Ex Stasis Games

ONWARDS! To Day 9 of #CharacterCreationChallenge! Time to give Mothership, by Tuesday Knight Games, a go. I know people love Mothership, and as it’s sci-fi horror I should love it, but… I dunno. I’m interested. If someone offered to run a game of it, I would jump on it. I think by that metric it counts as a “game I want to play”, for the purposes of this challenge.

By now it’s pretty clear I’m writing these posts for myself. That was always the case. I was more interested in this challenge as a way to speedrun some new experiences in character creation and make myself think about what I like and don’t like in games’ character creation processes. Also, I’ve never once finished one of these “one a day” challenges, and I think there’s hope for this one. Something to be proud of.

Let’s Do This

Right off the bat, the Mothership resources do something I really like: they’ve got a beginner friendly character sheet, with all the necessary rules and info included, and an “advanced” character sheet for “veteran players who prefer a bit more space.” I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever seen this before, and it’s such a nice touch.

The version of Mothership I’m using is a 44-page zine. I don’t know what edition or release it is, it’s just the PDF I happen to have on my Google Drive. Character creation is the very first page, which I take as strong support for my standard approach of diving right in. It’s definitely not the current edition, because the character creation instructions do not match the form-fillable sheet I just downloaded. Oops.

Gonna stick with the sheet from the back of the zine. If I can scrape up enough to buy the new PDF, maybe I’ll try the full edition later this month.

Step 1: Stats and Saves

Eeeeeyyy,  random stats again. 6d10 each.

• Strength 32
• Speed 41
• Intellect 30
• Combat 35

Around average in most things, but notably fast. Cool. I have to say, it feels nice to roll a big old handful of dice and play with some big numbers.

Step 2: Class

There are four basic classes: Teamster, Scientist, Android and Marine. Androids are creepy and Marines don’t interest me. I made a smart boy yesterday and, as the book says “if Ripley is your hero, play a Teamster.” She is, so I will. I think he keeps the ship running, in a sort of everyday, lowkey way.

Teamsters get small bonuses to Strength and Speed. I think, later on, they became fully all-rounders, with small bumps to everything. Not sure which I like more, honestly. There’s something to be said for a real jack of all trades.

My starting saves are derived from my class, so no need to do anything with them.

Step 3: Skills

As a Teamster, I get zero-g, mechanical repair, and a choice of heavy machinery or piloting. I go for piloting. I’m liking the idea of this man as generally useful, not specialised, and pilot feels like a more defined role. I’ve got four other points to spend.

Skills are binary states in Mothership: you’re either skilled or not, and if you are, you get a bonus. More advanced skills have a narrower focus but provide a bigger bonus. For a starting character, and one who can turn his hand to most things, I’m going to stick to the basic skills and get a good spread of them.

I give him computers (everything on a spaceship involves a computer), rimwise (knowing his way around the seedier parts of the galaxy), scavenging (he can jury rig a lot of stuff) and first aid (he’s superglued up many small wounds).

Step 4: Stress and Panic

Every class has a specific way of dealing with Stress and Panic, the psychological factors that will fuck up a character. Teamsters seem to be the only one with a possibly beneficial effect: they can reroll on the Panic Effect table once per session. Sure, it’s risky, but it’s not as bad as literally every other class.

I assume this got smoothed out a bit in the full version of Mothership, because it just seems punishing.

Step 5: Loadout and Trinket

There are four standard loadouts called Excavation, Exploration, Extermination, and Examination. They’re not class-locked but there are obvious parallels. Excavation, with a crowbar and laser cutter (amongst other things) is clearly Teamster-y. It’s the most appropriate loadout for my career crewman who’ll pick up most gigs, so I take it.

I also get a trinket and a patch, which are just character background. I’m never a huge fan of these. It usually feels like they require more work to build into the fiction than they ever really pay off. I roll my 1d100s and get:

• Trinket: Necklace of shell casings
• Patch: “Powered by Coffee”

He’s never been in combat, so that necklace of shell casings is from when he worked for an arms manufacturer. It’s just made of defective casings off the factory floor.  “Powered by Coffee” is just a warning.

Yeah, this hasn’t changed my opinion on random stuff.

Step 6: Finishing Touches

Last bits and pieces, now. Stress and Resolve have fixed starting values (2, 0). Health is 2x Strength, so . I need some starting cash (5d10 x 10 = 210), and a name.

World, meet Brooks. He’s in his fifties, he’s spent more of his life in space than on solid ground, and he meets most threats with the same kind of grumpy, inconvenienced equanimity he tackles yet another broken repair droid: same shit, different star system. We’ll have to see how long that attitude holds up.

That was fun. It didn’t give me a character with a great deal of depth, but he’s going to die in space. He’ll become interesting if he survives a couple of near-death experiences.