D6 Empty Rooms

1.
2. Empty of air.
3. Nothing in it can be seen.

4. Imposes a profound hollowness on the soul.

5. Empty of even dust. Pristine. Will stay that way.
6. Any container empties itself, including stomachs and bowels.

Mothership: Backgrounds and Memories

Mothership House Rule: Spacer Backgrounds and Recalling Memories

Backgrounds

Unless you're playing a one-shot, Mothership characters could use a bit of grounding, as it were. Here's a table to generate crappy backgrounds for roughneck spacers.

Where did you grow up?

1. Asteroid mining station, among microgravity miners
2. Itinerant labor ship, among career spacers
3. Orbital junkyard, among weary shipbreakers
4. Deep space waystation, among opportunistic scoundrels
5. Agricultural station, among countless algae vats
6. Military base, among bored marines
7. Terraforming station, among vast cooling towers
8. A subterranean moon city, among colorless apartment blocks
9. A failing surface colony, among fatalistic family
10. An industrial factory station, among lethal machinery

Where did you spend most of your life before your current career? (Roll again from above)

Why did you go there? (if the same result: Too poor to leave)

1. Dragged along when parents had to change jobs
2. To break away from your family
3. Ran out of money while traveling to somewhere nicer
4. Accepted a Company contract position
5. Socially exiled, forced to leave
6. The ads for it were so nice...
7. Following a good friend and/or lover
8. Relocated by The Company
9. Kidnapped into forced labor by a crime syndicate
10. As a refugee from disaster

Recalling Memories

Either at the end of a session, or once per session when things are calm, you can relieve 1 Stress by recalling a memory from your past.  Set in one of the places from your background, recall a specific person, place, thing, or event that stood out against the static of a generally shitty spacelife. How did it impact who you are today?

Conceptual Status: Caution - Only Preliminary Playtesting

Freya's Prospect from the 2010 AvP game apparently?

Commentary & In My Campaign

These are part of a game structure to support doing something weird (as is my wont) with Mothership: using Emmy Allen's The Gardens of Ynn as the alien-ness in this space horror game.

One of the main threats in Ynn is attacking the visitors' "Sense of Self"; eroding their personality and personal identity. In order for that to be effective in a game only a few sessions in, the characters need a personality and identity to erode in the first place. Mothership is pretty minimal in terms of PC identity, hence these backgrounds, and a method of the players filling in bits of their characters' sense of self, via recalling memories (incentivized by a free point of stress relief).

Related Resources

Dan at Throne of Salt does a ton of bespoke Mothership content

I encourage you to comment below, rather than elsewhere.

Long live the Blogosphere!

Grotty PC Relationships

Your PC's relationship with the PC to your right:

1. You're connected quite literally, by ten feet of chain, shackled to an ankle each.
2. You're revolted by them, but somehow they're the only thing keeping your shit together.
3. You're old friends, but always take credit for their accomplishments.
4. You both know damning secrets about each other. Like, really bad.
5. You stole their Wand of Self-Pleasure after finding them asleep with it in an alley.
6. You both ripped off a crime boss in The City and owe them way more coin than you'd be able to earn in a lifetime of honest work.
7. You discovered you both collect something gross, and have only confided in each other since.
8. You were both somewhat accomplished adventurers, until the incident. One of you lost their shield-hand, the other half their face.
9. You really look up to them. They always overlook you. Seriously, you're way shorter than them. But, figuratively, too.
10. You're positive they covet your pig (loyal, obedient, and loving).
11. They look very much like the face on a bounty poster you found. The others don't see the resemblance.
12. You grew close in the trenches of The War. Very close. Whether you can even stand each other now is another question.

Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. The duo on the right were inspiration for R2D2 and C3PO.

Conceptual Status: Warning - Untested but Play-Ready

Commentary

I have vague intentions of running some fast, loose, funnel-style OSRish one-shots at local pub game nights. The system would be pretty rules-light, and character creation would be dead-simple and lightning fast to get into the gameplay ASAP. These would probably be on cards, along with two other character aspect cards, randomly selected.

I want these and the other related character aspects to...

• Not be as boring as most PC relationship tables ("18: Siblings.")
• Give the players something to grab on to RP-wise, when everything else is also random and they're plopped into a weird situation with little context
• Give the players reason to interact among themselves in the absence of external pressure to do so, because this is where a big chunk of the fun of one-shots always seems to arise
• Encourage a wee bit of PVP, or at least dramatic irony, which are likewise generally good in a one-shot
• Naturally generate "leading questions" without forcing them
• Establish an appropriately grotty tone and aesthetic for the flavor of modules I want to run, and that your characters are not Heroes
• Let it be clear that they're free to lean-in to the Murderhobo instinct

Related Resources

Somewhat inspired by:

• Murder Snackers, a bonkers AP podcast. The sound direction is incredible, if cacophonous.
• Last Gasp Grimoire's aesthetic
• Bonds from Dungeon World, etc.

Do you know any other really good, flavorful tables for PC relationships?

I encourage you to comment below, rather than elsewhere.

Long live the Blogosphere!

Dinozoids

Dinosaurs, played straight, annoy me. Something about the dissonance of them existing alongside rust monsters and bulettes. If a module calls for a dinosaur, I intend to reskin them with this.

In rough order of increasing weirdness (adjust die size accordingly)

1. Too many horns
2. Big, sharp, scissor-like beak
3. Mouth too wide, splitting down the neck or torso
4. Proboscis tongue, flicks out with startling speed and range, injects strange toxins
5. Head like a giant reptilian claw
6. Moth-like antennae, communicates with static sounds, limited intelligence
7. Big faceted gem-like eyes that shoot frickin' laser beams
8. Articulated exoskeleton, can fold up into egg like shape for protection like a crab
9. Elongated body, 1d4 exploding extra sets of limbs
10. It never evolved limbs, remove them
11. Thick, gummy, rubbery skin and meat, cartilaginous skeleton, lower damage but higher HP, lose weapons in it
12. Encrusted in crystals, longest on the back where they don't get broken off
13. Fed by the heat of a radioactive heart-stone, exposed to the air through the ribcage for thermal regulation
14. Glow-in-the-dark skin, with that gross pale translucent quality in normal light, absorbs magic
15. Still mostly a fish; replace limbs with fins, somehow gets along on land
16. Saurotaur - replace head with an intelligent humanoid upper body
17. Take the 1-4: front, 5-6: back half of it, jam 2d4 of them together like a starfish
18. Crudely simple skeletal structure and body plan, too few joints, like a children's drawing, viscerally unsettling
19. Badly made; mouth sealed shut, webbed digits and limbs indistinct from trunk, seam-like lines, eyes seem painted directly on flesh
20. God's plaything; composed of glazed porcelain with gold embellishments, moving in clay-motion, cracking, flowing, re-firing itself as it moves

Youtube video "11 worst dinosaurs in my collection"

Conceptual Status: Warning - Untested but Play-Ready

Commentary

I tried to add things that might give these creatures a slightly-to-highly gonzo charm, reminiscent of that of the original D&D monsters, which Gygax based a number of on knock-off toy "dinosaurs".

Speaking of that brand of charm, I don't think I've seen a monster resource that comes closer to reproducing it than Roger GS's Varlets & Vermin (and that includes the Creature Compendium). It's straight-up D&D canon, in my book! And free. Print it. Put it on the table.

I encourage you to comment below, rather than elsewhere.

Long live the Blogosphere!