horror

Mothership RPG is the Haunted Void’s Sandbox Setting

/ geotrickster / Leave a comment
Mild spoilers for my future self-made adventure module.

It has been a long time since my formerly semi-regular tabletop rpg reviews and analysis on this site. Serendipity struck recently with my desire to acquire a new system with an explicit space-sci-fi focus coinciding with the arrival of the 25th anniversary remaster of System Shock 2, one of my favorite games of all time. This kicked off a rewatch of all the salvageable Alien movies (the first two being perfect top tier films of all time and canonical, and 3 and Romulus being the acceptable fanfiction entries, of course) and a determination to rewatch Sunshine and Event Horizon soon. Sci-fi Horror was my first true love, dating back to seeing Alien when I was only 8 years old and this no doubt leaving an impression. Its position at the pinnacle of subgenres would only become surpassed by one other, the Dying Earth subgenre, when I was in my mid-twenties.

So let’s boot up those retrotech systems and get going:

I have heard Mothership talked about for a few years now, but avoided it specifically because the primary game I both run and play in my life so far has been Call of Cthulhu. For this reason, and also because of my desire to find a space system that matches well with a preexisting setting I have made which is the one I use for much of my creative writing, I was holding out for something without so much of a horror focus. The problem was that none of those systems ever grabbed me in terms of mechanics. When I finally got around to looking at Mothership though, inspired by the confluence of factors above, I found that it was everything I wanted, and, being culturally adjacent to the Old School Renaissance type of gameplay style I so like, was easily modifiable to fit different setting-style beats. This is something I always look for when shopping for a new mechanical system as I almost never use pre-made material for adventure and setting.

Though Mothership does not count as one of the D20s-centric retro D&D clones, it shares the design philosophy of the OSR movement more broadly. Rolls are asked for in only the most contested of situations. Player cleverness and advantage-seeking is encouraged, and the deadliness of the game is accentuated by a quick and dirty pace with often decisive outcomes.  Its system is kind of a simplified Call of Cthulhu for base mechanics, with a roll-under D100 for skill checks and saves, and a roll-over D20 for less common panic table outcome checks. This panic table comes into play when either something truly shocking happens or a critical fail is rolled on another check, and has one roll against accumulated stress. Stress accumulates with every failed skill check, so these rolls become progressively more dangerous over the course of a session, providing a mechanic for heightening tension. Most will average against the player, whose skills, with the exception of one or two specialties, end up below the halfway threshold in most cases. This brings the stress mechanic and panic check element in with relative rapidity. 

Mothership’s character building is so simple the very character sheet can explain to new players how to do it. If one has not done it before it would take five minutes. If one has, two or three. It has a three-tiered tree of advancing skills whose primary mechanical effect is adding bonuses to stat checks. There are only four starting classes in the base game, though each player is given a large amount of leeway in how to allocate skills.

Ship combat is just as simple as ground combat, with range/position and skills determining phases and equipment determining skillsets. The difference is that crew members serve as adding bonuses to different checks and the whole party acts as the ship itself in a singular form. I have seen a lot of criticism of this aspect of the game online, but to me it retains the OSR feel in a way that feels distinct for a space setting and so I personally like it.

Rather than get to into the weeds on mechanics, as this particular game has become quite popular recently and so multitudes of deep dives on it can be found, I am more interested in turning now towards its immaculate rendition as a horror sci-fi toolset. I have (and am only reviewing) the core set. This is made up of multiple small booklets that come in one box break. They include the players guide (really the only thing that is necessary to run), a Warden’s (GM) guide which is possibly the best example of that often superfluous book I have ever seen, especially for new game masters, a ship guide (personal favorite of mine for the retro-jank designs), a de facto monster manual, and a single adventure module. Taken together, the quality of all of them is excellent and leads me to believe this would be one of the best first-time games for someone new to the hobby. The format is well-organized and concise. There is one of the better screens I have come across included in this pack, as well as cut out figurines for ships and characters.

As it comes to the setting, it is as minimal as possible, once again drawing from OSR sensibilities. I see this as an advantage, allowing whatever influences you wish to graft on flowing with the simple and easily modified rules. The overall influences on the game are included in a sidebar in the Warden’s Operation Manual and they are pretty much exactly what I suspected as I had been reading up to that point. Interestingly, they mention Alastair Reynolds’s book Diamond Dogs (reminding me I still had yet to read that one) only and not Chasm City or Revelation Space, which I would have thought of as strong examples for this kind of game. The aesthetics are Alien, especially in the kind of hazard pay working class used universe vibe, but the overall tone, especially in its equivalent of the monster manual, is definitely more on an arc that stretches from the grounded Ad Astra to the Hellraiser in space that is Event Horizon. 

This adaptability around a fun mechanic is exactly what I wanted. But, as I mentioned earlier, my intention is to graft it onto my own pre-existing setting, which is not quite a horror-first focused one. To show the adaptability of the game, all that is required for me to make them compatible with my more Jack Vance inspired view of humanity’s anthropological and cultural potential in space is to make the panic check table less foreboding in outcome (proportionally speaking, not in the absolute) as well as add a +1 to the amount of wounds characters or ships can tank before dying. The biggest change in addition to this is a new custom class that fits the primary theme of my pre-existing and quite Machiavellian setting, that of the diplomatic agent.* This did not require adding any new skills, as the linguistics->psychology-> sophontology and art->mysticism trees already exists in the game, but it did require making different starting bonuses for this fifth new class that effectively gives a large boost to intellect, a minor one to speed, a slightly improved sanity save, and a mandatory starting skill in linguistics/psychology plus one optional trained skill of the players choice. I am also considering adding a kind of ‘ethnicity’ element to my currently under construction campaign module, given my setting’s focus on cultural and biological divergence on different worlds after human settlement, but any stat changes here would be very minor. After more playtesting we can look into that further. Who knows, I might end up posting the finished module here when its done and tested.

My overall impression is this: I went looking for a system to compliment my regular rotation games with a space sci-fi element. Mothership is both adaptable and worthy. It further adds value to one’s shelf if one is interested in collecting the art of the OSR aesthetic. It will now join the ranks of Call of Cthulhu, Shadow of the Demon Lord, Pelgrane’s The Dying Earth, and Old School Essentials as a regular and recurring element in my game running.

And remember: if something catastrophic happens to a ship or station while you are running a game, you are obligated to suddenly and without warning whip this out and have it play in the background at the critical moment for all of your players:

*Technically I need to add two, with assassin/bounty hunter being the other, but a very interesting game expansion is coming that deals with this so I am leaving it out of this post for now. I may jerry-rig my own though in the meantime, but I have yet to do so as of the time of this writing.

Laird Barron’s Carnivorous Cosmicism

/ geotrickster / 1 Comment
Hunter by Justin Sweet

“”To know itself the universe must drink the blood of its children.” Her voice cracked like an ice shelf collapsing; it roared across an improbable expanse of inches. The talon pressed against my pupil. It went in and in.” ~Laird Barron, ‘Swift to Chase.’

“The foxes run. The foxes die. I mourn them, but I understand that there is a danger in mourning for those who would not mourn you in return. Empathy is for those who can afford it. Empathy is for the privileged. Empathy is not for nature.” ~Tanya Tagaq, ‘Split Tooth.’

Happy October. The best month is upon us so it is time to be thematic.

As of the time of this writing, I am one story away from closing out Not a Speck of Light, Laird Barron’s latest collection of short stories. I imagine that reviews of this specific work will be rapidly proliferating, so I am more interested in examining the overall themes of his oeuvre. All I will say about the latest publication is that it is excellent- as much so as his last collection Swift to Chase. As is normal, there are three or so stories on average from each work that really stick with me, a whole lot I enjoy thoroughly, and one or two that I am simply (but not negatively) baffled by.

Barron’s publicly available biography is well known because it is so interesting. Born and raised in Alaska, he worked in fishing and dog sledding, and spent some time in Washington State before moving to upstate New York. These three locations are extremely present in his works. Interestingly, he seems to be working backwards, with more recent stories being more likely to be set in Alaska. His earlier work was Washington-focused. There is also a novel series set in New York State, which retains the weirdness of his shorter fiction if more indirectly but is more focused on two fisted mystery and action.

Most of Barron’s stories are readable as self-contained and stand alone entries. Yet there is a clear overlap and greater cosmos going on here. Characters reappear, as do cults and monsters. Old Leech, an eldritch being who loves humanity “in his own way”, enjoys feasting on our suffering to sustain either his power or perhaps merely to slake his boredom. The world is animalistic and very much alive. But it is not a Live, Laugh, Love world- although you can do all of those things in it if you like.

Something that brings all of Barron’s work together, at least from my own perspective, is the same thing that has attracted me to for eleven years now: Its ruthless paganism. Barron’s protagonists are like Robert E Howard’s in the sense that they are tough and fight back no matter the odds. Unlike Howard, however, who was very much on Team Humanity, human supremacy never exists in Barron’s world. No one wins out over entropy. The food chain, like in Lovecraft of Clark Ashton Smith, is not stacked in favor of man. People fight back, but they often go down fighting. Specific underlings and odious toadies can get their comeuppance, but the protagonists don’t really win either in the long run. I have long maintained that Barron is really a modern Sword and Sorcery author more than even a horror author. That older and better form of fantasy was rooted in an earthy defiance of established order combined with naturalistic sensibilities. Horror was everywhere, but so was adventure. The world was predatory and so were its heroes.

A film example of sword and sorcery in the modern day which also goes unrecognized is the film Mandy, a movie I suspect Barron has seen, especially considering the direction some of his newer stories have taken in the past few years. In this way it takes one to know one as that film also influenced my own writing.

What you get with Barron is a kind of beautifully sparse and atmospheric writing style. Cormac McCarthy doing the pulps. But to say this is pulp is not to deny its literary value. In a culture where we are expected to be awash in Platonic idealism and a mandatory public moralism, it is of cultural value to take the human glasses off from time to time and see the surging tide of instinct and feeding that undergirds our experience. Life is visceral, and above such notions as good and evil. Suffering is everywhere, but so is the joy of combatting it. The pulps understood this drive, to see the awe in horror. Mysterium Tremendum made manifest. To choose life is to choose confronting, perhaps embracing, horror. Personally, I think these kinds of outlooks are extremely useful to meet many present challenges.

Barron shows us a world where everything eats everything else. An endless cycle of predation and consumption. It is perfectly in line with the view of the surviving shamanistic traditions or the old gods. This is the shamanic journey, where one is devoured by monstrous animals before being reborn with the devouring beast as a personal guide. One lives, laughs, and loves with a bloodstained mouth. As the musician and author Tanya Tagaq once put it while complaining about PETA’s demonization of traditional indigenous communities continuing to hunt: “We’re animals! We’re meat! We’re so stupid to think we are not.”

I am not one to become personally invested in people I do not know directly. When famous people I respect become ill or die it does not impact me like it does others. One very big exception to this, I found out, was when it was announced not too long ago that Laird Barron had a sudden and major medical emergency. A jolt passed through me fearing the worst. It was the fear that we would lose one of our best living authors. Someone who spoke to a reality lost in the endless publications of mainstream literary fiction with its endless focus on human subjectivity. Someone who had been one of the main reasons I had gotten back into writing fiction after years of inactivity on that hobby. Thankfully, he pulled through. Old Leech isn’t done digesting us yet. Here is to many more- both years and publications.

I can’t help but wonder if he listens to atmospheric black metal.