20 is kind of expensive. I don't remember that being the estimated shipping at the time. Honestly, from what I remember, it was like somewhere in the$10 range. But other people were saying, oh, this is spot on. But I was reading through the comments. and a lot of people in Europe were getting raked over their coals. There was a person in London that said, how is my shipping$150? It's a book. Are you guys sure that you are inputting this correctly with your shipping coordinator? Because it's just books. It's not something weird that has to be taxed heavily and shipped specifically. A lot of people were, I think, too, it was the tax. It was getting taxed. Whatever information they were giving to the people that handle all the logistics sticks i think was incorrect because they were able to fix it for the most part i think for a lot of people they were to bring it down substantially but that's still it's still an extra cost
SPEAKER_00:i'm never that bothered when they estimate a high shipping cost at the beginning because to me that always suggests or they've done their homework
SPEAKER_02:yeah
SPEAKER_00:and you know this is a fairly hefty box and again when we were um doing the call of cthulhu history podcast because there's a whole debacle around call of cthulhu 7th edition and shipping like they've actually charging five dollars to ship a you know call cthulhu rule book and you're like that thing weighs three pounds there's no way it's five dollars to ship
SPEAKER_02:in america it can be um because there is a special postage rate um for media mail which is books and that's why like i used to sell books online and it was a lifesaver you know it'd be twelve dollars if you're shipping a normal but it starts out like if it's a pound i don't know if it's with the current rate but when i was doing it's a dollar 79 for a pound and it's like 50 cents extra per pound after that So you could fill a box full of books. It could weigh like a hundred pounds and only shipping would be like$25. But
SPEAKER_00:the instant you start putting other things in like dice, it doesn't become books anymore. Yeah. They dice. You see what you did
SPEAKER_02:there.
SPEAKER_00:So we have, we have the box in front of us and it's a lovely hefty box. I
SPEAKER_02:forgot to measure it. It's a small format box. Oh wait, did you guess? I got the little one. Maybe we got different ones. Oh, you got the full format one. Big, shiny one,
SPEAKER_00:yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I thought I got the
SPEAKER_00:nicer one, but maybe I guess I didn't. It's my equivalent of the full leatherette box.
SPEAKER_02:You're a big fan of the leatherette,
SPEAKER_00:yeah. Honestly, stick full leatherette in anything. I'm buying it. You get some very questionable books. I'm like, yeah, but it's a full leatherette version of Minecraft. I'm sure it's fine.
SPEAKER_02:Knowing that yours is larger format, I do have a question. How big is your little Game Master Storyteller screen?
SPEAKER_00:It's still fairly small so in the box there's a bunch of fluff leaflets and here's how you get the app and some conversion rules um in terms of the screen itself it's it's that size oh that's way bigger that's way
SPEAKER_02:bigger let me show you the one that came with mine it is ridiculously
SPEAKER_00:small for the
SPEAKER_02:tape we're comparing
SPEAKER_00:the size of the gm screens ryan's one it looks about the size of like a novel
SPEAKER_02:it's like it's it is like it's the size of a book you would bring to the beach like a softback book. It is not very big. It's maybe like four or five inches by like six inches. I mean, it's a trifold, so it folds out. It's not big enough. Like if you were worried about people peeping your notes or you wanted to do like a secret role, it's not tall enough to hide anything you've got. If you're playing with people that are sitting at a table. Now, if their head were level with the table, as much privacy as you'd ever want.
SPEAKER_00:If you were playing mothership with children, you'd be fine. without any booster seats. The GM screen's pretty nice. It comes in landscape format, which is God's chosen format for GM screens, which is good. And it has basically all the stuff you need to run the game on the back, which is really all you ask for. It's not particularly pretty. It's got a bunch of vaguely sci-fi looking... Yeah,
SPEAKER_02:I think I like the art on mine because it's more of like a Morkborg-ish kind of like almost Knorr-like quality that I really... I should have bumped up my style.
SPEAKER_00:This actually amused me. It gives... There's two patches that come with it. Oh, I only got a
SPEAKER_02:single patch.
SPEAKER_00:The most amusing thing is his launch crew and it's got the date of 2021 on it. Yeah. That's kind of funny.
SPEAKER_02:You can tell that some of these were bought a while ago. Yeah, the one I got was Landing Crew. And some of the books... The books inside here actually say 2023 as the publishing date. So they've had them for a little while. Mine also came with a bunch of cardstock little figures. Oh yeah, mine came with some. I think it maybe cut that in half and then was able to fit it in here.
SPEAKER_00:And then there's our sort of map thing for space, I guess. Yeah, I got that as well. It's like a little fold-out map of space for you to put counters on so you can have that kind of exciting aliens moment of something pings on the radar and you you put something down but the important stuff is the books that come with it this set came with the player survival guide which is the rules the warden's operation manual which is like the GM's guide they obviously have to have their own proprietary name for GM so they call the GM the warden I think called the ship breakers toolkit which is a list of ships that you can put in the game and A book called Unconfirmed Contact Reports, which we'll get into, which is like a bestiary, basically, of things that you can throw your players at. And then there's, I think it's three adventures. No, it's actually four adventures. I just got
SPEAKER_02:the one adventure. I got the bug hunt.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I got the bug hunt adventure, Gradient Descent.
SPEAKER_02:Gradient Descent is supposed to be incredibly good. I own that separately. A
SPEAKER_00:Pound of Flesh and Dead Planet. And all of those were available as PDFs when they were launching the game and trying to pacify the howling masses. but let's start with the player survival guide there's been loads of criticism online I've seen people say about the artwork so the art in this book is it's all it's all black and white line drawings yeah and some of them actually look like doodles
SPEAKER_02:some are doodles so I think some are first pass like setting up the artwork I actually don't
SPEAKER_00:mind that I like it I like it I think it adds to the the atmosphere the actual picture the front is literally a doodle it's of a guy who looks that something has burst out of his spacesuit chest. I think this
SPEAKER_02:is a good example of the doodle quality. On page 29, there is like a legitimate, like this is my, like somebody thinking out the process and like drawing what it could look like without doing a lot of detail. I didn't mind that. I think it's kind of funny.
SPEAKER_00:And they do, there's nice things with some of the artwork. For example, there's a section talking about range and distance and they explain adjacent, close range, long range and extreme range. And they do it through a picture at the top of some alien world. monstrosity like fighting a bunch of space guys. In terms of the actual system itself so this player survival guide is everything you need as a player and I kind of like the way it was laid out because it takes you through how to build your character as if you had no idea what you were doing and it lays it all out on a page for how you build this character and then it gives you references of where you need to go to find out what your stats mean and what your skills mean and in terms of the system you mentioned at the beginning Ryan it's super simple you get four stats and you get four saves and I love the way they explain them that your stats are something you roll against when you're proactively doing something and your saves are something that you roll when you're reactively avoiding something bad happening to you and you have skills that basically allow you a bonus to your stat when you try and do something so if you're trying to fight something you add your and if you fight can scale you add a bonus to your strength for example really simple and you roll a d100 to find if you're successful i say you to find out you're successful the thing that i loved about the system says if you fail a roll it doesn't necessarily mean you've not done the thing you're trying to do you can do it but things get worse yeah so like if you're firing an alien you might miss your shot and you hit a pipe and like something starts decompressing
SPEAKER_02:you might take some damage i really did like that they also have some really nice examples in there uh showing like this is kind of what it would look like. I think there might be maybe some more in the world. I can't remember what I read first, but I noticed that there's quite a few. I really liked the player's book. I think it mostly because I think it already jived pretty well with my views of like game mastering. It made a lot of sense. It was pretty cogent. There were a few times where I had to like go back and forth and be like, what are you talking about here? I do think it waits a little too long considering that it talks about like armor on like the first couple of pages. It doesn't explain armor until the last few pages But it does actually in a lot of places point like, hey, if you want to know more about this, check this other. Here's the page number. So I appreciate that. I thought it was pretty well laid out. I think it had really good information in there. And the one thing I really like about both the warden and the players books is it's set up like you've never played a tabletop RPG before, but it doesn't like some books. They'll have whole sections about like what a tabletop RPG is. I think this is a pretty good middle point to that. Like you're not wasting. You're not really wasting any time because they're also like defining what this tabletop RPG is in its own context so I really like that I think it's it's set up for newbies really well it also is really good for you know somebody that's already played a bunch of tabletop RPGs like explaining what it's about versus other tabletop RPGs which I think is good I
SPEAKER_00:always cringe a little bit whenever you buy a new RPG and you've got the what is a role playing game section and you get some pontificating purple prose but this is like improvisational theater they give you an example of play and you read the example of play like nobody nobody sounds like that when they play the examples of play in this are brilliant they are they're spot on they sound just like a game session i mean literally there's one bit where there's one guy arguing with the gm about whether he should be able to do something yeah
SPEAKER_02:the hiding section because yeah they talk about and also the thing i really i think they maybe talk about more in the warden warden's things but like this is like a very flexible framework feel free to add or delete at will um so it's like there is no like hiding skill that's really up for like at the table and they have like a genuine discussion it's like well I feel like I have a military training the whole idea behind my characters that they're gonna like like special forces sneaky character like I should be able to do this and they go back and forth and like the player is still like I don't know if I like that I don't know if I like that and the warden is like well what if we do this and then another player chimes in I think that's very accurate to like a first time playthrough of the game and I think is a good to have it in there because in some games and I don't want to name names, but they give you this idea that the warden or the game master, dungeon master, whatever, is supposed to be God and their word is final and that it's not like a, you know, it's just not like a conversation. I think this is a great way to show that it is a conversation, especially when you have a rule framework that is very skeletal, like on purpose. The more specific you get, the less, the bigger the book it gets and the more things you have to remember. If you keep things general and just add things as you need them, it's way easier for everybody involved.
SPEAKER_00:There's also a very nice touch to it where it talks about when you should roll dice. Yes, I love that section. You only need to roll dice when something's at stake. If you're doing your day-to-day job, like you're playing a scientist character and you're doing science stuff, you don't have to roll for the science stuff. And it specifically says your stats are there to show how you perform under duress. Which is great because sometimes you play games and you roll for everything. And it's like, I'm this top scientist guy. I'm a Nobel laureate in astrophysics. I've got 80%. I'm doing an astrophysics thing. And oh, you're 81. Oh, you fail. I'm Einstein. Why would I fail? Exactly.
SPEAKER_02:I like that section. I think, I can't remember if the rolling is in the Warren's book or not. I like the way that it really went through and explained, like, here's the reasoning why you would need to roll. Here's when you don't need to roll. And I really like the idea that it's like, you'll really need to roll when something is not right like if their plan isn't very good if they don't have enough time to like be careful or they don't have the materials like they don't have the tools necessary that's when you start rolling and it makes a lot of sense because every time you fail a roll you take stress and max you can only take 20 stress before you basically break and you're gonna have a really bad time afterwards so it makes a lot of sense i really like that as I really like, there are some great things in here that I think are awesome tips, regardless of game. I think there's a really good section on here about safety tools. It's just like a page is basically the writer basically says, this is me, the writer talking to you, the warden specifically in this moment. And it's like, I understand that there might be some things, but like, imagine you're at a, like a party and people, and it really kind of breaks it down into like common sense, kind of like terms, like in the same way that like, Oh, you, you may occasionally overstep. that's fine just make sure that everybody talks about it and then you work towards not doing that again like i thought it was maybe one of the best worded like safety tool sections i've ever seen in a book
SPEAKER_00:no you're absolutely right about that it felt very natural not heavy-handed like you get some safety tool sections and rpg rule books and it's just like you're a bad person at your core and you need to acknowledge hello okay but as this it was like yeah it's common sense advice i love the example of if you're under my roof and i invite you to a pal yeah you can expect x y and z and if that doesn't happen then we'll talk about it and not try and ruin it next time it should be the same at your table I thought that was that was nice I also love that the book is set up and it assumes that you're a brand new player and basically says here's how you roll up a character really quickly because you're probably gonna have to do this mid game you're probably gonna do it quite often you're probably gonna die and you mentioned the stress mechanic which is really nice it's similar to an alien where you get stressed but the idea is as things go wrong your character gets more and more stressed and the more stressed they get the more the chance there is of them panicking and doing something ridiculous it's a nice way of simulating the sort of sanity blasting horror that you come up against Again, I talked about this in the Call of Cthulhu podcast, but one of the things I loved about the sanity mechanic in Call of Cthulhu was it actually forced the players to act in a certain way. If you know that just looking at that thing can drive you bananas, you might not want to go and look at the thing until you know what you're dealing with. Likewise in this, if you know that you're probably going to get stressed out by attempting to do the thing, you're going to wait until you've got the best circumstance possible to do it so you don't wig out and freak out and shoot at your teammates or whatever it's a really nice way of doing it all the rules are really simple combat is really simple there's a brilliant bit where it actually says use the ward and what you should be saying is not that the creature's going to attack you it's here's what's going to happen if you fail to stop the creature doing its thing it's going to bite John's head off or it's going to throw Clara out of the airlock and it gives the players something to actually work against rather than just oh I'm going to try and blast it and take down its hit points
SPEAKER_02:and that's really nice it also gives the players a chance to be a little creative it's like oh you know the more you describe and the more you set the parameters like oh well I don't want you know John to get bitten gives me an opportunity like I could get in front of him I could do something maybe we picked up an item or we did something earlier that allows me to set up an interesting situation other than like oh here's monster X in hallway who's just standing there until you finish acting so I really I really like that way of setting it up on the
SPEAKER_00:back of the player's guide here, you literally have the system on the back on one page. It's kind of Mork
SPEAKER_02:Borg-ish where they have basically all the rules
SPEAKER_00:on one thing, which is great. But if we move on to the Warden's Manual, these are A5 style, almost like zines, tiny. And I have to say the Warden's Operation Manual has some of the best GM's advice that I have read in any book. It basically walks you through how you set up a session and it gives you this whole example of taking a notebook and what you should write on each page and how you set up an adventure. More importantly it talks about how you set up the atmosphere for a Mothership game how you should slowly reveal horror there's a lot of detail in here but it's fantastic around how do you set up puzzles how should you put clues in and one of the things I love is essentially not hiding things behind clues not hiding the progress and I used to always say this when I talk to people about Call of Cthulhu for example I would always say to them that if a player searches for something you should give them the information make them roll to get additional insight that can help them later on but it's not one of these things of if you don't find that clue you can't do anything because then the game just grinds to a halt and this gives some wonderful advice along that. It gives you advice on how you generate a campaign, how you... It also points out there's no social skills in this game that you roleplay at all, which I think I really like. I always have issues with social skills becoming mind control powers in games. I intimidate him into going away. Problems dealt with. But it's fantastic. One of the nice little features of the game is it talks about survive solve or save being like the pillars of the game and it's like the player should only ever be able
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, two Macs. So they can save themselves, they can solve the problem, or they can be the hero. And it says, usually they're going to be able to do one at most. If they try super, super, super hard, they can do two, which I think is great. Which, honestly, when you think about a lot of sci-fi, that makes a lot of sense. A lot of sci-fi, they don't ever really beat the monster. They escape from the monster. Occasionally, especially if you're talking about something like Aliens, like the Alien franchise. Like sometimes they beat it. Sometimes they just escape. It's always comes back. Um, which I think you were talking about before. Like they, they have in here, like the story cycle, transgression, omens, manifestation, banishment, and slumber. So you do something to awaken it. You start to get signs, you know, people start to, you know, you start to see dead people or like physical signs on people manifestation. That's when it actually erupts and happens and like starts being an issue. Then banishment is the players dealing with it. But at the end, there's always the slumber aspect. Like you may have defeated that, but there's always this inkling that it could come back and be a source of new trouble in the future. I think that's a really great story structure, especially for sci-fi horror, that you could probably take really to anything. You could probably even bring that into fantasy games if you want to bring more horror aspects to, which I really like.
SPEAKER_00:And it chimes perfectly with the example of the Aliens franchise. If you look at the original Alien, it follows that arc perfectly. Ripley in the original Alien survives. She doesn't solve anything aliens hero yeah she doesn't save anyone in the original alien apart from the cat it's a really great format and they pack a lot into that little design and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone wanting to run a horror game because it's just fully good advice and again the artwork is very doodly but it works nicely
SPEAKER_02:yeah maybe that's just me enjoying Morkborg and stuff like that as long as the artwork gives vibe I'm fine with it especially one thing too that I like about there being like more fiddly doodly artwork is that's close to what I would be able to draw in a given moment if I was coming up with my own creature so I think it's nice that it shows like hey it doesn't have to be some like Van Gogh art piece it can be just like a scribble and still be illustrative of the point that you're trying to make and be scary
SPEAKER_00:one of the pieces I loved is in the section about basically making your horror in the game those things we talked about transgression omens manifestation etc they've got a little picture above each of them that tells a story so like in the transgression there's like these two scientists in the lab and they've got a petri dish with some alien thing in it and he picks it up and it squirts him in the face and then for omens it's the same scientist but he's got little things spikes out his neck in manifestation it's him erupting into some alien horror and then banishment is a dude with a flamethrower shooting him but the slumber it's a picture of the close up of the body And you can see the alien parasite crawling out his eye as if it's cut off someone else, which is a lovely illustration of...
SPEAKER_02:The artwork is very illustrative of what they're trying to explain. It's very explanatory. And I think one of the cool things about the Warden's Guide is that it has consistent examples. It doesn't change... So all the little sidebars, it uses the same characters. So you have some idea for the examples that it gives for character creation. It uses that same character. I think it's Cleo. And then when it's talking about your little journal, it talks... It keeps that consistency throughout it. Like it talks about this little adventure where there's like this like hive mind that is taking over things. So it keeps consistent. So it shows you how you can evolve and like move these things around. And because a lot of tabletop RPGs will show examples, but sometimes it'll be completely different examples. So there might be some question in somebody's mind, like, well, how do I take this and turn it into that? And then in this one, it shows it like it gives you all the examples. It shows you like the layout, like because it does a pretty good job of explaining. how to build like a map and instead of you know getting very granular and showing like the sizes of rooms and all that stuff it's really like what you really need is like a block diagram this block diagram and then right next to it you have a key that says like you know general dimensions the vibe of the room what's in here the adventures follow that pretty well so i looked at bug hunt and not another bug hunt and but that showed like those block diagrams it had keys it had like little bullet points kind of explaining what was in the room like the high points and low points and or if there's anything like icky that might attack them. I think that's a really good way because I think a lot of games will show you these really ornate maps like Dungeons and Dragons, super ornate maps that you're like, oh God, what am I supposed to do with all this? So you have like pages of maps and then it has all these like huge amount of details that you have to like espouse or like somehow fill in the blanks. This is like very simple. Two pages, you have your entire adventure and they basically say like this is what you would have open in front of you for the majority of the game. This map and this key and and you're just like bouncing off it. I really like that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I like the fact with the block diagram it gives, it says each one of these blocks, it could be a star system or a closet. Yeah. But the thing is, it's important. It's an important thing for the players to go to. What you're showing is how you, how the link, it's not a physical, this thing isn't necessarily right next to this, but it's like, if you have this information, you will know about this location and you can go there and do things. And again, it lets you as the warden fill in the, like the journey stuff between locations but it keeps your players moving it keeps them interested because it means they know when they go somewhere something's going to happen they've got something relevant it's not like oh we wander around to you know generic cabin number five to see because it's on the map it must have something it's something I remember running years ago Shadows over Bugenhafen for Warhammer Fantasy roleplay and it had a massive beautiful map of the city of Bugenhafen it must have locations on the map and that was the player's map and the intent was the players would look at it and go ah well these things are marked therefore they're important therefore we're going to go to those places rather than it just being a blank map and then going oh well that street looks nice let's go there and then you as a GM are you know making up lots of incidental nonsense and anyway moving on for the Wardens Operations Manual great book we've got the Shipbreakers Toolkit which is I think it's basically just a a list of ships? It
SPEAKER_02:is a list of ships. I think could be extremely useful given your campaign or you would never look at this at all. If you were a purely terrestrial thing or even if you're in space station, like this gives a lot of like pre-done ones. So I guess if you were to do an adventure on one of these, it would give you a bit of a player map that you could use. But a lot of them are so small, like the map is like pretty bare minimum. I do think that there's supposed to be maybe, I guess, like ship-to-ship combat as an option in this. But I don't think I would do that too often because, I don't know, I just don't see ship-to-ship combat being
SPEAKER_00:survival horror-y,
SPEAKER_02:I guess?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, what it specifically says, and I think it's the Warden's Operations Manual, if you get to the point where it's ship-to-ship combat, everyone is losing because the weapons are so deadly that you just need to damage a ship and suddenly people can't breathe. And it said so the actual horror should come from the negotiations and the hailing and trying to get the other people not to fire on them and if you're in fact it does say that about combat as a whole it says once you're in a fight you've kind of chosen the worst option because everyone loses
SPEAKER_02:yeah it yeah it says that in the book like nobody ever really wins the fight especially when you look at monster stats you know a marine might have at max like i don't know 60 70 percent chance of success a lot of the the monsters and oogie boogie weirdy things in here like Their combat starts at 70. I didn't see anything below a 70 with thumbing through. Most of them are up to 90 to 100. Every time they attack, they hit unless it's a very small... There's always a very... I think there is... What is it? A 99 through 00, I think, is always... It's an always failure. I don't think there's anything... Actually, I think the good can hit on anything. I think good might be God. Let's talk about the other one. I think this is cool. I think it's a good um because of the time frame that it gives i don't know how much you read into like the downtime activities this stuff's supposed to take place over like years like a campaign is like there is an option to go and join the space marine or like the colonial marines that's a six-year contract you don't get to play your character for six in-game years but then they come back and they have military training and some other stuff they also just might die they might die yeah they just might die um so like i do think this is like a cool idea almost like hey here's things that you can buy As you guys progress and get cooler and cooler, because they have a lot of things that you can spend money on in this book, a lot of the like going to specific ports and like using your stress to turn that into points that you then put into different skills and stuff like a lot of those ports. They're measured in the kilocredits, so a thousand credits. So you need a lot of money to spend. And I think at a certain point, especially if you do more role play instead of like if you break free from your corporation and like start selling secrets and doing things like that, you're going to have a lot of money to spend. you could probably make a lot of money. So this is like a cool thing to be like, hey, well, if you guys get up there enough, you could afford, you know, this gas-fack Grendel Corvette.
SPEAKER_00:Or gauss-fack Grendel. I love the artwork in this for what they've made the ships look like because they look very similar to the sort of stuff you see in a lot of these survival horror sci-fi films like Alien and Aliens. They don't look like sleep Star Wars style or Star Trek style ships. They look very induced. industrial and a bit clunky and they don't look the sort of things that can... A lot of squares. Yeah, lots of squares and... Things popping off of them, yeah. Spinny round things. I do love that there's a mega damage table. Yeah, the mega damage table. Which reminds me of like rifts. But yeah, that's the shipbreakers guide, which is, you know, it's fine for what you do. However, I think this is probably both you and I's favorite book, The Unconfirmed Contact Report.
SPEAKER_02:There is a lot of great art in this book. I do have... um, one critique. And that's if, um, there's like, there's a lot of art. There's a lot of space on here. If I have to go and they put all the stats in a line on the top, I think this is one of my OSR least favorite things to do. Um, because if you have to put a key in the beginning of the book, explaining what all of these random numbers and letters mean, especially when you have so much space to just like put a little block here and said, Oh, it's damage is this it's combat is this it's instinct is that I feel like you've kind of like missed an you've oversimplified one thing to the detriment of itself like you I have to I mean luckily monsters are pretty simple they simplify all the stats into instinct if they have something very specific that they are good at they outline that but again if I have to go and flip to the front another thing a strike against all of the books involved they don't have an index which I understand these are paper vaccines no index and they have no table of contents I think they would be better for them
SPEAKER_00:the best thing about this book though is it's not written like a traditional monster manual in terms of here is this thing this is where it comes from this is what we can do it's written as reports from survivors
SPEAKER_02:yeah
SPEAKER_00:who have encountered this thing and a lot of these things are genuinely horrific like there's a creature called throat leeches which is that's fairly grim in itself you get other things like like just really sinister things there's one called cabin 102b and it's just a mysterious room that appears on liners and the staff are like this room isn't part of our ship people go in the room start going mad one of the most sinister ones is called family meal number five and it's a bit like the ring it's a tape that shows footage of a human being strapped down the table and then like five pigs appear and start devouring him over the course of a few hours and then people who watch it start becoming cannibals which It's just a lot of really, really dark stuff.
SPEAKER_02:The cool thing about the unconfirmed reports is that it would be very easy to fill this full of just like alien abominations that have like a lot of tentacles. There's a lot of like esoteric nonsense in here. I think I mentioned before, there is the good, which basically its power is that it makes people like they can't lie. They can't hurt others. It's like power is technically infinite. I don't think you can kill the good. Like it gives infinity symbols for its stats. So this idea that they're like corporations might view this as a bad thing and maybe send you to like you can't kill it maybe you could send it somewhere it's like you mentioned before there it's like all like little reports but it's all like reports hearsay it the images a lot of them and I'll say oh this is like graffiti found on a bathroom stall and like a space station that was massacred or this is like for the demon in here it's like oh this is an acrylic painting made by a prisoner that survived something I thought that was really cool it all I think I might like this most because it is also again very Morkborg in quality where like the artwork is very evocative but not necessarily like the most pristine like strokes and things like that it definitely has like a bit of like a do-it-yourself vibe which I really enjoy like there's weird stuff like the headjackers and that artwork is super messed up it's just like something like diving into the back of this person's head and it says give me a better brain art therapy exercise patient 1771 one seven parentheses deceased stuff is messed
SPEAKER_00:up in here one of the things i liked is because as you said it's not just a it's an alien gribbley that you know comes at you with teeth and fangs now they have some like that there's one creature in there that is essentially the creature from the thing you you read it and how it you know it takes on the form of things down to the dna level but it will like violently explode into something else and so that's your your bog standard alien that you can start and shoot at and fight. But they've got other things like there's a sentient computer virus.
SPEAKER_02:There's a sentient TV show. It's called The Brownstream 2 or something that slowly corrupts you. One
SPEAKER_00:of the monsters quote unquote I loved was C-level executives. Oh
SPEAKER_02:yeah. Very easy to get. The Hatchet Man. I don't know if you saw The Hatchet Man but it's like when I first read it I was like oh it's just talking about like a corporate headhunter but no it's like some weird like configured organism created by the corporations to like basically give certain people quote unquote pink slips which I thought was very clever and very fun I do think the one cool thing about Mothership is they're very creative I think it's that comes from the unconfirmed reports super creative and like what a monster can be and how it can affect you
SPEAKER_00:that's what I liked about it I thought that it was not just it's an original take but it's an original take on horror you can see the the horror tropes are in there And they just twist it a little bit to give something where it isn't just the monster rushing through the airlock at you. It's something that you're like, well, we can't actually fight this. So how do we get rid of it? Yeah, exactly. That makes them, again, it goes back to their pillars of save, solve and survive. You can build that actually around the creature. And then spin off the adventure off the back of that, which I think is great. I think the example it gives in the warden's operation manual, like the horror, is that this massive alien head that is being worshipped by people in this facility. There's brainwashing children or something horrible like that. And figuring out how to deal with something like that is brilliant because you're like, I have no
SPEAKER_02:idea what I would do. So it talks about that a bit because when it shows the notebook, it explains that. And it basically says that the... It gives them, because they have an idea of like how they would solve this. It basically says that that alien thing is functionally immortal because it's like some psychic thing that's intertwined with everybody. It has some psychic shielding and that the only real way to escape would probably, the easiest way to escape would be to give people to it. So I thought that was a very interesting take outlining like the easy path and letting your players figure out the hard actual path that they're going to want to take. I think that's clever. Cause you can very easily find yourself. I mean, they were already set up as a cult in the way that it's set up. They, they allow new people to come in. If you were just be like, Oh, we're going to send you like 20, 30, 40 people or give you half of us. And then we'll send more like that would be a way to negotiate with a monster that like functionally is immortal, but also wants things.
SPEAKER_00:And just looking at these adventures here. So again, they're in the little design format, but they're fairly substantial. I mean, it's like you have 50 plus pages in that. they're, you know, as you would say, very murk-borgy in terms of how they're laid out, the artwork, the format. And I really like that. It makes it very easy on the eye. And it's also laid out in a way that it's easy to use as a, as a warden because the, all the information you need is on a single page. Yeah. You don't have to go flicking back and forth. Again, no, it's still no indexes, which is certainly annoying. Love an index. Love a table of contents. Love an index. Yeah. Always, I have at the beginning or the end but just don't not have it at all but yeah that is that is mothership and I have to say I'm despite the long wait very happy with with what I received very
SPEAKER_02:happy with it I like it I will say one thing the small box that was$59 shipping is$21 where I don't know if taxes are included in that we're up to around$80 I think there is some good stuff in here comes with a little encounter tracker thing it comes with the little cutouts comes with a little stand so you can you don't have to make 3d printed stuff comes with a little very teeny tiny cutesy warden screen comes with some bonuses$80 not terrible dragonbane box which you can get retail$30 depending on the day is comes with dice it comes with the same kind of like cutout things here but they're in color and fully like illustrated come with a little stands it comes with with a source book. It comes with a couple, it comes with like seven or eight adventures. It's a, it, it has a box that is completely full. There's not much more you could fit inside there, including maps and everything for less than half the price, including shipping. The one thing that I, the, the one thing I have grown to dislike about Kickstarter is I will see, I was like, Oh, I'll buy that. I ended up buying it basically full retail price. I pay for shipping. And then I would not be surprised to see this on Tuesday night games uh website for ticket price but with shipping being five dollars which is the thing i mean i haven't i haven't checked but i would not be surprised if that's the case it does feel like especially it's one thing when you're if you get the early adopter advantage but we've waited so long for this it doesn't feel like we're early adopters anymore so
SPEAKER_00:And that was our review of the Mothership Kickstarter. We hope you enjoyed it. Thanks must go again to Ryan for joining us and offering his insight into his experiences with the Kickstarter. Fans of the podcast will be pleased to know we actually cut out 25 minutes of rambling at the end where Ryan and I just went off and on about various Kickstarters that we backed and failed. So due to the magic of editing, you didn't have to listen to that nonsense. We are a semi-regular podcast on the history of RPGs and we have a whole big back catalogue of 60 plus episodes that include history episodes reviews like this one round tables author interviews and even some actual plays so if you're bored go and check them out if you want to get in touch with us you can do so on twitter at savepodcast or you can email us at role.to.save.pod at gmail.com if you're feeling kind please nip on to your podcast directory of choice and leave us a review. We really do appreciate them and it helps us with visibility. Anyway, we hope you enjoyed the episode and we will see you on the next one.
