Mothership RPG play report

For Free RPG Day, I had the opportunity to play in a game of Mothership RPG. I was a former marine on a team charged with exploring an abandoned spaceship for potential reclamation. It unfolded exactly as you would expect: dead teammembers and a frantic retreat to our ship from a horrifying alien. The other players and I had a great time; thanks to Games Unlimited in Pittsburgh for hosting and supporting the hobby in our community.

I had heard great things about Mothership in OSR circles from Questing Beast, Dungeoncraft, and Quinn's Quest. While science fiction is not my usual preferred fantasy, I was interested to try a highly-recommended system in a new setting. Overall, I wasn't disappointed: Mothership was a fun system to play. I wasn't thrilled by the sci-fi/space aspects of our adventure—differentiating between air-lock systems and the effects of temperature on pressurized cabins—but I'll attribute that to personal preference. What really shined was the Stress/Panic mechanic.

Mothership advertises itself as a "Sci-fi Horror" RPG, and Stress/Panic is how it accomplishes the latter. Every character starts with a Stress level of 2. Whenever something goes wrong like a failed check/save, then the level increases. On critical failures or climactic moments, the GM calls for a Panic Check: players roll 1d20 and try to get under their stress level. If they fail, then their character panics with consequences based on how close they rolled to their stress level.

This was the perfect mechanic for ratchetting tension in the adventure. As we delved deeper into the ship, the number on our character sheets quantified the heightening anxiety. As players, we felt it too: there was a feeling of dread that built as our characters' stress levels increased. When they panicked, it felt real and earned—not just procedural. The mechanic achieved it's design purpose elegantly.

I recently finished a three-year campaign through The Curse of Strahd. While I had fun with friends defeating the famed vampire, at no point in the land of horrors did we feel scared. We were never afraid for our characters' lives (a D&D problem). We were occasionally "Frightened", but because it was an un-altered die roll it never felt earned. Characters are just as likely to fail that roll at the beginning of a session as at the end.

What Mothership does well is not introduce the concept of fear but give it impact: stress is real and increasing. It's not a matter of if but when your character will panic. As a player, you must navigate the adventure with that reality in mind. And it works really well!

I want to take Mothership's Stress/Panic system into every game that I run. Whenever the characters are going into a fearful situation like storming the vampire's castle or delving into an ancient crypt, we start tracking stress. Players will need to manage that in addition to other resources. Maybe they have rations and HP to continue, but their stress is too high and they need to return to town before continuing. Or maybe they push ahead and risk panicking against a horrifying foe.

It's great when a simple mechanic perfectly fulfills its purpose. Mothership's Stress/Panic mechanic does that while being system agnostic. I recommend trying it out for your next intense session; let me know how it goes at your table. And if you are a fan of science fiction and RPGs, then Mothership is definitely worth a try.

Sean McPherson works as a software engineer at Khan Academy, and enjoys playing games and watching soccer. He lives with family in Pittsburgh, PA.