As mentioned yesterday, I obtained the Mothership RPG following Gencon (ordered directly from Tuesday Knight Games, since I could not obtain it at the convention). I only have the PDFs for now, the physical books will be a week or two, but from what I am reading thus far, I am really impressed. I had heard great things about the game, both thru various articles and some YouTube reviews, but many of those can be biased based on sponsors. I know most groups try not to bias things, but some naturally slips in when it is a promo copy or a paid review. Since I don’t have to worry about any of that nonsense, I get to form my own opinions.
I was rather cautious about the purchase, given the tight formatting and concise rules. My concern with many games these days is that they tend to overly simplify game mechanics and leave almost everything up to either interpretation or group cooperation. That is a style that works for many groups, I have no issue with the style, but doesn’t really work for me. I like to have some framework to fall back on, otherwise the story may as well just be a diceless game (I know that’s an oversimplification). I am open for some interpretation, but more crunch tends to be better. As a comparison, we used to play Cypher system, as an introduction to gaming by a new group. It worked, but we rapidly ran into areas that were undefined, and switched to the full Pathfinder system (reference our original Rise of the Runelords campaign).
However, if done correctly, narrative games can be very good – one of my favorites is still the original West End Star Wars RPG, a system which would generate a new character in literally 10 seconds, and with which we had many fun adventures back in the day. A solid mechanic, a developed setting, and some imagination, and the game works very well.
Fortunately, Mothership seems to fall into this latter category – just enough crunch to provide a framework that works for the setting, but enough undefined to have a lot of freedom in the game play. And as a bonus, the concise style of the rules and adventures lines up almost exactly with my own campaign prep style. Rather than pages and paragraphs of detailed descriptions, and large spreads of maps, Mothership includes bulleted lists of descriptions and locations. Details are listed in an organized fashion and ordered in increasing detail. Anything else not detailed is up to the imagination of the GM or group at the time, giving a solid combination of freedom and structure.
Admittedly, I have only just started on the introduction adventure module, and I have yet to run an actual game, but the wheels are already turning about how this can be a very successful game. With a group who is open to the concept, and ready for the horror aspect, it can be a very strong game system and a notable improvement over some of our prior attempts. At its bones, it feels very much like Call of Cthulhu, but far more streamlined. Instead of a long list of skills, many of which won’t come into play, it has a shorter list that allows for focus and are all thematic around a science-fiction setting. Instead of the CoC Insanity mechanics, it has a more modern take referencing Stress level – the more stress, the less effective or efficient. But it also has mechanics (albeit difficult) to recover from stress both during and after an adventure.
I can easily see this system being adapted easily to other time periods as well – with a revised skill list it could easily fit into just about any setting. I suspect the publishers are aware of this, and likely have modules for that change that I am just not aware of yet.
For Halloween this year, we have planned on a sequel to our prior one-shot The Dare, with the kids now a few years older. I am already envisioning how that could be done with this system instead. And Mothership would have been a far better implementation of Salos Glory than our attempt with Call of Cthulhu, since the story was so well written (it was more a failing of the CoC combat mechanics, than anything else).
