REVIEW: Mothership 1e - Player's Survival Guide by Tuesday Knight Games [2/5]
Enter the cum jar.
Mothership 1e Reviews
Player’s Survival Guide (PSG) - 2/5
Review
The last part of my Mothership 1e review series. The “Player’s Survival Guide” (PSG) is meant to be the core rulebook and manual for play. It has character creation, some of the needed rules systems, and a lot of combat rules. A bizarrely high amount of combat rules.
The PSG is 44-pages including cover, attributions etc. Maybe half of each page has rules on it, so you are looking at a maximum of 20-pages of rules.
If you haven’t read my previous reviews of the Mothership 1e line, you should start with the “Warden’s Operations Manual” (WOM) review here:
I was finding it hard to identify where the problems in the PSG are. Character creation is pretty fast, the resolution system is fine if slightly lacking the bite you’d expect, the art for sure is fucking delightful.
No, the problems are more structural than that. It doesn’t know what it wants to be.
If you’re making something for a very specific type of play which is inspired by a specific genre of fiction, such as a sci-fi horror tabletop roleplaying game heavily inspired by Alien, The Thing, and Event Horizon then you have to be knife edge sharp with any potential fat.
You can add fat on later, but that runs the risk of changing the genre of the game.
And this is doubly important if you are trying to fit all that information into 44-pages.
It’s like the difference between Alien and Aliens. In Alien, it’s about space truckers, and Sigourney Weaver barely surviving against a single xenomorph. In Aliens, it’s about colonial marines, and Sigourney Weaver taking the fight back against an entire colony. The amount of aliens made it more about being overwhelmed than fear.
Alien is a horror movie, Aliens is an action movie with horrifying pieces.
Mothership 1e thinks it’s the former. The rules as written say it’s the latter.
Combat rules take up around 15 pages, between weapon equipment lists, the above armour spread, the actual combat rules themselves. That is over 1/3 of the book dedicated to combat.
The thing that most horror protagonists don’t engage in.
Is this a horror game or an action game? You would think that it could be indicated by what the most time is dedicated to but, according to Tuesday Knight Games, that is not the case.
Now we get onto what I consider the most unhinged decision in Mothership:
There’s no stealth mechanics.
In a genre that is overwhelmingly about hiding from the big bad monster.
This is a conscious design decision. I think it is insane. The only reason I know it is a conscious decision is because Sean McCoy said it on fucking Twitter. He said, essentially, stealth is so crucial to the horror genre that putting mechanics in would ruin it and you should have conversations instead.
What the fuck?! This is like giving me a raw burger in a restaurant and telling me that cooking it is so important that I should do it myself. That’s what I paid you for.
I could accept that decision but there’s nothing in the book to reference this either!
I would at least expect a “have conversations” sidebar. The closest thing to this crucial sidebar is tucked away on pages 34-35 of the WOM in the form of “Making Up House Rules” and “Making Good Rulings”.
Imagine getting this ridiculous book home to your group, finally getting to a point where stealth is needed to sneak past Dr Doomdick or some shit, and then completely destroying the flow of tension as you try to find the mechanics for it.
Insanity.
Where does the confusion come from? It might have something to do with the amount of people listed as developers.
I don’t actually know how many people have worked on the PSG or to what they actually did. There’s six or seven developers listed on the PSG, and each book has a different style of attribution. Sean McCoy is listed as the creator of the PSG, as the writer on the WOM, and not listed at all on the “Unconfirmed Contact Reports” (UCR).
In my opinion, six developers for a 44 page book is fucking insanity but it does start to explain how a book so short still doesn’t know what it wants to be.
Some people took offence to my colourful description of Mothership 1e as being the tabletop equivalent of a group cum jar.
I don’t think I’m wrong.
Half a dozen people have poured creative juices into Mothership but, much like the aforementioned tub of cum, they’re not directed anywhere in particular. How can anyone really be surprised that it’s sticky, messy and confused?
There’s more elements that I could discuss.
There’s hireling, campaign and space port rules in here, but why? Surely that would be better suited to the WOM. Adding it in here is taking up space in the 44-pages. The spaceship creation rules were taken to a separate book, why are these included here?
It adds to this feeling of creative ejaculation, jumbled together without rhyme or reason.
There’s some stuff I liked in the PSG:
I think the class choices are reasonable. Marine probably should have been Private Security or something a bit less impressive, but that’s not a huge criticism.
The art and weapon layouts would be brilliant for a completely different genre of game.
I love the skill-tree. I think it is very well designed and directs player imagination really cleanly.
But other than those few things, I struggle to say anything positive.
I don’t think it should be a surprise that Mothership 1e’s “Player’s Survival Guide” is getting a low score. In all honesty, the only reasons it hasn’t received a 1/5 is the art and the skill tree, the former of which is beautiful and the latter of which I will absolutely steal the style from.
There’s a long history of sci-fi games that would fill the same broad hole as Mothership 1e, from “Stars Without Number” to “Warpstar!”. All of which would be better serviced by the genuinely brilliant WOM.
I am well and truly disappointed in the PSG. There’s another book within the core set called the “Shipbreaker’s Toolkit” (SBT) and that shows that Sean McCoy and the team at Tuesday Knight Games are capable of genuinely producing something creative, new, and interesting.
So why is that not reflected in the PSG?
The PSG is a series of undefined and absolutely fucking bizarre design decisions. It’s lead to an incoherent mess of random elements strung together into something approximating a game system.
Can you play using the PSG? Sure, but to do so you’ll need to be adding another load of cum into the jar.
Maybe clean it out first.
Mothership 1e “Player’s Survival Guide”: 2/5 STARS
Confused about what it wants to be, too much bloat for such a short book. It needed a full editorial pass and a removal of any non-key elements.