REVIEW: Mothership 1e - Unconfirmed Contact Reports by Tuesday Knight Games [1/5]
A book full of SCP rejects.
Mothership 1e Reviews
Unconfirmed Contact Reports (UCR) - 1/5
Review
I hate it when you eagerly anticipate opening a book and discover that it is just fucking garbage.
Such as when I opened up the “Unconfirmed Contact Reports” (UCR) by Tuesday Knight Games. The UCR is Mothership 1e’s equivalent of a monster manual, except without many of the things you would expect from a monster manual. Such as inventiveness, cohesion, or general quality.
I had read the “Warden’s Operations Manual” (WOM) a few hours before, and I was buzzing on how clever some elements of it were. I reviewed the WOM positively, and I would recommend reading that review before continuing:
One of the things that I highlight in the WOM review is the TOMBS system, which is essentially a standardised process to run horror one-shots. The point is to allow tension to build and prevent it from being released too easily.
The steps on TOMBS are essentially:
Transgression: Something bad is done by someone.
Omens: Evidence that something bad has been done and a worse thing is coming.
Manifestation: The worse thing shows up.
Banishment: Something is done to make the worse thing go away.
Slumber: The worse thing goes back to sleep and awaits the transgression to happen again.
Now, you would expect a monster manual to use the processes as laid out in the gamemaster guide. This would be a beautiful method of integrating all the different components and illustrate how clever the gamemaster guide is.
Tuesday Knight Games believe in subverting expectations.
There is no link to the WOM. There is no indicator at all that the person that wrote these monsters actually read the WOM. The only actual link to the “Player’s Survival Guide” (PSG) is a single line at the top of some of the pages that indicate the creature’s stats.
That would be a problem if I was planning to use it with Mothership 1e. I am not. I can be disappointed for whatever poor sap ends up buying it, expecting an easily usable monster manual, but at least I can delight in the creative and horrific creature designs.
Again, Tuesday Knight Games have brilliantly subverted expectations.
The creature designs are reminiscent of dollar store SCPs, rejected for being somehow both too derivative and too random.
It’s like the opposite of the creative process for the xenomorph. H. R. Giger took the ordinary and natural and twisted it into being new and wrong. Alive but metallic and fuelled by acid, the uncomfortable melding of sexual imagery with insect anatomy, the almost human structure of the whole.
Instead, the UCR has Granny.
This is an especially bad design in a book of bad designs and yet it illustrates the rest perfectly.
None of it resonates together and somehow at the same fucking time the conflicting parts don’t work to make it uncomfortable.
It’s an old, naked, smelly woman in a hole in the floor. I can think of at least three ways to make this scary, but the writers of Granny apparently just decided she was going to be hungry.
You could make it sexual, you could make it about the weaponisation of sympathy from the elderly, you could use the disgust about needing to care for the needs of something else.
Any of these utilise the visual design to make it fucking horrible instead of milquetoast “Granny hungry”.
And on top of that, the microfiction in the top right seems to be from a different entry. Unless the idea is that people get crammed into a hole by this thing? Who the fuck knows.
Nearly all the monsters are like this though. Horror needs the different elements to work together or against each other to generate something uncomfortable, and very few of these monsters manage.
The few ones where they are uncomfortable and actually verge into the territory of horror, they are completely fucking useless at the game table.
The Dorians here would be great for a book, movie, or being rejected from the SCP archive. But how are you meant to deploy them on a tabletop group without them just scuttling behind the players like little sad turds?
Maybe we would know if there was a gamemaster book that suggested a series of steps to utilise monsters in a horror format. Unfortunate that the writers of the UCR never read it.
Ultimately, the madness of this book is not that it ignores the PSG, the WOM, and the basic standards of quality.
No, it is the fact that there is so fucking much good quality monster art in the other books that is not used here.
Like this:
Just think about flicking through the other books, seeing this nasty cunt, and imagining what horrors your gamemaster is going to inflict on you.
And then he pulls out motherfucking Granny.
The most use you’d get out of UCR is from the “Five Quick Horrors” section at the back, which list some basic monster stats and - guess what - how to use the fucking things:
How this wasn’t the case for every single monster in the book is an absolute mystery.
This book has eight separate writers for under 50 pages of what I could haltingly call content. Did no one question the lack of design principles? Did none of the people writing this read any of the other books? Was this book just summoned from the void?
The UCR is a complete own goal. The field was fucking wide open and, for whatever reason, the writers of this flubbed it. That is the reason it gets 1/5 stars.
😯
Thanks for the review; I keep thinking that Mothership sounds pretty cool but it seems like on the whole 1e is a swing and a miss.