by elsewiseunplugged

A new GeekList has been posted The Book Came First

by elsewiseunplugged

An item GeekList: The Stainless Steel Rat has been added to the geeklist The Book Came First

by elsewiseunplugged

An item RPG: John Carter of Mars has been added to the geeklist The Book Came First

by Gomez

Does anyone know a way of comparing this Geeklist against a User's collection please?

by Bahasa

Congrats Travis!

As a fellow Minnesotan, I wanted to share a few links you might like:

TCAT (Twin Cities Ameritrashers)
Twin Cities Games for Sale
Minneapolis/St Paul Gamers

Have you played DCC (Dungeon Crawl Classics)? Rules are simple and it has a lot of randomization. They also use a lot of different dice (d3, d4, d5, d6, d7, d8, d10, d%, d12, d14, d16, d20, d24, d30) though you can use online rollers if you don't want to buy the dice.

Chip Theory Games is based in MN but I don't see any of their games in your list. Any reason for that? Too Many Bones is a good game to play solo and it involves a lot of dice.

You've got some great games and if I lived closer (I'm in Rochester), I'd definitely play with you.

by Karkared

TomTomThePipersSon wrote:

We're currently in the middle of a mass uprising of the dead- does that count?

If the world comes out widely changed by this, then yes. You might have new cults, new leaders, whole destroyed cities etc.
If the world is just destroyed, then not in the sense I suggested - it's not an evolution, merely an extinction.
If the undead just have to be destroyed and life goes on as before, it's not an evolution either, just an accident.

by Karlsen

Coffee, real

by Rachel Carpenter

You know what the best part of being an independent game designer is? I can procrastinate work with other work 😜. There's always lots that needs doing and yes, some things do have hard and fast deadlines, but in today's case, rather than focus on getting Bears love bows: Very Merry Trashmas edition up and running here on the Geek for the Bad Comet contest... which I really do need to get done... I found myself making the last 3 short promo videos for my currently available games. Sales are slow, I have no idea of my reach (though I'm pretty sure that it's tiny), but I'm trying. And it seems like the shorter the content, the better. Especially when it comes to social media. Hence the short promos.

Youtube Video
Youtube Video
Youtube Video

Anyway, any weekend plans? I'm hoping to get Bears love bows: Very Merry Trashmas edition up tomorrow... and that's about the extent of my weekend plans :geek_grin:.

Happy Saturday and happy playing!
-Rachel

Thank you for reading my blog. If you liked it; then please click the green thumb [microbadge=23724] at the top of the page. If you really liked it; then please subscribe.

by leroy43

Introduction
The 1979 movie Alien left quite an imprint on me. I was helping a friend babysit the neighbour's kid in the apartment across the way, and they had a big selection of movies on Betamax. We didn't know what we were in for, but what I remember more than anything is how the hairs on the nape of my neck had a mind of their own, and just how effectively frightening the movie was with it's build up of tension.

It was a sharp contrast to the generally feel good space western tone of Star Wars just few years earlier.

But that's the Mothership vibe. In the Kickstarter campaign, which I backed, other movies were listed as direct influences, including but not limited to
Alien (1979) & Aliens (1986)
The Thing (1982)
Event Horizon (1997)
Pandorum (2009)
Sunshine (2007)
Outland (1981)

These films have several things in common.

They're set in gritty spaces, well used, prone to breakdown, subject to the arbitrary rules of the corporate masters that run them. The technology feels heavy, mechanical, industrial, not sleek and modern. You may have seen the Mothership aesthetic called "cassette punk".

In almost every one of these stories, the protagonists are working class cogs in the machine. Distant uncaring entities like Weyland-Yutani in Alien or the mining corporation in Outland are the rules makers. They people are often expendable assets, sent into dangerous situations for the sake of profit, research, or a mission they don't fully understand.

They use profound claustrophobia and isolationism. There is no rescue coming. The environment itself is as deadly as any monster. If the hull breeches or the heaters fail, the vacuum or the cold will finish what the antagonist started.

The use psychological and body horror. For mind horror, they rely on the breakdown of the mind due to isolation, some form of space madness, or exposure to the literal abyss (Sunshine, Event Horizon). And for body horror, we have parasitic gestation (Alien), shapeshifting assimilation (The Thing), or genetic mutation (Pandorum).

High skill professionals. The characters are usually professionals like engineers, pilots, miners, or colonial marines. They're just trying to do their jobs. The horror stems from the intrusion of the impossible, the monstrous, and the improbable into their routine. They rely on and leverage their skills and vocational tools like improvised flamethrowers, welding torches, heavy machinery, and pulse rifles to survive.

With all these influences as inputs, you come out the other end with a system that presumes the characters are competent professionals that are good at their jobs.

How that translates into practice is a system where characters simply describe what they do, and then it happens. Where the outcome is consequence free why complicate matters by having to roll?

Consider one of the early scenes in Alien. The marines have landed on LV-426.

They approach the colony doors. The need to get through the doors. Hicks orders Hudson to "run a bypass", and Hudson pulls out his tools, flips down the switch, and the doors open.

Professionals doing what professionals know how to do. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

If you look at the stats for the players in Mothership, you'd might be surprised at how "bad" they are, given that they're supposedly professionals. But the stats aren't about competence. The stats are about how are you reacting to what's about to be the worst experience of your life?

For the aforementioned Hudson, he famously utters "Seventeen days? Hey man, I don't wanna rain on your parade, but we're not gonna last seventeen hours!" when he finds out how long it'll take to be rescued.

In Mothership terms, what's happened to Hudson is he's accumulated stress, failed a save, and then failed a panic roll.

The system
The Mothership game fundamentally requires one book, the Player's Survival Guide (1E), which covers the game rules everyone needs to know, and for the Warden (what the GM is called here), the Warden's Operations Manual.

Players have four core stats: Strength, Speed, Intellect, and Combat. The base stat is 2d10+25 for each, so you'll have between 27 and 45.

Players also have three core saves: Sanity, Fear, and Body, which are 2d10+10 (so 12-30)

You'll end up with stats that are lacklustre and saves that are worse. Remember though, this isn't how good your character is. You are brilliant, talented, fabulous, and professional. You're just having the worst day of your life because you're entering a situation that's going pear shaped.

The stats and saves will be modified by your profession, which includes Marine, Android*, Scientist, and Teamster. Each profession comes with a package of perks and modifiers that will make some of your stats or saves better, and also gives you some skills that you're particularly good at.

I put an asterisk next to Android because that is something the player and warden will need to discuss before the session. Are you a Hyperdyne Systems 120-A/2 like Ash from Alien, fully synthetic but human looking? Are you an enhanced organic replicant like the Nexus-6 models in Blade Runner? Are you an outwardly mechanical robot like C-3PO in Star Wars? In theory it doesn't matter much, in practice it does. Are you getting infected like your fellow crew mates or looking on dispassionately?

Then there's health, which will be 11-20 (d10+10) which is how much damage you can take before you receive a wound, which might be a sign that you really are having the worst day of your life.

Finally, after picking your skills, you get a loadout of gear, and a trinket and a patch. The trinkets and patches are flavour, but they are meant to inspire your formulation of your character's personality.

The deluxe box
The deluxe box is a lovely 10.5" x 12.5" x 2.5" set with gold embossed patterns below the Mothership logo.

It contains the Players Survival Guide, the Wardens Operation Manual, Unconfirmed Contact Reports, and the Shipbreaker's Guide.

In also contains these modules, Another Bug Hunt (An introductory module for new crews), Dead Planet (A classic adventure module), A Pound of Flesh (A sci-fi horror module set on a station), and Gradient Descent (A sprawling dungeon crawl module).

Finally, you get a set of dice (%, d20), a warden's screen that is as menacingly gritty on the player side as useful on the warden side, a poster map, and some punch out figure counters. There are also plastic standee bases.

The inside of the box is built to hold the booklets in the centre while having little lidded sides to store... stuff. Mine are full of various patches from this and other Mothership projects.

This box set will give you everything you need to get going and play your horror based science fiction sessions.

The core rule booklets are zine sized.

The Player's Survival Guide (PSG) as mentioned has everything you need for playing in your sessions. As mentioned above in the introduction, the system makes broad assumptions of the professional competence of the characters, but the stats and saves are reflective of how your character will act under the duress of the inhuman situation they've been thrust into.

The system uses percentile dice where 00 is a zero, and 99 is the highest number you can roll. You need to roll under your skill/stat/save when needed, and doubles are critical. Critical successes means something really good happens. Critical failure means something really bad happens, including a panic roll.

Failure on a roll increments your stress. And the more stress you accumulate the worse your potential panic rolls might turn out. You can always get rid of stress on shore leave. If you survive.

Two things of note that are vital for Mothership players to pay attention to.

First, there isn't a stealth skill. When faced with a xenomorph hunting for you, you can't simply roll to hide. You need to explain to the warden what you are doing to hide or conceal yourself. Then the warden will tell you the outcome.

Second, Mothership doesn't have combat. It has violent encounters. This may feel like one of those "I don't see the difference" moments, but much like Call of Cthulhu has mythos monsters that the average human has no chance against, here too then we have alien life that is lethally efficient and frightening.

Make sure your players note both of those before they just decide to jump into the fray D&D style.

Final note on the PSG, virtually every narrative play example in the margins winds up with a critical failure. Comedy gold.

The Warden's Operation Manual may be my favourite supplement for game masters ever. I've played and run various RPG games for a very long time, and this book is a master class. It opens with a 10 step process for running a game. Step one is to get a notebook and make some headings. Step two contains my favourite advice ever. "Do this before you're ready. Get a hold of 3-4 friends and tell them you want to play a sci-fi horror roleplaying game with them. Find a night where you can spend 3-4 hours playing in person or online. They don't need to know anything about the game. You'll team them how to play and they can make a character when you get together."

Boom. I'm dead. I love this book so much.

Sean McCoy had an interesting insight on running games, which was that most people coming to other RPGs come from a D&D ethos, and he wrote the Warden's Operation Manual to both teach new to RPG game masters how to run this game, and perhaps more importantly reeducate D&D DMs from the habits that 50+ years of D&D gaming has perpetuated in the RPG space.

At the heart of this is honouring the characters and their inherent professional skill sets. Hudson can run a bypass on an electronic lock. He doesn't need to roll. This is simply something he can do.

On the other hand, if Hudson is trying to use his welder to get through a deadbolt before the xenomorph who's spotted him can race down the access tunnel... then is when you would roll.

The Shipbreaker's Guide is a supplement about, well, space ships. If you're planning a campaign where the players are running their own ship, what you need is here. However, that's not the kind of game that hooks me so it generally lives in the bottom of the box set and the various modules I run give me what I need.

Unconfirmed Contact Reports is a horrific book, as in, it's full of horrors you can inflict on the players and gives you both stats and inspiration for encounters you can foist on your crew. If you are making up your own adventures, this is a must. If you're relying on third party content, then it's a handy reference, but not essential.

I won't fuly review the modules for two reasons. Either I've not had the opportunity to run them yet, or I haven't had the opportunity to play them yet. Gradient Descent is an epic space that I'm definitely going to run at some point. Another Bug Hunt is definitely what it sounds like, and has some great advice for new Wardens. It's also modular enough to break up into multiple one shot adventures, or to let you omit parts you don't want to run.

Parting Thoughts
Overall, Mothership has become one of my all time favourite RPGs. I love the entire premise of professional characters in this gritty sci-fi horror genre. I also love the "don't roll unless it's consequential" ethos.

Tuesday Knight Games has opened up the design space to third party designers, and there are literally hundreds of modules of content out there for the aspiring warden to pull from, on almost any kind of subgenre you care to name.

If you had to choose between solve, save, and survive, which two would you pick?

by GeoffreyB

Here is how my gaming group's campaign transpired:

The PC names were Felix Vanderpool, Dr. Anders Vance, Liam Montrose, Eva Serrano, Sy Darkwood, and Maverick James plus the GM.

Felix the leader of the group was granted leadership rights to the Chicago South Shore area and was in charge of overseeing the territory. The main haven was the Chicago Arts Depository which was haunted by a ghost. Most of the PCs were not aware of the ghost until Eva took a book out of the library causing it to go nuts. The ghost then marked Eva with an ink blotch on her face which remained until the book was returned which caused the ghost to settle down. An investigation of the ghost revealed how we could permanently appease it but had no luck doing so. So it remained as status quo.

After the ghost situation was settled the group was tasked into investigating a clergy member named Pastor Ruth Alvarez who kidnapped. There was no luck finding her until Dr. Anders Vance got a premonition in a dream which revealed the location of the building. After casing the building for security cameras the group entered the warehouse. Liam Montrose then compelled the main guard of the building to leave for an hour while the group entered and found the target. Ruth was being guarded but 4 newly turned vampires who put up a fight for the most part. All but one of the guards were subdued while the one escaped.

Knowing that the vampire existence was to remain somewhat a secret Felix determined that Pastor Ruth Alvarez seen too much and decided to turn her into a vampire also. All of the guards that didn't escape were staked and put into torpor. The pastor was also staked until we could decide what to do with her.

The group tracked the escaped guard to a warehouse in Gary, Indiana where Felix set up a tour under the guise of making a legitimate purchase. Felix and Maverick went to the appointment while the other members of the group waited outside the building. Things went fine until we went inside a sensitive part of the building causing an attack. Maverick ended up killing three of them and Felix the other two. The group took some of the guns that the warehouse was hiding in order to make it look like a gang hit.

After getting back to the haven the group had to investigate a werewolf incident in their territory. The werewolf was tracked to an abandoned boat on the docks of Lake Michigan. When confronting the werewolf Felix had a silver tipped cane sword while the other members of the group had silver knives. The werewolf took 7 turns to defeat and Felix in a rage fed off of the dead werewolf.

Getting back to Pastor Alvarez she was brought out of torpor and convinced to being an accepting vampire so her kidnapping was solved and she went back into the community only working at night.

The group was then called to a meeting with the overall bosses of Chicago for a status report. There the group was cleared of wrongdoing and was tasked to escort two dignitaries to see the bosses in two nights.

The group decided to take multiple cars to the airport and back to hide our movements. Due to poor driving the main car and not knowingly had GPS on it the main car got funneled and blocked by a crash. After some dialogue Dr. Anders Vance drove his car freeing up an escape path for the man car.

Later that night the group guarding the dignitaries was attacked and fought off and the group successfully brought the dignitaries to the bosses.

That is when our game broke down because it was determined that the PCs had no interest in the politics of overall Chicago vampire hierarchy.

We probably won't come back to this game because most the players didn't want to play semi-evil characters as the game intended.

by bulldog93

An item RPG Item: A Pound of Flesh has been added to the geeklist [Chars] Mothership RPG - Haunting of Ypsilon 14 Characters - Table 1

by 7eat51

An item RPG Item: The One Ring has been added to the geeklist [US] RPGG Pay It Forward: Traditional List