REVIEW: Mothership 1e - Warden's Operations Manual by Tuesday Knight Games [4/5]
The only good bit of the Mothership Kickstarter.
Mothership 1e Reviews
Warden’s Operations Manual (WOM) - 4/5
Review
Mothership 1e by Tuesday Knight Games is mostly a piece of shit; a confused mess of conflicting design principles with six (or maybe seven) developers spread across 40 odd pages. The review for this will be coming in a few days, once I have forced myself to read through the slop that is the “Unconfirmed Contact Reports” book.
In a bizarre contrast, the gamemaster guide, “Warden’s Operations Manual” or WOM, is brilliant.
I devoured this fucking thing.
The WOM is 60 pages long and is essentially a series of linked two-page articles that come together to form a beautiful handbook for running horror games and - in particular - one shots.
My favourite part of the whole thing is the TOMBS cycle. This is a framework for developing a horror session, following your standard scary movies. If you’ve no idea what you’re doing, and if you’re running Mothership 1e then you probably don’t, then this is fucking perfection.
It follows the steady build up and then release of tension that you’d get out of any good quality sci-fi horror movie. You can see the Event Horizon, Alien, The Thing, all beautifully framed in this.
There’s something in the WOM that I wish more guidance books did, and that’s explain the concepts through illustrations.
You can see it above in the TOMBS, but the best example is in Tactical Considerations:
The picture above makes the text instantly obvious. It enhances the text instead of taking away from it. If you have English as a second language, are easily confused or have dyslexia, things suddenly make a lot more bloody sense.
The last third of the book is a good set of campaign design principles, most of which could be used to great effect in a better system. Whoever wrote this section seems to understand how to run an engaging game.
I do have some problems with the WOM.
There’s no table of contents, which makes it hard to flick through to find some particular page to reference back to.
The advice and procedures are too compact. As an example, TOMBS above could have been a full ten page section on its own, with advice and roll tables for each. That’s sort of damning the book with praise though, as my main problem is that I want more.
The book feels confused on what type of campaign it really wants to support. The Campaign Style table guide above is indicative of attempting to support a broad range of campaigns, but each piece of advice or procedure is suited for some of these. I’ll come back to this in a later review, because it’s stretched across all the Mothership 1e elements.
Also, there’s like three references to the “Player’s Survival Guide” in it, which is three too many.
For me, the strangest part of this whole thing is that the mere existence of the WOM well and truly means someone ran a fucking great game with the roleplaying equivalent of a group cum jar.
I am giving this 4/5 on the basis of the brilliant advice in it. This would have been a 5/5 rating if there was more advice and more procedure added in across the board. I think it’s a pretty fucking good book.
If you hate the Mothership 1e “Player’s Survival Guide” then I would highly recommend buying the WOM and using it with one of the many better systems like “Hulks and Horrors”, “White Star” or “Stars Without Number”.
I genuinely believe you’ll have a good campaign.