Mothership 1e: The Cleaning of Prison Station Echo

I was wondering if anyone was interested in playing, if I ran a game of Mothership 1e…. I’ve dabbled a bit with the rules system, face-to-face, and I feel like I have a decent grasp of things, but I’m not sure I feel super confident in running it face-to-face quite yet, and Play-by-Post is what I usually do to just get a good feel for a rules system and the modules I might run.

We’d be going through the module "The Cleaning of Prison Station Echo", which is a one-shot adventure with a bunch of sandbox material if one decides to make it a jump-off point for a campaign.

I’m thinking I’d hope for about 5-ish posts a week from players, but if players are engaged and happy to go faster, great! And by the same token, there’s an understanding that life happens, so if there’s times we can’t post so frequently, that’s alright as well. So the "5 posts a week" is just an optimistic ballpark.

Previous experience with the Mothership 1e is not required.

Ooh, tempting. But I doubt you'll have trouble filling this game!

I'd love to try Mothership. I haven't played the system before but I have played other ttrpg Scifi horror and scifi games.

I'd be interested. We did a Halloween one-shot the year before last, but that's the extent of my experience. I'd be happy to add to that.

I'm in too many games, right now, but it'id love to follow it if it's made public.

Delighted to see Mothership getting some love.

I wanna play this but also too many games atm #sadface Wishing you lots of fun with it!

I would like to play if you have room. Never tried this before.

@microtheMacroBear: For sure! I’ll count you in if you’re interested.

@MaJunior: I would love to have people with some previous experience with the system, because I take constructive criticism very well. I’ve ran Haunting of Epsilon-14, and I’m currently running this for an online group of friends, but I just don’t feel like I’m getting the tone right. I like to run some modules online as PbP because I enjoy the exercise of writing. It helps me get the feel of the tone I should be using when I speak in live games. I’d love people with past experience with Mothership to play and give me advice if needed.

@Ysolde, I definitely have room.


The game module of this I’m running with my friends online typically has about 4-6 players, depending on our schedules. We could definitely run it with 3, it might be a bit deadlier, in an already deadly game. That said, it’s really easy to make a new character if you die and fit them in, because you just roll up a new character and introduce them as one of the prisoners of Prison Station Echo, or as one of the science experiments. We’ve had to do that twice in our face-to-face game and the transition was smooth and offered a lot of roleplaying opportunities.

I kind of run my games with the intent of always pressing forward. A lot of combat, but I’ve found that roleplaying between combats really builds a good Mothership story, because death is almost always imminent, and intervals of roleplaying and character development between make deaths more interesting or exciting. Basically, character deaths are frequent, and it’s hard to care about the deaths unless you give players a chance to interact, roleplay, and make their characters "characters", rather than a bunch of stats and numbers to get slayed.

So there will be some deadly combats, but roleplaying is encouraged in between, if only to make your deaths more cool.

Everyone watches Predator knowing the Predator kills everyone but Arnold. But we we’re all sad every time a Not-Arnold died. They told funny jokes, they have lots of guns they love, or they make a memorable moment by being terrible at shaving with a BIC shaving razor.

So lots of scary fighting, but opportunities to make your character a person before they die.

@BenShotFirst - Sent you a PM.

Sounds great! I'm definitely interested!

Excellent! I'll be setting up the game this afternoon then, and I'll send invites to all that expressed interest afterwards!

Awesome!

I set up the game and sent invites out to the four players that expressed interest in playing, and I opened it up to applications if another couple find it later. It's set up for 6 players at the moment, but I'm running this campaign over discord one Tuesday a month right now and for players have been enough. Two PCs in that campaign have died and the players had to make new character, the other two players have almost completed the "one-shot" with their originals. I say "one-shot" because I estimate that the basic adventure would probably take 6-8 hours to finish at a face-to-face table, but we only run it in 2-hour sessions, and after three sessions finished, I'd guess they have about 30 minutes of gameplay next month.

For now I have included threads for OOC chatter and a Character Creation thread with (I think) pretty easy instructions on making a PC.

Hello! I threw in an application. New to gamersplane but I have a tiny bit of experience with Mothership. If you're still taking people I would love to join. Thanks!

Hi z3bul0n! I approved your application and sent you a PM. Welcome.

Oh hey, @bowlofspinach, I didn't even see you up there! Wow! Not sure if you recall, as I haven't been logged to Gamers Plane in a long time, but I ran a zombie apocalypse game of TinyD6 a few years ago that lasted at least a good year or a year-and-a-half if I recall correctly, and you and a couple of other players stuck it out until the end.

Hope you're doing well!

Yes, I remember! When I saw your username, it brought the memories back! It was a pretty fun game and it's still my headcanon that the apocalypse only started on our cruise ship and by getting one of the PCs onto a life boat with a bite wound, we then doomed the entire world.

@bowlofspinach: Yeah, Roxy; haha@! Got infected and was taken off-ship by the soldier Thomas, who set a course for land. Excellent head cannon.

Hi – I get a 403 error when I try and go to the recruitment thread – are you still accepting applications?

Hello BenShotFirst, same here. Would be interested to join if still possible. Have skimmed the Mothership rulebook, ran a Mothership pocket mode one shot once.