Kickstopper: The Mothership Connection

It seems genuinely difficult for a 100% new tabletop RPG to take off these days, especially one with a brand new system and an original setting. New editions, hacks of existing games, new applications of pre-existing systems, and adaptations from other media (like RPGs based on movie or novel licenses) can all tap into a pre-existing audience for the game, system, or setting in question.

It’s far from impossible, of course. For as long as the RPG industry has been a thing, a steady stream of new games has arisen – fads like the D20 System glut around the release of D&D 3E and the original OGL may sometimes cause the river of inspiration to run low a little (as far as all-new games go), but it never completely dries up. And it’s always been the case, even in the earliest days of the hobby, that a chunk of new games and product lines have emerged only to be faced with total indifference in the wider hobby, failing to build enough of a fanbase of enthusiasts around the game in question to sustain it over the years.

Without creating a self-sustaining community of people who like playing the game, reading its game materials, discussing the game, designing material for the game, and propagating the game, an RPG faces extinction. This doesn’t just apply to commercial flops – though a game which utterly fails to sell will obviously fail to make a community that extends much beyond the immediate friends and acquaintances of the designers, a fragile network prone to going extinct if the key movers lose enthusiasm for the game in question. Whilst I suppose it is possible that someone out there has an active Tales of Gargentihr campaign going, I think the odds are against it, and if there’s an ongoing game out there it’s more likely than not run by one of the designers or someone in their circle of friends, because that thing sank like a stone and has had basically no attention for years outside of my own review.

However, it’s also possible for an RPG to get published, have a period of flash-in-the-pan popularity, be the flavour of the month for a while, but fail to build a truly self-sustaining community which doesn’t just drift away once the game’s time in the spotlight has come and gone. Take the portfolio of Atlas Games; lines like Feng Shui or Over the Edge had their time in the Sun, got a bit of a buzz around them, had commercial success and critical acclaim, but then the scene seemed to move on. There was enough affection for both games to sustain Kickstarters for glossy rereleased editions later on, but that was after long periods of commercial dormancy, and neither game has seen that much in the way of supplement support after delivery of the core materials (not that they particularly need it). The result is that both games fell out of the conversation a little in between their original runs and the Kickstarters, and the sense I have is that whilst they had enough fans that people would take them out for a spin now and then, they aren’t games which inspire the sustained passion of an invested community.

Then take Ars Magica, a game which has supported LARP adaptations, fanzines, web forums, and other community endeavours for decades and continues to do so even after new commercial products have ceased emerging, and regularly comes up in the conversation still. That’s the difference having a self-sustaining community around a game and temporary hype; in the former case, the community will find ways and means of sustaining itself even when it isn’t getting much love from an official publisher, in the latter case a game might sustain a fanbase of interested customers whilst a steady stream of commercial releases are coming out, but only a few will keep talking about and playing the game once the hype ends.

When analysing this sort of thing, a certain amount of survivorship bias exists – the games we see thriving today which can trace their roots back a substantial period of time are inevitably those which developed that self-sustaining community around them, games that didn’t did not. Sure, you only really test whether a game has that self-sustaining community when it goes through a bit of a publishing hiatus – but other than Dungeons & Dragons, pretty much every major RPG has had its periods of hiatus or slack release schedules from time to time. Retro-clones – particularly Pathfinder – have kept old editions of D&D in the conversation even when current editions have been riding high, Vampire: the Masquerade and other classic World of Darkness games retained strong fanbases even during that span of time when White Wolf had gone all-in on what would eventually be known as Chronicles of Darkness and had retired the old lines, Call of Cthulhu retained massive popularity even when Chaosium went through a fallow period before Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen mounted a boardroom coup to put things back on an even keep, and people kept writing about, discussing, and playing Paranoia even in the years between West End collapsing and Mongoose picking it up again.

It’s obviously quite exciting, then, when you spot an RPG which seems to be actively creating that sort of self-sustaining community around it. Like I said, you don’t really know if that community is self-sustaining or not until a publishing hiatus happens – but you can spot the sort of infrastructure developing which suggests that something exciting is brewing. Hallmarks of that can include:

• The game is doing well enough that the current publishers are able to put out more ambitious products and run large-scale Kickstarters, an indication that people are invested enough in the game to put their money where their mouth is.
• The game is inspiring discussion and commentary. Forums and platforms dedicated to the game itself can be useful, but such venues can rapidly become ghost towns if a community moves on. Discussion in the wider scene can sometimes be a better sign because that suggests the game is being noticed outside of the niche it’s carved out for itself – and that there are therefore routes and byways to lead people into that niche in the first place.
• The game is inspiring creativity not just from the main publisher, but from third party publishers and solo designers (either through officially permitted commercial third party publications or through non-profit fan releases), suggesting a level of engagement going beyond consumption of first-party material and which can keep interesting stuff coming should the first party pipeline get cut off.

So it makes me sit up and take notice when a game like Mothership comes along and hits all of those criteria.

Created by Sean McCoy and put out by Tuesday Knight Games, Mothership already has a dense thicket of products out for it; as well as permitting the creation of third-party products for Mothership, Tuesday Knight Games is also happy to stock and sell products by third party publishers and individuals. It’s attracted a decent amount of discussion and critical acclaim; notably, Stu Horvath’s massive trawl through games of yesteryear, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground describes itself as “A guide to tabletop roleplaying games from D&D to Mothership“, and that’s despite the fact that Mothership is not the most recent game covered in that book.

And perhaps most impressively, Mothership has been able to generate that buzz despite releasing its “0th Edition” on itch.io as a zine-style ashcan effort. From these humble beginnings, enough buzz has been generated that not only did Tuesday Knight raise over $1.4 million on Kickstarter to produce a 1st Edition core set for the game, but third party Kickstarter projects like Anodyne Printworks’ Hull Breach campaign can also hit a high bar (Hull Breach earned over $480,000). To get that level of enthusiasm for a game where the products available are basically PDFs or cheap and cheerful print zine-style products is incredibly good going, especially when it isn’t tied to a more popular game system or well-known setting.

I don’t know that Mothership has a self-sustaining community around it just yet – but I do know that it’s the most recent game I’ve seen which feels like it’s well on the way to forging one (if it hasn’t done so already), and it’s worth taking note. I was interested enough to back both the core set Kickstarter and the Hull Breach one; let’s see how my swag turned out.

---

The Core Set

Tuesday Knight Games describe this as the boxed set they had in mind when they first devised Mothership; it contains the 1st Edition core rulebooks, a small referee screen, a neat double-sided poster map (one size to use in space combat, one the other with a starship deckplan), 12 cardboard pawns to shunt around the maps should you care to, percentile dice and a “panic die” (basically a D20 with an exclamation mark where the 1 usually goes), and the introductory module Another Bug Hunt.

All of this comes in a box with simple, stark cover art, in a form factor reminiscent of the original releases of Dungeons & Dragons or – perhaps more immediately relevant – Traveller. The books are stapled digest-sized booklets, not glossy perfect-bound affairs, and almost all of the components in the box offer black and white art only – there’s some very limited use of orange and green in Another Bug Hunt to jazz things up but otherwise we’re in a monochrome world reminiscent of a black metal album cover (perhaps something by Darkspace, come to think of it). The individual booklets very much feel like zines, as the original OD&D and Traveller booklets did a little.

On the one hand, this is a stark difference from the common accepted wisdom in the RPG industry about how you present products, where big hardcover books with lots and lots of full colour art have become the norm – largely because everyone tries to imitate Dungeons & Dragons in this respect out of the inferiority complex the entire rest of the industry has towards D&D, fearing that failing to keep up with this very expensive presentation style would make them look rinky-dink. Certainly, a lot of projects have used those sweet Kickstarter bucks to give their products a presentational makeover in order to hit those standards.

On the other hand, the Mothership box is a tactile joy, and proof positive that going for the “large hardback book” presentation absolutely does not have to be a default. Sure, these booklets feel like zines – totally awesome zines which feel well-constructed enough to hold up at the table and have had their layout sweated over. The presentation of information here compares well with Old-School Essentials when it comes to combining information density with utility, making these materials an absolute dream to use at the table.

Presentationally speaking, in fact, I think it’s worth comparing this to Paranoia‘s Red Clearance Edition, which went for a similar booklets-inna-box format but didn’t bring to the table the same level of presentational flair that Mothership mustered, leaving the product feeling slipshod. This set is a masterclass in making the most of lo-fi production values and a DIY aesthetic in RPG presentation, and I hope this sort of thing catches on.

So, what of the contents themselves? Well, the first core book is the player book, aptly dubbed the Player’s Survival Guide. This has basically all the rules you strictly need in a session – indeed, the most frequently-used rules are summarised on the back cover (told you the layout was cleverly done), and the full character generation process is integrated ingeniously into the character sheet. Devising a character in Mothership is a fast and simple process, which both harkens back to the early RPGs the boxed set is reminiscent of and is a highly appropriate call for this type of game, where you want characters who are quick to grasp, fit into the sort of archetypes you get in SF-horror movies, and can hit play with a minimum of fuss, and where character survival is a low enough priority that you’re not going to need a complex backstory to build plot off (because you’d be a fool to do so since the character that plot resonates with could buy it well before that connection pays off).

The system works off a simple roll-under percentile process, with “00” interpreted as zero interestingly. You take the appropriate stat (or save, for reactive stuff), add the relevant skill, and try to beat that score, rolling twice and keeping the best result if you have advantate and worst result if you have disadvantage, and doubles are critical successes or failures. Notably, each time you get a failure on a roll your Stress score goes off, and under certain circumstances you may be asked to make a Panic check – roll a D20, and if you get equal to or under your current Stress then the relevant result on the Panic table applies.

Stress can be relieved through rest, especially if you do something to blow off steam like getting drunk, taking drugs, or (if your group is comfortable with sexual content in your game) banging it out with someone also seeking comfort. This nicely aligns game mechanics with genre-appropriate behaviour – especially in campaign play, where neat guidelines for setting appropriate prices for jobs (and cost of living expenses) help ensure characters always are tempted to undertake just one more job.

Mothership‘s tools for campaign play are neat, but one suspects the game’s real strength is in presenting one-shots or tight little mini-campaigns, in which the long-term downtime options aren’t likely to feature. That said, the fact that there’s room in the rulebooks to add inessential but nice to have features like the campaigning rules is a testament to the economy and clarity of the presentation and the brevity of the rules. Much of the referee book – the Warden’s Operations Manual – isn’t dedicated to referee-facing rules for uptime so much as it’s providing tight guidelines for designing your first Mothership scenario and cultivating the right approach to get the best out of it whilst refereeing.

The scenario design stuff is in keeping with the rest of the core set’s admirable willingness to be an accessible game even to people who have never touched an RPG before. There’s plenty of RPGs out there which pay lip service to being newcomer-accessible, but where you can tell the writers have largely written off the idea of selling to anyone who isn’t steeped in the hobby already; one of the things which is grand about Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu Starter Set in particular is that it refuses to be defeatist on this point, and Mothership likewise is willing to provide advice and tools to take someone from fresh-faced newcomer to viable Mothership referee all in the process of working through the advice here.

In this aspect, Mothership really puts me in mind of a confluence of indie RPGs/storygames on the one hand and OSR material on the other – a blend which makes more sense than some of the angrier and more reactionary voices in the OSR movement (or the indie RPG scene) would have you think. The big emphasis on only rolling for success/failure when it’s truly important and something is at stake, for instance, is something both scenes have tended to play up, as is the embrace of digest-sized booklets and a zine-style approach to production.

Having, as it does, a fairly traditional referee-and-players arrangement, Mothership tends to fall on the OSR side of the line – but not unambiguously and unthinkingly so. The scenario design process puts a big emphasis on drawing a map, which is very OSR – but cramped, claustrophobic environments lost in the vast, agoraphobic expanses of space are what the genre’s all about, so that’s appropriate. Moreover, before you draw your map you are guided through coming up with all the thematic ingredients of a story in this genre, and you are firmly told to make sure that each thing you’ve jotted down prior to that ends up keyed to something on the map, otherwise you’ll forget it in actual play. There’s a big emphasis on the concept of “rulings” on the spot – but whilst the OSR has tended to fetishise “rulings over rules”, Mothership offers some genuinely interesting insights into the types of ruling that goes into running any RPG, and the principles that make one ruling good and another bad, and offers pointers on what to do when you have second thoughts about one of your rulings.

Perhaps the most OSR aspect of the game is the way it encourages you to come up with a situation and then let it play out, without assumption as to which way the players will jump – or with the assumption that there is a particular story that needs to play out here. Instead, Mothership has you contrive a situation where an Alien-like story can be naturally expected to occur, and then you have the fun of seeing the story take shape in actual play… but then again that’s the exact sort of stacking the deck that indie RPGs often do, especially in the Powered By the Apocalypse family, where the playbooks and their movesets will naturally nudge players into genre-appropriate action.

Another thing Mothership has in common with the Powered By the Apocalypse family is the way it utilises a traditional referee, but gives the referee very particular and structured refereeing device, priming them to deliver the experience as intended and offering clear pointers on the philosophy of running a sci-fi horror game which the game is designed to work with. Sure, you are free to deviate from that as much as you wish, but then you’re on your own – if you follow the guiderails you’ll have a good shot at delivering the sort of game Mothership is trying to be.

Something I particularly appreciated is the way that, in stark contrast to GUMSHOE in its various iterations, Mothership urges the referee to not get overly invested in the players unravelling the mystery of any particular scenario. Playing Mothership is an exercise in choosing priorities – the three most common ones being Save, Solve, and Survive. Do you prioritise preserving your own life, saving innocents, or figuring out what is going on? The more you concentrate on one the more you’re going to have to be willing to compromise on the others.

Mothership, in fact, understands that the “oh no, the players missed a clue and gameplay has ground to a halt!” problem in investigative RPGs isn’t a problem of the resolution system, it’s a scenario design problem. (It does encourage you to simply hand players clues if they are looking in the right place for them and only rolling if there’s any tension or time-critical factors involved – but then again, so does Call of Cthulhu these days.) As part of the scenario design process, Mothership urges referees to come up with timelines of what’s going to happen in the event the players do not act; this provides a basis for escalating the situation if the PCs get bogged down in an investigation and fail to take proactive measures as a result of getting bamboozled by the evidence in front of them. So long as a scenario continues to evolve in ways which are exciting for the players, it actually doesn’t matter overly much whether PCs are succeeding at unravelling the mystery; this is doubly so in horror, where characters often find themselves not wholly understanding what is going on anyway.

The Shipbreaker’s Toolkit provides deck plans and systems for running ship operations. These are fairly light, because a tight hard SF ship management game isn’t really what Mothership is offering; that’s Traveller‘s turf. However, between the Toolkit and other tools in the Warden’s Operations Manual, the game is set up to provide ample economic pressures and and economic temptations to get characters in a campaign to sign up for just one more job, even when the last one was a horrifying shitshow.

The sample adventure, Another Bug Hunt, is an example of how Mothership scenario design can provide terse, high-density adventures which cram entire game sessions’ worth of fun into a tight page count. It’s not one single scenario, but an interrelated set of four; you could play any one of them as a single-session one-shot, or play through the entire thing as a mini-campaign of some 2-4 sessions, depending on what routes you take. (Again, Mothership admonishes the referee to not sweat it too much if players skip content – and thus also urges you to not spend overly long on prep, the better to manage the temptation to force people to experience stuff you’ve spent a bunch of time on).

Like I said – the Mothership core set is a real joy simply to hold, open up, and look through. It’s rare that a game product makes me this excited to give it a spin, but Mothership managed it, and it’s proof positive that you don’t need big glossy full-colour hardback to feel like a product is aesthetically compelling. Between the booklets, the darling little referee screen (with landscape-orientation panels, they way they’re meant to be), the fun little standees, and so on, it’s absolutely packed with cool stuff, and more than justifies its price point. It might be the best core set for a brand-new RPG I’ve seen for years.

Tuesday Knight Extras

Along with the core set, I also bought in on a range of add-ons, largely consisting of additional zines and pamphlets for the game put out by Tuesday Knight. Some of these are truly tiny in form – a single sheet of paper, printed on both sides and folded into 3 to provide a 6 page pamphlet. The Hackers Handbook offers terse but potentially flavourful pointers on using hacking as a skill in a Mothership context, with a simple subsystem for tracking network responses. The Conversion Kit provides a breakdown on converting 0e characters and materials to the new edition, as well as some discussion of why various changes were made; an accompanying Module Conversion Kit provides 1e-style statblocks for the 0e printings of some larger modules (though the versions of those which came with the Kickstarter are new printings anyway, rendering this unnecessary).

The remainder of the one-sheet pamphlets are one-shot scenarios, providing enough material for an evening of play in an incredibly convenient format. The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 has nasty goings-on in an asteroid mining facility, Hideo’s World is a journey into a dream-based videogame console, Terminal Delays At Anarene’s Folly is an example of how even an apparently routine docking request at a space station can go awry, Chromatic Transference offers an asteroid research facility where things have gone very very wrong, Piece By Piece tasks the PCs with unravelling a nasty incident at a robotics lab, and Cryonambulism presents a nightmare in cryosleep. These are generally pretty good; Chromatic Transference is rather linear, a tad underdeveloped, and could have done with reproducing its documentary clues in a format that doesn’t compromise legibility for flavour so much, but the rest I’d be happy to run as is.

Of the three chunkier modules, Dead Planet is an update of what I believe to be the first Mothership module released – a grim set of locales on and around the titular world, which can conceivably be visited in any order or skipped as necessary. It’s a great example of mashing PCs into the middle of a horrible enigma and then seeing which way they jump. A Pound of Flesh describes the delightfully sleazy space station Prospero’s Dream, which can either be a fulcrum of adventure in its own right (there are three plots that can unfold separately or in tandem with each other on here) or a familiar home base between adventures or both.

The best one, though, is Gradient Descent, an honest to goodness Mothership megadungeon – it’s set on a space station that used to be an everyday android factory before its controlling AI took over, at which point it became a very very alarming android factory. Usable either as the centrepiece of a campaign or a basis for one-shots, exploring this can offer masses and masses of play, can viably deploy very differently depending on your group’s preferences, and can go absolutely anywhere.

Hull Breach Volume 1 and Other Anodyne Printworks Goodies

As I said, Tuesday Knight’s Kickstarter wasn’t the only one I backed – I also backed Hull Breach, a Kickstarter by Anodyne Printworks. The main product for this is Hull Breach Volume 1, a hardcover collection of 26 new little third party scenarios and mini-supplements for Mothership. With each article having its own ethos in terms of layout and presentation, and a wide variety of creators involved, this reminds me of the old APA concept of yesteryear, Alarums and Excursions being the major example in the RPG field – where people would submit their own little articles and mini-zines to be collated and propagated in one big bound-together bundle.

To bring a bit of order to the chaos, Anodyne present (in the endpapers and at the back of the book) a little appendix offering a pocket campaign setting that ties everything together, describing the Public Sector (an area of space where human exploration is dominated by the Publico megacorporation) and offering campaign frameworks and a job board to help get your PCs involved in the stuff in here in a sandbox fashion. This by itself is useful but bland – but it’s not here to provide the flavour directly, it’s here to bounce your players from one Hull Breach section to the next, and for that purpose it’s just dandy.

The articles themselves are arranged in thematic sections. First up is Intel, which covers “generators, resources, toolkits and system hacks” and leads off with Essence of Dread, a short and sweet article talking up the use of taste, smell, and touch in RPG narration – three senses we tend to de-emphasise in our descriptions (referees tend to default to sight and sound as primary focuses) but useful for a sense of immersion, especially in a horror context. The Hand-Off offers some useful tools for jazzing up those situations where the PCs have to involve themselves in a tense transaction (hostage exchanges, drug deals, etc.) between two parties which mistrust one another. Manhunt is a hack of Mothership that casts the players as horrifying aliens who must evade and predate on cunning, annoyingly numerous humans, and is interesting mostly because of the parallel with Monsters! Monsters!, the early Tunnels & Trolls hack; it seems an interesting experiment but I’m not sure it holds up as well as baseline Mothership.

The Osprey’s Quarry describes a pirate ship, gives a rundown of its strategy and tactics and crew, and also gives some insight into corporate anti-piracy measures, yielding a bit of game design which can be inserted into a campaign any number of ways. Some deeper thinking about how investigative scenarios work in Mothership is offered in in A Pound of Mysteries. Most ambitious of all, there’s Wardenless, a refereeless hack of Mothership which to be honest might be better served as its own distinct game.

After this, we have the Missions section, each article here offering exactly what that implies – a prewritten scenario based on an “accomplish the mission” format. Bones and Videotape sends the PCs into a mystery structure to check in on the first team that went inside, and sets up a nice little puzzle therein for them to ponder. Helium Hysteria throws military PCs into the midst of a crisis at boot camp. Road Work and 1000 Jumps Too Far are a “your hyperspace technology has gone wrong” scenarios with decidedly different tenors, whilst Vibechete! is basically a Mothership slasher movie. These are about as involved as, say, one of the single-sheet pamphlet style scenarios I discussed above.

Residue Processing is somewhat more involved. It’s a “funnel” adventure, riffing on the similar concept from Dungeon Crawl Classics – everyone plays 3-5 characters who are each less capable than a starting Mothership character, most of them are expected to die, those who survive can graduate to being full-time PCs and get their stats boosted to the baseline starting character level. That’s all very well, but it’s also an episode of The Writer’s Barely-Disguised Fetish, since all the PCs begin the scenario – all about horrible human testing in a dodgy scientific facility – sealed in rubber “doll suits”. Per the module, these are “Human-sized rubber ‘skins’ bearing comically exaggerated expressions, intended to dehumanize and anonymize rest subjects”, and if you do a few image searches for “rubber doll suit” with SafeSearch off you will find a great many similar garments intended for a similar but less scientific purpose. It’s a weird inclusion which will add some brief claustrophobia for some players at the start of the scenario but will largely just be faintly funny or gross depending on your group’s temperament, and I’m a little surprised it got past the edit.

The next segment is Locations, offering interesting locales either for sandbox exploration or to deploy as needed when you particularly want to have a  dystopian space courtroom (Escape Clause) or nightmarish space shopping mall (Intergalactic Mega Mart) or free port suitable for use as a campaign hub (Siesta-3 Autonomous Zone) or whatever. Procession of the Enlightened Chorus offers an intriguing procedurally-generated megastructure; Terrifying Terraforms is a toolkit for generating horrible planets; WNDRLND begins as a swanky space station but becomes something altogether stranger (or not, if you decide not to use the associated plot and just make it one more stopover).

The Entities section offers people, factions, and creatures. Bad Company is a grab-bag of offbeat NPCs without a unifying theme to toss into your game as you wish; Corpocrat Dogs is a fun random generator to roll up the sort of middlemen corporations use to hire adventuring parties. Hellkites offer a particularly threatening alien species, whilst the Parasite Portfolio offers you a range of nasty things to grow inside warm human hosts. Xeiram, an especially bizarre corporate enforcer, rounds out the section. Lastly, the Assets section provides various little items – the contents of the Abbatoir Family Co. Catalog provides a fairly diverse selection, Beamed describes an interesting teleportation technology, and Boom Box rounds out the collection with expanded rules for explosions and grenades, for those situations where it’s really important.

On the whole, I suspect no referee will feel keen on everything in Hull Breach, but any particular ref will find some of it awesome enough to make them keen to use it, other parts handy for seasoning the stuff they want to focus on, and the remainder they don’t care for easy to set aside. If I had one criticism, it’s that the layout often prioritises flavour over clarity in a way that Tuesday Knight’s products generally don’t (and the 1E core box absolutely doesn’t). Sure, flavourful layout is cool and that’s what catches the eye about the core Mothership materials, but that’s all done without sacrificing or compromising readability – indeed, it’s by and large focused on supporting that. The same rigour isn’t quite apparent here.

Beyond Hull Breach itself, the Kickstarter also yielded for me more goodies in the form of various add-ons. The first pack of fun is the Executive Suite Bundle. The main offering in this is Breach of Contract, a “legal horror” supplement presented in the form of a spiral-bound notepad, with some of the pages being tear-off. As well as providing pointers for depicting the legal and bureaucratic pressure that can be brought to bear, it also provides a new character class for busted corporate lawyers who’ve been forced to join a blue-collar crew to make ends meet and a slew of horrifying forms, some already filled out as scenario seeds, some blank. It will be particularly useful for scenarios taking place in Anodyne’s Public Sector setting, but can add spice to any Mothership game where friction between the PCs and “the Company” is a thing.

Other fun bits in the Executive Suite Bundle include a sew-on patch (“Escape Pod Pass – Non-Transferrable”), an ID card for the interstellar Public Teamsters’ Union, a poster map of the Public Sector, a sheet of stickers you can use to give players rewards mid-session, the Bookmark Derelict – a little Mothership dungeon crawl on a bookmark, with the map on one wide and the notes on the other, and Agent, a one-sheet pamphlet rules expansion detailing how to make and run a Corporate stooge in a Mothership party. They’re neat, but there’s little doubt that Breach of Contract is the main course of the Executive Suite Bundle and everything else is garnish.

The other goodie I got was a Zine Bundle of previous Anodyne Printware releases for Mothership, the majority in the zine format. This leads off with Picket Line Tango, a brief plunge into a tense dispute between a mining corporation and a union where something else is going on to destabilise things. The Drain is another Dungeon Crawl Classics-like “funnel”, plunging the PCs into a corporate holy war on a corrupted space station; its sequel, Meatgrinder, sends PCs into Hell. At some 15 pages and with fairly basic, functionals layout, these are nowhere near as stuffed with material as, say, Another Bug Hunt, but I’d put it on the level of one of the meatier chapters of Hull Breach.

The Zine Bundle also includes a nice collection of one-sheet pamphlet scenarios. Moonbase Blues has PCs caught in a moonbase that’s being affected by a mind-scrambling meteor; The Third Sector provides a scheme for tying various Anodyne publications together into a sandbox setting, making it a first pass at the approach taken in Hull Breach with the Public Sector.

By and large, these little offerings have simpler, less ambitious layouts than Hull Breach itself, and that is slightly to their advantage and just makes me double down on my sense that Hull Breach‘s balance between visual excitement and visual clarity is a little off. Despite that, I think all of the Anodyne products I’ve seen are pretty neat and certainly very very useful for anyone running Mothership.

One thing I did notice was that there’s a significant overlap between the designers crafting material for Anodyne and those working for Tuesday Knight; unlike in the third party ecosystem of games where there’s a sense of a cordon between first party and third party products, both in terms of the people making them and the production values, here it feels like the third party ecosystem benefits from Tuesday Knight not inflating their own production approach to a level which other publishers couldn’t possibly keep up with (at least as far as modules and supplements go) and being cool with their writers moonlighting elsewhere. It makes the third party material feel legitimised – and it further creates the sense that there’s a vibrant community around Mothership who can keep the ship afloat for the long haul.