A Hazard Die for Mothership

Ben is interested in getting people blogging about Mothership. People are good, so of course it wasn’t long before someone shared something: Hazards In Space! Adapting the Hazard Die For Mothership. Funny enough, this is something I had also done when running Gradient Descent a few years ago, and probably should have carried forward when I was running Another Bug Hunt.

Mothership’s play loop is pretty free-form and loose, like a lot of OSR games: describe a situation and have a conversation with your players till the situation is resolved. This loop is illustrated on page 27-28 of the Warden Manual in a neat and tidy spread. I like to run games this way as well, but I find left to my own devices my games drift towards some all vibes no rules FKR-ish nonsense.¹ Forcing some structure on myself is helpful.

When I ran Gradient Descent using 0e Mothership, and Another Bug Hunt using the current rules, I never felt like I was really taking advantage of the stress and panic system. I don’t call for rolls that much, so there is less chance for people to gain stress through failure. I also don’t have a good habit for just doling stress out because it makes fictional sense.² Folding gaining stress into the act of exploration seems like a reasonable approach for play. Here is a small update to my earlier attempt at moving the Hazard Die to Mothership:

Hazard Die

When exploring a dangerous environment roll a d10 each time the players perform a notable action (i.e. move between locations, carefully search a space, attempt to hack a computer, etc).

1: Encounter
2-4: Environment
5-6: Exhaustion
7-8: Expiration
9-10: Easement

Encounter: roll on a random encounter table. Gain 1 stress.
Environment: something about the players immediate surroundings change: lights go out, gravity fails, doors lock, etc. Perhaps there are hints of a future encounter. Gain 1 stress.
Exhaustion: the characters are hungry or fatigued. They must rest or gain 1 stress.
Expiration: batteries die, oxygen runs dangerously low, etc. Easement: a moment of calm, the players may lose 1 stress, but never reducing it below the value they started the session with.

Mothership has real Alien vibes. In a horror games it feels like the general mood should always be “it’s quiet, too quiet.” Mothership’s typical 10% chance of a random encounter seems inline with that, so I left it alone. I merged what Brendan calls Percept & Locality into a single entry named Environment. I think the general intention is the same: hints at future badness. The big change from my previous table is that Encounter and Environment results tick up a players stress. As players explore a location they will slowly accrue stress.

The other results are unchanged from my previous iteration. Exhaustion forces players to pause unless they accept 1 stress. This result is only meaningful if strict time records are being kept. In Another Bug Hunt infected characters will eventually turn into bugs after enough time has passed: make sure you track that shit! If characters are being chased, this is another result that will likely result in them gaining stress as they can’t stop to chill out. In Mothership you don’t have torches, but there are lots of electronics that have a chance to break down. Expiration is the place for those failures to happen. Since we are doling out stress I thought there should be a chance for players to lose some of the exploration based stress they have earned.

Is this good? I’d have to play and see. With these sorts of rules you want to get the mouth feel just right. Maybe a violent encounter should result in d5 stress. Maybe this is way too much stress and your characters become broken husks without also tweaking the stress relief rules. I will report back.