Mist and Sorrows - A Trifold Fantasy Mothership Hack

 

 

Beware what you wake in the dark...

At some point last year I bought Mothership, and after reading through the player's survival guide I decided to give it a shot. I ran some friends on the GLoG server through a space station as they tried to rescue... someone. There were lots of laughs along the way (My ma' was a robot!), but I'd hardly call it horror.

A little disappointed, I put it back on the shelf. Still, I've been meaning to come back and read through the Warden's Manual for some time, especially as I keep hearing it called one of the best referee books in the Old School vein.

Friends and foes, I was not lied to.

The Warden's Manual is punchy, blunt, and full of hands-on guidance about how to create situations that are already bad, and destined to get really bad before the get better (and some day even worse).

The usefulness of the manual extends beyond sci-fi into the realms of all role-playing games. A few items that I found especially good were:

  • The "alignment chart" for NPCs, with Helpful/Unhelpful and Powerful/Powerless.
  • The TOMBS system for creating horrors.
  • General guidance on running horror, especially in regards to controlling tension.
  • Exact procedures for quickly generating gameable content.

The issue, I realized, was not in the mechanics of the game I was using, but in all the advice about running a horror game that I was not using. Mothership isn't about how you roll dice (other than cautiously), it's about traumatic situations in the vast emptiness of space, faced not by well-equipped heroes, but by desperate individuals doing their best with the tools they have.

Most of the interest in this kind of game comes from the situations, not the character's ability. 

In a mad fit, I realized that most D&D games with level-ups and strong character growth just don't fit the bill for horror play. Cairn is probably the closest to working out of the box for fantasy horror.

But I wondered if I could hack something together. I demanded of myself that it be small. I have other projects already and can't commit to a big new game, and I also wanted it to utilize some of the "core" of Mothership to save myself a little time. Specifically, I used:

  • Simple Roll-Under with Advantage.
  • Typically under 50% chance of success when rolling dice.
  • The Stress/Panic System. 
  • Wounds and Very Slow Healing.

Without further ado, here's Mist and Sorrows. It is rough, untested, and heavily reliant on the Mothership Warden's Guide to make it into an actual playable game, but it is here, none the less.

Mist and Sorrows 

Also, as it is just now June, happy pride!


  

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