M.T. Black
Hero
I ran Mothership for the first time last week. My D&D group did it as a fill-in one shot because some folks were away. We played "The Haunting of Ypsilon 14", which is considered the classic introductory scenario.
The scenario does not hold your hand! I rewrote the hook, and, my players pretty quickly understood what was required and the adventure was soon humming along nicely. You really need to time the monster attacks fairly well to keep the pace up, but that's not too difficult. I don't think rolling the monsters location randomly, as suggested by the text, would work too well. The large cast of NPCs is difficult to manage in a one shot, so you want to reduce the roster really quickly.
Regarding the system itself, it seems adequate. We used the free Mothership Companion app to create the characters, which is fantastic. I also really liked the Wound table - it added heaps of flavor to say "Oh, you sliced off two of his fingers and he's bleeding badly." On the downside, I think the interaction of Fear, Sanity, Stress, and Panic is all a bit messy, especially when the rules are pretty much "force a panic roll whenever you want." The panic checks actually felt curiously low stakes, because all the results we were rolling up were long term conditions.
It was a good experience overall. Two of the three player characters died, but the third escaped and destroyed the base on the way out. The guys enjoyed it, said it reminded them very much of Call of Cthulhu, and was good for an occasional one shot. But their praise was a little tepid - they don't really like these high lethality games, and it did seem to reward luck more than careful gameplay.
Recommendations (specific for Ypsilon 14)
The scenario does not hold your hand! I rewrote the hook, and, my players pretty quickly understood what was required and the adventure was soon humming along nicely. You really need to time the monster attacks fairly well to keep the pace up, but that's not too difficult. I don't think rolling the monsters location randomly, as suggested by the text, would work too well. The large cast of NPCs is difficult to manage in a one shot, so you want to reduce the roster really quickly.
Regarding the system itself, it seems adequate. We used the free Mothership Companion app to create the characters, which is fantastic. I also really liked the Wound table - it added heaps of flavor to say "Oh, you sliced off two of his fingers and he's bleeding badly." On the downside, I think the interaction of Fear, Sanity, Stress, and Panic is all a bit messy, especially when the rules are pretty much "force a panic roll whenever you want." The panic checks actually felt curiously low stakes, because all the results we were rolling up were long term conditions.
It was a good experience overall. Two of the three player characters died, but the third escaped and destroyed the base on the way out. The guys enjoyed it, said it reminded them very much of Call of Cthulhu, and was good for an occasional one shot. But their praise was a little tepid - they don't really like these high lethality games, and it did seem to reward luck more than careful gameplay.
Recommendations (specific for Ypsilon 14)
- Improve the hook. In my scenario, the players were sent by the company to pick up classified cargo from Mike the engineer, the cargo being a canister of yellow goo. Sonya, the station head, knows nothing about it all ("typical mushroom treatment"). So the players arrived and had an incentive to search the base for Mike.
- Use the Mothership Companion App. This is one of the reasons I will likely run this game again in the future, as opposed to other games.
- Ignore Fear and Sanity rolls, and just ask for Panic rolls whenever the characters see something horrible.
- Pare down the NPC list quickly. The cast list is too big to do justice to it in a couple of hours. Pick some NPCs you would like to play, and pulverize the rest asap.
- Introduce monster attacks to drive the story. When the action lags, they hear a scream from another room. And if any PC is silly enough to go somewhere on their own, attack immediately!
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