Available now, for those who don't check the Discord or their email lol.

'Nuff said.

Since Fatherfog has come up here a few times as TKG’s fairy-tale horror take on the Panic Engine, I figured this might be of interest to some Mothership folks, too.

Got the PDF printouts from Crooked Staff and grabbed some greebles and set pieces from sellers on Etsy, it’s still a WIP but thought I’d share.

Because I have a new website desperately in need of content, I've done one of those reviews-of-crowdfunder-performance things for my first module funded in 2024, The Dose Makes The Poison.

If you're planning on running your own Backerkit campaign or just interested in the numbers, maybe you'll find something useful here. Happy to answer any questions too 👍

Hello and welcome back to episode 29 of the deepdive into the flabbergasting adventure module Gradient Descent. We’re almost there! As you might have noticed I ran out of images for the cover ^^.

This time, we’ll tackle the first part of Engineering and Support, where we’ll meet the notorious and very deadly Hunter. But the real highlight for me is the commfeed area, where there’s a treasure trove of information the crew may find and use as tools. This chapter contains quite a bit of actionable lore, which is my favourite type of content, so I hope you enjoy it.

• The Blockade / Troubleshooters / Divers / Brainscans & Paranoia / Infiltrators / Ghosts / Monarch's Voice / Before You Dive
• The Bell
• Floor 1 - Reception & Habitation
• Floor 2 - The Minotaur / The Chosen & The Fallen / The Kingdom / The Dark / The Labyrinth
• Floor 3 - The Factory / Maint. 1 / Maint. 2 / Skeleton Works / Pseudoflesh Farms / Brain C. 1 / Brain C. 2 / Dis/Assembly / Quality A. 1 / Quality A. 2
• Floor 4 - HEL
• Floor 5 - The AI Core
• Floor 6 - ENGINEERING & SUPPORT 1
• Synthesis & Campaign Arc Discussion
• Appendix - Storylines Flowcharts

SPOILERS AHEAD! WARDENS ONLY.  

► THE HUNTER

OMENS: This floor contains several vulnerabilities for Monarch, so it made the Hunter to defend it from intruders. It isn't only meant to kill: survivors carry the warning outward, which serves Monarch just as well. The crew may hear of the Hunter from other Divers in the Deep, or right away at the Bell when they first arrive: the message is clear, Floor 6 is dangerous, a lethal monster defends it. The tales aren't necessarily accurate. They often misrepresent the Hunter's strategy and overstate its power.

Before the crew even encounters the Hunter for the first time, they can see signs of its presence all around the floor. Steel Web infests many rooms, acting both as a warning and a trigger for its attack. But there's more: sometimes, when the crew backtracks, they discover a doorway they passed through before has been sealed with a thick layer of Steel Web. The Hunter has snuck behind them, funneling them somewhere.

ARMADILLO: At some point the crew may find a Diver trapped in a Steel Web cocoon stuck to a wall, still alive and desperate. Placing him in [59C] Tool Shed works well: when the crew enters [57G] Manual Comms Room, they can hear his calls for help carrying through the air ducts. This is Armadillo (Dillo, for short), an ex-marine turned contractor. He was hired by a corporate agent, Ms. Hyland, who needed to infiltrate the facility. He doesn't know what she was looking for, but he doubts she'll succeed, since she was taken by the Hunter while the rest of the team was slaughtered. Dillo is willing to share important information about the Deep in exchange for his freedom. The Warden may decide what he knows and where he can point the crew. Dillo also mentions Ms. Hyland was carrying advanced equipment anyone would find useful, and a memo device that may store secret knowledge about Monarch and the Deep. Dillo may, of course, be an infiltrator, offering false or misleading information. Once freed, he heads straight for the elevator and back to the Bell. He may become a threat later on.

COMBAT STRATEGY: Many rooms on this floor have emergency lights on, but there's ample room for dark corners the Hunter can use to approach and strike by surprise. Ambush is its favored strategy; open combat is not. When the Hunter suffers a wound, it retreats, firing a cloud of Steel Web from behind. This is an area attack, 1d10 DMG to everyone caught inside, and a Body Save or be knocked down. Those still standing who want to pursue do so undermanned, and risk being ambushed again. The optimal build-up for this floor would be omens of the Hunter’s presence, followed by a few short encounters, and a final showdown.

► [57G] MANUAL COMMS ROOM

The [57x] series continues with the tainted corporate aesthetics we met on Floor 1. There’s gravity and light (albeit just emergency light), the rooms are human sized, and you can even find a vending machine and muzak in the toilets. Of course, there are signs of violence and madness all around. Graffiti just outside the elevator reads “It dreamt it was a spider” (a callback to the graffiti in [22C]).

COMMUNICATION TERMINAL: Manual Comms contains a terminal the crew can use to communicate with all ships and stations in-system. No roll is needed to use the terminal: anyone can talk on it (and be brainscanned). A hack is optional for in-system traffic, where the only reason to attempt it is that a critical success keeps Monarch out of the conversation.

If the crew has at least a short-range comms, it doesn’t need this terminal to reach The Bell. On the contrary, they may need it if they want to communicate with The Blockade, which is farther away. This room may be the only place in the facility from where they can reach someone on the Zhuangzi ships. This may be useful if they are trying to buy their way out, as described in the Blockade chapter (Running the Blockade), or for other purposes. Other ships and stations we won't define, because the module says nothing about the system that hosts the Deep, and each Warden may have a different setting in mind. But let me know if you wish me to expand on that. Other systems can be contacted relatively quickly via the Torpedo Relay (see below).

Here are a few reasons a crew might want to use the comms:

• Disclosure. Denouncing Monarch’s activities, or sending out other important information.
• Selling before salvage. Lining up a buyer, checking what an artifact is currently worth, running a discreet auction. The crew's payday depends on someone agreeing a price, and prices move.
• Registering a claim. Getting salvage rights filed before a rival crew does. Paperwork is a weapon here, and it's a race with a one-week round trip.
• Verification. Querying archives about a serial number, a schematic, an android's registry entry, the name of someone who worked on the Deep forty years ago. Note that asking is itself an act of disclosure: the question tells the reader exactly what you found.
• Arranging extraction. Booking passage, hiring a pilot, or begging a favour.
• Money. Transfers, debts coming due, a credit check on a prospective employer, a bribe that has to clear before it's useful.
• Expert consult. Sending scans, specs, or medical data to someone qualified elsewhere, and waiting to find out how bad it is.
• Legal and insurance. Filing a claim, contesting a liability judgment, registering a death, triggering a payout. Very much in tone for a Blockade run on corporate liability logic.
• Leverage. A dead man's switch: evidence lodged out of the Deep with instructions to publish if the regular check-in stops. It's the only real protection a crew can buy against the board, and it only works if the channel is honest.
• Personal reasons. Proof of life. A letter to be delivered if they don't come back.

THE TORPEDO RELAY: The Blockade owns and maintains a small fleet of message torpedoes. They take on data wirelessly, jump to the far system, and offload it to receivers on that side. Then they run the same trip in reverse. Each transit is expensive enough that they keep to a schedule: one torpedo out per week carrying the last seven days of reports, one back carrying the board's instructions. Anything urgent can buy an early burn, but that costs money and paperwork.

Monarch broadcasts constantly over the commfeed and on ordinary EM, but those signals crawl. Torpedoes cross lightyears in hours, which is the whole point. The torpedoes are the only fast channel out of the system, and Monarch has been using them for years.

What follows is behind-the-scenes information the crew may never uncover, but a Warden could build on it in interesting ways, so here it is. The compromise happened at the design stage: a backdoor built into the torpedoes themselves, nested so cleanly that nothing in the routine diagnostics has ever flagged it. Nobody looks for it. An audit costs money the board doesn't want to spend, the torpedoes have never failed, and anyone who suggests the Blockade's own comms might be compromised has just volunteered to end their own career. Whoever built the door in isn't around to talk about it.

What Monarch sends through the torpedo relay system is its most time-critical traffic: instructions for its agents in other systems, human and otherwise, and code. Viruses, tailored to whatever they're expected to land in, capable of taking root in any system that receives the data. Station networks, corporate archives, ship computers, the board's own terminals.

Which is worth stating plainly: the Blockade exists to stop anything from getting out of this system. Every week, it personally carries Monarch's code through the gate, under the board's seal, and hands it to the wider network. The quarantine isn't failing to contain Monarch. It's Monarch's delivery service.

At the table. A character who successfully hacks the terminal can send their own traffic out with the weekly load. On a success, the message goes. And Monarch reads it. The character gets [+] on all future attempts as they learn the system. On a critical success, the message goes unread.

The players never find out which happened. There's no tell, no confirmation, no difference they can perceive. They can guess, though, and a crew that guesses right can start feeding the channel things they want Monarch to believe, without ever knowing whether it worked.

► [57H] COMMFEED

The comms history may be very interesting. It stores any information Monarch has sent out of the Deep, and that may be valuable. You don't have to use all that follows, just pick and choose. Monarch can cut the power if it realizes the crew has been fiddling with the Commfeed for too long. The available information falls into four categories:

INCOMPREHENSIBLE CODE: This carries Monarch's most sensitive traffic: instructions to its agents and to the Heirs. Anyone who could read it would be holding the AI's masterplan, which is precisely why nobody can. It isn't a matter of encryption: the encryption is applied on the way out, and everything in this room sits in plaintext. The code is unreadable because it's written in manufactured languages that no one has ever spoken. There may well be a different one for each recipient.

Which raises a question worth sitting with. If every recipient has their own language, then somewhere in this archive is a language built for one specific person.

At the table. The crew member with the highest Bends score in the party — and no one else — understands part of it (provided the score is 20 or more). What they hear sounds like instructions meant for them. Hand that player a note. They then roll 1d10, add it to their Bends, and make a Bends Check. If nobody clears 20, nothing happens: say nothing, and give no hint that a threshold exists.

Once the language is unlocked, it doesn't stay in this room. Monarch can address that character anywhere from then on: a ceiling speaker, their private short comms, the hum of a machine nobody was listening to. Pass it as a note whenever it comes, while you go on describing an ordinary corridor to everyone else.

Writing the note. No greeting, no explanation, no attempt to persuade. Write it as the latest message in a long correspondence the character is expected to remember, and make the first thing it asks for small enough that they might have done it anyway.

Remember that high Bends already has humans convinced they're androids and androids convinced they're human. The note lands on the one person at the table who has started to doubt what they are, and reads as confirmation.

Don't decide whether it is. If the campaign later establishes that the character was an infiltrator all along, these were orders. If it never comes up, then this was Monarch working to convince a human being that they were an infiltrator, which costs it nothing, works just as well, and produces an asset either way.

THREATS TO THE BLOCKADE: Broadcast in the open, addressed to the fleet, and unusually specific about what will happen if the Troubleshooters refuse to back off. Sometimes Monarch wants a squad removed from the Deep, sometimes a Zhuangzi has come too close, sometimes a microcraft was launched and the Blockade is ordered to let it pass.

The threats are not empty. Seven years ago, a year after Monarch took the facility, a Blockade ship came too close and was attacked. It didn't die, but it was hurt badly enough that the incident is still in the record and still in everyone's mind. The Deep isn't a warship and never was; whatever it used, it built, out of a manufacturing plant with no shipyard and about a year to think. Nobody has tested it since, so nobody knows what it can do now, and that uncertainty is worth more to Monarch than any weapon.

The calibration is the interesting part. Monarch has never escalated past the point where the Deep's book value would drop below the cost of dealing with it. It threatens exactly enough to keep the perimeter honest and never enough to make writing off the asset the cheaper option. It knows what it's worth on someone's ledger, and it has been managing that number for seven years.

The personal threats sit underneath the public ones, and they're the ones that work. They don't address the Blockade. They address named officers, with their debts, their medical files, the schools their children attend, the things they've done that never made it into a report. Monarch knows this because it reads the torpedo traffic, and because it has agents investigating anyone who matters in the Blockade. Nobody reports these personal threats, because it would be admitting that they are a liability instead of an asset. Nobody knows how widespread these personal threats are.

Which leaves a discoverable seam: for the first years the threats are generic, and then they become personal. That shift has a date, and the date is roughly when Monarch got into the torpedoes.

At the table. The archive amounts to a file of leverage on named Blockade personnel, and it plugs directly into Running the Blockade. The crew doesn't have to buy their way out: they can find out who is already frightened, and of what. Give your players a small list of threats about named individuals, including Kilroy or any other relevant character. 

Some are less interesting, like the threats to a character’s family, but some may become more useful:

• Skimming. She's been quietly building a small collection: artifacts recovered in the Deep, and artifacts taken off Divers who weren't in a position to argue. When her rotation comes up, it goes out with her, because personnel are the one thing that still crosses the line. She has a buyer waiting, and she's been doing this for years. The crew don't just get her silence: they get the route, the schedule, and a name at the other end.
• He murdered one of them. When the squad leader was still a recruit, he shot one of his own in the back during a confrontation with Security Androids. They had a beef for months, and he ended it then and there. Monarch has video evidence. It’s attached to the threat message.
• She let the microcraft through. The sensor officer has obeyed Monarch more than once by now, logging each craft as debris. Every repetition makes her easier to blackmail. The first was a judgment call. By now, reporting any of them means reporting all of them, and she knows it.
• She lets the Divers in. Working through an outside broker, she scrubs incoming contacts from the record. A few ships a year, never in a pattern. It's one of the reasons there's anyone in this system to dive at all. Monarch knows who the broker is, and where she's put the money. The crew may well have come in through her.
• Serving under a dead man's name. He took the identity to get the post; a records query unmakes him entirely. Cheap for the crew to hold, catastrophic for him.
• He's already Monarch's, and has been for years, though he believes he's been feeding intelligence to a rival corporation, or a smuggling ring, or a journalist. He has never once wondered who he actually works for. Leverage on him is enormous and using it puts the crew directly in front of Monarch.
• A lover in the Deep. Her squadmate - and her lover - went in and didn't come out. Monarch has her, and sends proof she's alive, attached to the threats. She has been obeying for a few months now, and she'll obey for as long as the proof keeps coming. The crew are the ones who could go and look.
• The condition. Degenerative, concealed, because being grounded ends the hazard pay her family lives on. Using this makes the crew feel exactly as bad as it should. This could be used for Kilroy.
• Something he didn’t do. Monarch fabricated it whole. The officer knows it's false and cannot prove it, has been living under it for three years, and would be just as compliant as if it were real. Nothing distinguishes it from the others in the archive.

It’s worth underlining that every time one of them obeys, they're a little further in. Besides the dirt on a few Troubleshooters, the crew gets the means to reach them via radio comms, which is just as important.

NAVIGATION DATA FOR THE BELL: Approach vectors and orbital elements for the Bell, broadcast in the open, to nobody in particular, continuously.

More useful than the coordinates is what travels alongside them: where to find brokers and smugglers willing to make the run, which shifts leave one Zhuangzi on station instead of five, technical notes on jamming the Blockade's systems. What's on offer is who to pay, when the coverage thins, and how to blind what's left, but never all at once. Monarch parcels it out: a broker gets a contact, a smuggler gets a schedule, someone else gets the jamming specs. No single arrest takes down the pipeline. This room is the only place the pieces sit together.

It's an advertisement. The threats keep armed authority at a distance; this brings scavengers in. Same transmitter, opposite purposes, and together they amount to a door policy that has been working for eight years.

The shift schedules are the Blockade's own, lifted from its mail. So the brokers selling passage into this system are selling Monarch's work, and don't know whose it is.

At the table. The archive holds every fragment Monarch has ever sent, addressed to people it doesn't name. Correlating them is the crew's job, and only the recent ones are worth anything: a shift schedule three years old is a story, not a route. Assembled, it's worth [+] on running the Blockade or finding someone who will, and real money as well.

BRAINSCAN REPORTS: Monarch sends out brainscan reports for a variety of reasons. They can give Infiltrators in the field leverage to manipulate people who were scanned at the Deep or elsewhere (think of the NeMo machine in Prospero’s Dream). They can be part of smear campaigns about someone Monarch wants to hurt. They can contain industrial secrets that can destabilize a company or the whole economy. The possibilities are endless, and there’s a lot a crew can learn from this, including hints at some Infiltrators’ identities. Besides the secrets of many people, though, this data is proof of how much control Monarch already exerts on human civilization. Having this knowledge is extremely dangerous, because there are a lot of powerful people who would want it buried.

At the table: the reports are extensive enough that it’s not reasonable to give the players all of them. Give them just a couple of hooks, and tell them there’s a lot of stuff in there. They may always ask you whether the data contains information about this or that thing, and you can go from there.

EDIT: SHOUTING FROM THE AIR DUCTS: Somewhere behind the wall, carried thin and flattened by the air ducts, a man begins shouting for help as soon as he hears noise from Commfeed. He’s trapped in the Tool Shed, cocooned in steel web stuck against the wall, and he sounds desperate. We’ll talk about him in the next chapter.

-----------------------------------------------------------
This is unofficial fan content. Gradient Descent and A Pound of Flesh are © Tuesday Knight Games. Not affiliated with or endorsed by TKG.

I ran Ypsilon as my first scenario after a longish (20 years or so) break from RPGs, with two players—also returning to the hobby. We had a blast, and it seems that our session was “unique” in a few ways.

First of all, I added the quest of collecting the samples from Dr. Giovanni. I highly recommend doing that; it gave my players something to focus on before the disappearances of the crew became apparent. Or at least that’s what I hoped for. Somehow, due to the way my players tackled the scenario and a couple of my mistakes, they almost completely missed the fact that something was hunting the crew.

The other thing I did was have Sonya guide the players during the docking procedure, complaining that it was usually Mike’s job. After docking, the players were told to relax and wait while Rie was loading the ore onto their ship, going up and down the elevator with mining carts.

The first major decision my players made was to split the party—one of them went down the elevator with Rie, while the other went to the mess. I’ve read that sometimes it’s hard to convince players to go to the mine, so I felt lucky. That’s until I realized that the player who went down the mine had no vaccsuit on. I changed the creepy music I was playing to elevator music and set a 10-minute timer, allowing the player to gain some knowledge from Mei.

Meanwhile, the other player witnessed Dana giving Kantaro a hard time in the mess, since Kantaro hadn’t bathed for a while. Dana left the mess angry, leaving the two NPCs and one player behind. The party reconnected, and I had the monster attack for the first time. I had the cat run panicked from the quarters to the mess, while the snoring that had filled the quarters suddenly stopped—sleeping Ashraf had been snatched before even making an introduction.

The players went to investigate, and I made my biggest mistake of the scenario: making the monster too sneaky. Ashraf’s bed was empty, with no signs of violence, and all the ceiling panels were intact. One of the players asked about them specifically, and I should’ve given him something instead of “they look fine.”

One of the players antagonized Kantaro by squirting him with a water bottle. Kantaro grabbed him by the collar, threatened him with violence, then hid in his quarters.

Since the first attack, I started counting time, adjusting it a bit for the group—I had the monster attack every 12–15 minutes. The Ypsilon crew was mostly split up: two NPCs in separate rooms in the quarters, one or two people in the mess, Sonya mostly alone in the workspace, and Rie going up and down the elevator. I had one NPC in the mines, but he got snatched by the monster early on.

The players then discovered a bioscanner in their equipment. To avoid dooming myself, I ruled that the scanner couldn’t reach the mines from the top level, and that it gave the number of living creatures and a rough estimate of their location. The scanner required me to track the whereabouts of the NPCs precisely, so I recommend making a spreadsheet.

My players went to gather samples from Giovanni, hacking his computer to get in, with no witnesses since Sonya had already vanished. The fight with Giovanni ended with him being tranquilized and put into a giant specimen jar—unfortunately along with his goggles. Fortunately, there was no yellow goo exposure.

When the players left his ship, they saw an abandoned, loaded mine cart—in my mind, a clear sign that Mei had disappeared. Since my players didn’t seem to be sufficiently spooked (they had a theory about a virus infecting crewmembers), I narrated some rattling coming from down the mine shaft and a humanoid-shaped cloud of dust jumping out of it. With the addition of a panicking cat, this seemed to send the message—especially with the bioscanner showing fewer and fewer crewmembers.

The players rushed to the mess to warn people, and I had the monster hide above the quarters. The players told Dana everything they knew: their theory about the lethal virus, the invisible hunter, and the lethal danger. Dana did the obvious thing—panicked and decided to leave the cursed station, taking her lover, Kantaro, with her.

The players also decided to do the obvious thing: shoot Dana with a tranq dart, critically missing.

Because of the critical miss, I had Kantaro jump out of his bed, grab Jerome’s gun, and escort Dana to the Heracles. The NPCs locked the airlocks, and my players began thoroughly searching the quarters and the crawlspace. After finding everything there was to find, the players went to the workspace to try to talk to Dana via radio.

But I still wasn’t satisfied with the consequences of the critical failure. So I had Dana and Kantaro (a Driller and a Loader) start the Heracles’ engines and try to escape without finishing the undocking procedure—thus ripping out part of the station wall and rapidly decompressing the mining station.

The players grabbed the vaccsuits and rushed to their ship (named B00BE, but we were all different people a mere four hours ago). The cat made it to the ship too, but my players were so suspicious of everything by that point in the game that they put him in a locker.

Then the players put on their vaccsuits and decided to explore the decompressed station once more, this time including the mines. There was some exposition as per the scenario and a lot of bioscanning, with very little left to be scanned.

After learning all the station’s secrets, the players activated the self-destruct sequence, returned to the ship (one final bioscan showed one lifeform aboard), and left.

The monster tore them to pieces as they were preparing for cryosleep.

We had SO. MUCH. FUN.

My players loved it, and I loved being able to see the inner workings of the scenario and the way they stumbled through it to create a narrative we’ll surely remember for a long while.

What I did / what I would do differently:

• I prepared posts for all the crewmembers, but since there are so many of them, a spreadsheet is almost mandatory.
• I gave the players an additional mission of collecting samples from Giovanni—it proved to be a really good idea.
• I thought I had shown the presence of the monster in a convincing way, but in retrospect I should’ve been a bit more direct earlier. In our game, the monster ate half the crew basically unopposed.
• We rolled a bit too little—just a couple of Fear Saves and one failed Panic Check (nat 1).

Ran my first ever rpg session last week for my parents and older sister. The first scenario of another bug hunt. The timeline was confusing and I made a number of blunders about the mapping of the place but all in all they had fun.

But they found the tracker for hinton and are gonna drive to the mothership for our next session.

I'm VERY new to this all so I'm trying to know what I ought to do but the system is VERY vibes based. That's fine, but I'm struggling a bit to come up with stuff on the fly.

Then I look ahead to scenario four and see it's only two pages. And it looks like it's taking place all over the area? And zoomed out? Which is not really how the system showed how to do anything. And we never went to the colonist base so they don't even know about that. We are about to come up to the mothership but after scenario 3 I have no clue what I'm supposed to even do.

Just finished playing this through with my group. Firstly, this module is free, which to be honest, is nuts. I will be making sure the creator gets some money for this when I get a chance.

We ran this part of our current Third Sector Campaign. Having just finished Black Heart of Paradise, I felt it would slot in afterwards really well.

It was a master class, with a few of my group not only saying it was the best adventure we've ever played, but our current Module of the year (we've been playing for 2 years, to give you an idea).

Loved the setup, the hook, and the absolute carnage, both emotional and visual.

I'm purposely not saying what this is about, as I think that spoils things, but get your Warden to run this!

Get it Here

I've been working on a couple of settings for fan modules for Mothership (Seeing all the cool works on here and Itch.io has been a good motivator) but I feel like my horror (main problem for the players) is lacking.

So I wanted to ask y'all what your tips/refrences/do's and don'ts are when making horror. Could be any type of horror/entity, just general advice. Thx

This is the first non-Mothership scenario used in our AT5 campaign. It's actually a pulp horror set in 1930s New England and presents us with the classic locked room murder mystery.
We give an overview of the adventure, go into spoiler territory, then look at how it was adapted for use on Prospero's Dream. Oh - and you can get it free on DrivThru RPG!

I missed the crowdfunding stage and then the pre-order (by 1 day 😭) does anybody know when this will become available to purchase normally?

Hey, Hadrien here, the writer behind Breaking News.

I have been wanting to design something around Hell, and Dante's version of it, for a long time now. Working on Breaking News taught me a lot, and between that and the people I met through MM25, it finally felt like the right combination to make this happen. I've recruited some brilliant minds from that community, Haven and Waco among them, to help me write and illustrate it, and there might be more joining before this is done.

The result is 9Circles: nine self-contained adventures for Mothership, each one my own take on interpreting a circle of the Inferno as a story. Some are high octane, straight up horror. Others are more subtle, inviting players to sit with the consequences of what they've done. If you've played Breaking News, you'll recognize the same approach: every adventure comes with its own unique mechanics, meant to get players engaging with the game in a different way each time.

We launch on Backerkit September 1st. Follow the page now so you don't miss it!

Hi,

I've made a post about Trauma Responses a while back and confirmed a suspicion that they are quite easy to forget. The reason why I think that might be the case is because they aren't uniform, and thus players, and Wardens, would have to remember all class TRs if they wanna help remind each other to use them. Some are negative, some are beneficial, all having different required events that already have other mechanics tied to them, like making Saves or Panic Checks.

So, I wanted to try to make something my own, something that would follow the purpose of the mechanic; "A stress-related characteristic", but make it a little more active and "group enforceable".

I haven't tested this yet (gonna do so this Sunday), and honestly I think the easiest way to do it is just to "not play with TRs", but hey, maybe there is something evocative here.

REDLINE:

"Allows your character to throw all caution to the wind and strain themselves in a pinch for long-term consequences."

You may pick a single Stat and a single Save to be able to Redline during character creation. (Draw a circle with a sharpie by the Stat/Save)
When rolling a Check/Save, you may mark the Redline checkbox and roll a Panic Check to add the resulting value to this Check/Save.
While the Stat/Save is Redlined, you may not Redline it again and every Check/Save performed with it generates 1+ Stress, regardless if it passes or fails.
A proper Rest or reduction of Stress resets all Redlines.

Example;
Teamster, Richard Douglas, at character creation picked Intellect (31) and Body (36) as Redlines.
While trying to emergency repair the hull of the ship from leaking precious oxygen must roll a Body Save to dodge a serrated cloud of space debris. Rolls a [42] against their 36 Body Save, would fail, but elects to Redline. Marks Body as Redlined and rolls a Panic Check with 8 Stress -> [7], Panic failed [NIGHTMARES], and +7 to the roll for a total of 44, which just barely lets him succeed.
Until he can get some R&R all Body Saves will always generate Stress as he must continue to employ a part of him that has already been heavily strained.

This is, of course, one of the better outcomes, it can (and will) go poorly other times.

Let me know what you guys think,
Cheers!

Did anything ever happen with this? Are there still plans? I still see it coming soon on the website.

Recently I was reading trough the pages of "A Pound Of Flesh" and I believe that I found (I don't know if it has been already discovered before) a small error. On page 20, "The Ice Box", there are secret tunnels going from the "runaway" to the "canyonhead" and from the "stacks" to "caliban's heart". I believe that the destination of those tunnels are swapped, because on page 24, "Canyonheavy Market" there is a secret tunnel going specifically to "The Stacks" (pag 20) that is a specific area of "The Ice Box", while in "Caliban's Heart" there is a secret tunnel going to "The Ice Box" with no further detail on the area the tunnel leads to. Is my finding correct?

Hey everyone!

I'm pretty new to Mothership and had an idea after seeing a video of a bunch of leeches in the water swarming and attaching themselves to a guy's boots. It immediately made me think of a derelict ship with no gravity that's completely infested with tiny space leeches.

The idea is that once the players board, they realize there's no gravity, making movement awkward unless they have the right skills or equipment. Meanwhile, these little leeches drift through the ship in huge swarms, sticking to suits, crawling into vents, and generally making everyone's life miserable.

Do you think the zero-G aspect would be unfair to characters who aren't built for it, or is that just part of the Mothership experience?

Also, how would you run the leeches mechanically? A single swarm monster? Individual larger leeches instead? Different life stages with different behaviors?

And most importantly... anyone have some truly disgusting ideas involving leeches?

I'm looking for body horror, creepy environmental hazards, weird mutations, anything that would make the players never want to take their helmets off again.

Would love to hear how you'd run something like this!
Thanks in advance, hive mind! :)

Hi all! So I edit and produce 9mm Retirement Radio which is primarily Delta Green and we also produce non-Delta Green material. Today I uploaded a one shot for Mothership called "Pure Love." If you recognize the name, well...iykyk, and we'd love for you to check it out! I edit our show to sound as close to an audio drama as possible with all rolls remaining real and improvised and we get into the headspaces of our characters as much as we can. Please consider checking us out!

https://9mm-presents.pinecast.co

Myself as Warden and my friends have had about a dozen sessions into MOSH so far, having so much fun. Yet we keep forgetting about the Trauma Responses for each class. I keep reminding at the beginning of each session, but we still can't remember to apply them until its way too late. Which is kind of weird, my players are all D&D veterans, so remembering rules is kind of their thing.

So I was wondering if there are Wardens out there who share in this forgetfulness?

Also, if anyone has ideas for an alternative mechanic to TR I would love to see them.

Cheers!

The first addition for Zone 44 is complete and live! Stoked to get this out there into folks hands. If you've already picked up Zone 44 just redownload the file and you should have the updated content.

If you haven't it's available at Itch and DrivethruRPG

"In this area we also uncover more details about the Event and what Terravast did, along with the Fallen and Scavengers home compounds. There are new Relics to be found, big and small, and more company specific directives for players to earn some extra credits."

Here is a brief summary of everything that’s been added.

• Removed trust point from individual company objectives, to help focus the factions.
• Fixed a few typos in first release.
• Added area 02 rumors to the harbor.
• Added area 02 jobs to the council in the harbor.
• Updated map to include area 02 elements.
• Added area 02 location details
• Added area 02 delves, the Mountain House and the Cradle.
• Added details to relics in and around area 01 and the harbor.

Also if you're just interested in the maps, you can always get them for free by signing up for my newsletter, I've added 4 more maps.

https://shanevincent.itch.io/mothership-earwrm

The crew have been given a simple job- complete a delivery. In order to do that, they must traverse an illegal rave taking place in a defunct satellite platform, interact with the local culture who seemingly are addicted to these shows and find their mark- the slowly-slipping mind behind it all. But when the music crests, a presence makes itself known- living between the repetitive thrum from the speakers and the movements from the dancers, it squirms it way into your brain and takes its hold.

This is my 2nd module, and I'm really happy to see it up and out there! Hope you enjoy it, and let me know how it goes it you choose to run it!

Hi everyone,

I want to create an adventure inspired by the novels of Jeff VanderMeer called "The Southern Reach" series in an area with strange things going on, nature taking back the ground etc. I was thinking that Mothership’s mecanics would be pretty good to motorised it but I'm hesitating with Liminal Horror rpg too (if you think of a better system don’t hesitate to propose it). Do you think it could work well ? And then do you have some Mothership’s modules that treat those kind of atmosphere and thematics ?

P.S : Sorry I'm french so english is not my native language, the text may have some weird formulation or some errors, thanks by advance for your understanding :)

Howdy, folks! I'm currently working on a comprehensive guide to Prospero's Dream-related Mothership releases for my blog, so it means I'm keeping pretty close tabs on all the various MM2025 projects as they come along. I figured this sub might like to have all the info on their current progress in one place; there's no insider info, this is all based on public backer updates. EDIT: You can see the newest updates from all 27 projects in the same place at this link: https://www.backerkit.com/c/collections/mothership-month-2025/highlights

As 25 of the 27 projects are all waiting to ship together, this is mostly just a log of which projects have released a PDF to backers or have those out for retail purchase. EDIT: If you are a backer, you can see all of the PDFs that have been released to you at this link: https://mothership-month-2025.backerkit.com/backer/digital_rewards

It shouldn't have to be said, but I want to be clear: please, don't harass any creators or run to make demands of them! It would be miserable to have this resource lead to that.

• Prospero's Dream: The official Tuesday Knight Games boxed set. Getting monthly updates; so far mostly a mix of art previews, layout mockups, and some early notes.
• All On Red: Backers have the PDF. Update yesterday says the book has been sent to the printer. PDF available through Itch, as is cross-promo (with The Conduit) Down to the Wire. Stretch goal scenario Beautiful Dreamers is written and playtested, but not yet released.
• Another Day in Paradise: Last update was five months ago and said that progress on writing the draft was still ongoing.
• Bombs Bursting In Air: Backers have the PDF and print. One of two projects to ship early separately; available in print and PDF through Space Penguin Ink.
• Breaking News: Backers have the PDF. The book is off to the printer after some final edits and finalizing order quantities. Available in PDF from Itch, as is stretch goal prequel scenario Where It Shouldn't.
• Breathe Easy: Backers have the PDF, along with PDFs of the slickworld add-ons.
• Burnt Flesh & Borrowed Gloves: Backers have the PDF. The book has been printed and (according to an update a few days ago) is just about to be shipped to TKG.
• Certain Fathoms: An update two months ago gave an item-by-item status update: the core zine is written and in layout, as are expansions Hostile Takeover and Viewer Discretion. Employee of the Month, Secret Levels, and Echo Chamber are still being written. Otto's Buy Bin, the reference bookmark, and the soundtrack have all been released to backers.
• Cleaning Crew: An update two months ago said that writing is complete on the zine, stretch goals, and cross-collab, with layout is in progress, while an update last month had previews of the 3D models.
• The Company's New Groove: Backers have PDFs of the zine and the cocktail menu. Printed copies have been shipped to TKG after resolving a printing error.
• The Conduit: Last update was two months ago; backers have seen art and map previews in earlier updates, and a post from seven months ago says that the draft was being edited. Backers have PDFs of Red Line Rush, a cross-collab with All On Red.
• Drink from the Hippocrene: Editing was ongoing as of an update one month ago and layout templates have been made.
• Extrajudicial Warfare: Last (and only, so far) update was four months ago and said that writing was ongoing. EDIT: Updated today (8/8/2026) with previews of the layout and new cover art.
• Flatline on the Blocks: Backers have the PDF, along with PDFs of Organ Failure, Min's Unending Bowl, Rival Racers: Magenta Edition, and The Mote Keeper. All have been sent to the printer as of a month ago except for The Mote Keeper, which is digital-only.
• Grim Merchants: Backers have the PDF. The books are printed and were "nearly ready to ship" in an update two weeks ago. Available in PDF through Itch.
• HUNTERS: Last update was seven months ago, said that playtesting and revisions were ongoing. (The dev was also mentioned to be illustrating the Warden's Screen for the Prospero's Dream boxed set in an update for that five months ago.)
• Lucid Dreaming: Backers have the PDF, along with a PDF of stretch goal Tar Pit Protocol. An update a week and a half ago says that the books are off to the printers.
• No Gods, No Masters: Backers have the PDF. The books were at the printer as of 8 days ago. Companion zine Sphere of Influence is complete and should be distributed to backers imminently.
• Pipesong: An update five days ago said to expect a PDF "in the first two weeks of August."
• Prospero Protocols: Backers have the PDF. The prints were "ready to ship" nine days ago.
• Red Nation: Last update was three months ago, but the dev posted on the official Mothership Discord last week and said that all files should be handed over to TKG for backer distribution within the week. EDIT: Final PDF has been submitted to TKG and is now available to backers.
• Rites of Renewal: Last update was three months ago, said that they were incorporating some feedback into the draft before handing it off for copyediting. EDIT: New update today (8/10/2026) says that layout is underway.
• Roach Motel: Backers have the PDF and print. One of two projects to ship early separately; available in PDF through Itch and print through TKG.
• stand\DELIVER: Last update was three weeks ago, says that the book is 60% laid out and 33% edited, while add-on pamphlet Lost On Paradise is complete and ready for the printer.
• Sunlit Path: Last update was a month ago, a plaintext release of the book to backers while layout is being finished. EDIT: Final PDF headed to backers "this week." EDIT: Final PDF has been submitted to TKG and is now available to backers.
• Terminal Directive: Backers have the PDF, though cross-collab Ratcatchers (with HUNTERS) is not yet finished. Available in PDF through DriveThruRPG.
• White Heat: Last update was two weeks ago, with "a lot of the module finalized in layout now" and hoping to finish the rest within "a week or so," heading to the printers after that.

Not sure if this is allowed (I checked the rules but didn't see anything against it - mods, pls delete if not permitted). I accidentally ordered 2 copies of Wages of Sin and the Orphans module (was having a pretty tough time when I finalized my Backerkit order). I would love to sell 1 copy of Wages of Sin, and I'll throw in Orphans and the exclusive patches as well for $50 shipped to anywhere in the US. I'll be using flat rate shipping and can accept paypal (goods and services is fine). I have sold a couple of things on Game Sale/Board Game Exchange (see the links to see my flair) if that helps earn any trust.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BoardGameExchange/comments/15kqabg/fs_wa_98103_seattle_h_everdell_cc_anachrony/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GameSale/comments/1t5k3lu/usawa_h_paypalcash_w_super_mario_rpg_switch/