by leroy43

According to Gary Oldman, reality TV "is the museum of social decay."

Welcome to ARKYVR, a toolkit for the Mothership 1E RPG that provides rules for playing documentary filmmakers in space. Instead of Androids, Marines, Scientists, and Teamsters, we have Camera Operators, Producers, Sound Recordists, and Utility Techs. We have 68 pages of pure joy to read through describing the roles, backgrounds, and skills of these classes, the equipment they use, and how to manage pre-, production, and post-.

Meanwhile for the Warden, we have over half the volume dedicated to running such a cast and crew, including suggestions on how to "hack" existing scenarios to dovetail the reality TV experience into your SF horror scenario.

I candidly confess that I bought ARKYVR more as a novelty to fill out my Mothership reference repertoire, and thought to myself "that's kinda cool", but there are two reasons I'm writing a review now.

One is that I have a friend who used to do post- on a reality TV show (doesn't matter which one), and on this show there were two mobile and seven still cameras generating about 80-90 hours of content daily. Someone else would package up about 2.5 minutes of related content, and his job was to make up a 20-25 second clip from that. This is how they stitched together the show and presented the audience with the narrative they wanted to spin.

Two is that someone on Reddit mentioned they used ARKYVR with the (brilliant) Vibechette scenario from Hull Breach Volume 01. The hook was the players were a film crew following a bounty hunter on a mission. That was the epiphany for me.

This led me down the path of thinking "what if there were an embedded film crew on the Sulacco in Aliens?"

And that in a nutshell is the appeal. No guns, just a camera and a mic and "please tell me you got that?" along with a strong instinct for self-preservation and being able to outrun the marines to the safety of the escape pods.

ARKYVR elevates what could have been a gimmick into one of the most brilliant thematic lenses available for Mothership. By stripping away heavy ordnance and replacing it with the desperate, rating hungry ambition of a documentary crew, it turns every dark corridor and cosmic nightmare into high stakes storytelling. Whether you are running a bespoke media satire or embedding a sound tech into a classic bug hunt scenario, this supplement proves that nothing in deep space is quite as terrifying as dying on camera.

Except, of course, missing the shot entirely.

If you want to inject genuine, claustrophobic dread and sharp satire into your next sci-fi horror session, pick up ARKYVR. Just remember: keep the feed live, let the marines take the point, and never stop rolling.

by leroy43

There is no point in having rules for everything when the universe is actively trying to kill you.

Wages of Sin is Tuesday Knight Games’ massive new campaign expansion and setting toolkit for the Mothership SF Horror RPG. Written by Luke Gearing and edited by Jarrett Crader, this 336 page hardcover acts as a direct response to the fragmented one-shot nature of SF sandbox gaming, aiming to serve as the connective tissue for an entire multi year campaign, assuming that being a bounty hunter is your jam!

It was part of the Mothership Month 2024 campaign, and (finally) recently arrived in backer's hands. On the upside, the PDF has been sitting on my hard drive for quite a while now, one of the reasons I don't mind delays as much with RPG stuff since at least I can start using the supplements before the real books settle onto my shelf.

In contrast to the zines and tri-fold pamphlets we've become used to with Mothership, Wages of Sin makes the leap to a robust hardcover format. The layout by Sean McCoy and Nick McIver is crisp, dense, and remarkably clean. I made the choice to splurge on the black foil embossed cloth covered edition, although I cannot deny that the mainstream red cover isn't dead sexy. Fortunately that's how it is in the PDF, so I can absolutely enjoy both renditions.

From a high level there are three main takes I have on the presentation.

First is the "cassette-punk" futurist galactic map that instantly establishes context. Every port class, page reference, and shipping lane is clearly marked to turn a static graphic into an active navigational tool.

Second, Gearing and Crader compress entire solar systems into single, evocative paragraphs. The extra space is spent entirely on operational utility and NPC motivations. The flip side of this approach is that the Warden will need to flesh out the specifics. This isn't a problem; there are countless ready to run adventures you can pull off the shelf with near zero prep.

Third, visually the graphic design truly maximizes table-ready readability without sacrificing aesthetics. You get the full on Mothership vibe, but the layout is still crisp, clean, and consistent. You can open to a random page and know exactly what you're seeing.

While marketed around its headline numbers (100 bounties, 50 planets, 10 rival hunters), the core engine of Wages of Sin is its campaign level framework.

The book is structurally divided into three core toolkits:

The Setting & Bounties: A full sandbox built around 100 distinct jobs. Rather than outlandish space-monster hunts, ~80% of these missions lean heavily into the mundane, terrifying horrors of a broken society (arresting runaway teens, managing pandemic quarantine, navigating anti-immigrant riots). As it says in the intro on page 7,

The cheap serials tell you that beyond the Core stretches
lawless space infested with pirate-kings, striking workers, and
fleeing murderers. As the Rim is carved up and sold off to
megacorporations, colonial governments, and religious groups,
these owners determine how to enforce their own law—while
respecting the Basic Workers Rights Agreement, of course.

The Legal & Carceral System: A complete procedural loop for when player characters inevitably break the law. It covers evidence collection, dynamic bounty generation on the crew, legal representation, plea bargains, and full court trials. This is a fabulous addition and goes well alongside Breach of Contract (published alongside the stellar Hull Breach Volume 01 supplement).

The Prison Moon: A week by week survival engine on a penal colony. Imprisoned players must balance backbreaking logging work, deadly indigenous wildlife, corrupt guards, and encounters with the very NPCs they put behind bars earlier in the campaign.

Wages of Sin functions less like a linear adventure and more like a high density reaction engine.

The bounties explicitly set up an oppressive capitalist baseline. When player crews take on seemingly simple jobs like serving a warrant on a teenager living in a wind blasted military bunker, the horror comes from their explicit complicity in the prison industrial complex. The prison moon is a for profit jail after all.

Because the world is built as a setting rather than a rigid narrative, consequences compound organically. Unresolved or botched bounties potentially ricochet across the sector, causing economic collapses, political revolutions, and long term rivalries. Bounty levels go from 1 (Minor Bounties) to 9 (Apocalyptic Bounties), with consequent levels of difficulty and involvement. The maps vary from room scale dungeon crawls down to planet wide tactical overviews. I note that while this gives Wardens total freedom, it requires a higher degree of on the fly improvisation. In addition, ten fully detailed bounty hunters act as persistent pressure points, using everything from local legal frameworks to hired mobs to track down defaulting players.

Wages of Sin is a masterclass in high density TTRPG design. By refusing to waste space on fluff, Tuesday Knight Games has delivered a 336-page book that offers more usable table material than titles three times its size.

It isn't necessarily a beginner product. The light map scales and heavy reliance on improv mean novice Wardens might find it intimidating. However, for experienced groups looking beyond a one shot self contained adventure Wages of Sin provides a complete, hyper-functional campaign engine capable of powering years of play. Best served alongside the Mothership Deluxe set.

by Dunheved

The titular White Wizard is of course, Saruman.
When I had read through the pdf I had a poor impression of the book. It didnt seem coherent to me. So I waited to read the hard copy, as I find it a lot easier to look back then.
I have done that now, and its a great read.

This is a book with discrete adventures. For sure. They are so discrete that you can do any or all of them. However, you are somewhat directed by the LOTR timeline as to the order you want to play them in.*
Is this an example of a railroad in a system that (so far) has been keen to offer its customers as wide a choice as possible? I can see why some might say that; but its a strong word to use considering that you DONT have to do this. So I find myself in two minds if this is flexible or not.

And now I find that "in two minds" describes most of what I feel about the book.
I like the individual stories; but I struggle to feel that a Company would be employed on such an ad-hoc basis through many years. It doesn't 'narrate' well for me. Lets face it: Saruman is either going to pleased with the Company after the first Task, or he is not. So he will use them continually if pleased; but if a mission does not work out well, Saruman would simply not employ them again - he's not a charity!

2. Saruman's "condition" evolves over the time portrayed by the book. This is really good and a valiant effort is made to apply the Shadow points mechanic to this NPC to represent this moral decline. But what of the heroes? Do they also slowly descend into being minions of the Darkness? And if they do not, why do they continue to accept commissions from him? The Shadow mechanic in the Core Rules does a great job of showing the psychological degradation of a Character's mind/spirit due to witnessing the effects and temptations of Saurons forces. This same mechanism is used to erode Saruman over the years. But Saruman is a Power that ELECTS to follow the more brutal possibilities that go with the old phrase: " the end justifies the means". The heroes of Tolkiens world do NOT choose to do this as systematically as the wizard does, BECAUSE they are heroes of Tolkiens world. One of the better things about Middle-earth is that the people in it are not morally dubious: they know Right from Wrong, and choose accordingly. So this just does not 'narrate' for me.

3. So this brings my sense of incoherence back. Perhaps I would be more content if there were a Trigger to Sarumans behaviour changing at some time. (The text seems to imply that this change happens when the Palantir is first used). The correlation here is of course, that when Saruman has been Triggered, the heroes should notice this the next time they gain an audience. This next mission should then be too distasteful for them, and they need to part ways with the White Wizard. ( Probably gained a permanent Enemy.)
Tolkiens heroes are not the Hands that do Sarumans dirty work for him when he falls in his mission.



* this of course is not strictly true: an experienced or confident Loremaster (LM) can take whatever they want from this book and blend it into their own campaign. But I suspect that many people will at least wish to roll through the published order and lean on the advice found in the book.
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by Fantasy EnCounter

€50.00 for RPG Item: Star Crossed (Boxed set)
Condition: New
Location: Germany