The Troubleshooter Corps

A common assumption of Mothership games is that the PCs are bystanders. Whatever horrid shit happens to them, it's not because they specifically sought out trouble; they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Let's change that.

Andrea De Dominicis

Taurus-Littrow Interspace Industries

Taurus-Littrow does business in space colonization infrastructure - they build space stations, operate cargo liners, sell quick and easy habitat modules, and produce lunarcrete for large-scale moonbase construction.

Taurus-Littrow: trust, safety, reliability.

This company is most famous for its warranty policy, which is upheld through the Troubleshooter Corps. These are subcontracting spacer crews who are sent to fix Taurus-Littrow equipment sold to third parties. Did you lose contact with your research station? Is the ventilation in your base spreading some sort of strange disease? Have your mining robots disappeared inside a mysterious cave? Don't you worry - if your warranty is yet to expire, we'll send a crew of Troubleshooters to fix it right up!

In other words: the PCs will be visiting places where things have Gone Wrong in Space, on purpose. They're gig economy sci-fi horror adventurers.

Atomcyber

The Job Board

The PCs get: a company-owned spaceship, all the tools of their trade, a smarmy corporate liaison officer, and access to the Job Board. This is a corporate intranet site where Troubleshooter crews can volunteer for repair missions posted by third-party clients. Competition for jobs is tight - Taurus-Littrow has a reputation to upkeep. 

Each job nets a base payment - enough to cover all the day-to-day functioning of the Troubleshooter crew (food, fuel, spare CO2 scrubbers etc.) between jobs. As long as the crew keeps doing jobs, they won't starve - do not track their total amount of money, only their surplus/debt compared to the baseline. It is not enough to cover medical expenses, spare parts for the ship, new gear, or recreation on shore leave. That's what bonuses are for.

Things you get bonuses for:

• Especially risky jobs.
• Quick and precise work.
• Saving on resources (fuel, spare parts, etc.).
• Completing secondary objectives.

Things you get penalties for:

• Waste.
• Damaging or losing equipment.
• Customer dissatisfaction.
• Nosing where you shouldn't be.

5d10 Jobs

Client

1. Independent colonists
2. Colonial administration
3. Research team
4. Marine garrison
5. Religious cult
6. Tributary corporation
7. Space libertarians
8. Teamster work detail
9. Mercenary company
10. Corespace delegation

Location

1. Planetside colony
2. O'Neill cylinder
3. Asteroid base
4. Space station (small)
5. Space station (fuckhuge)
6. Spaceship
7. Cloud city
8. Underwater base
9. Deep space outpost
10. Ruin/derelict of any of the above

Primary objective

1. Retrieve lost equipment
2. Repair malfunctioning equipment
3. Replace broken equipment
4. Deliver needed resources
5. Demolish something that's in the way
6. Deactivate malfunctioning equipment
7. Quarantine a biological/chemical hazard
8. Reestablish contact with outlying equipment
9. Evacuate the Client
10. Save the job location from total destruction

Secondary objective

1. Memory-wipe all androids at the job location
2. Secretly retrieve sensitive documents from the Client
3. Take samples of the anomaly
4. Get the Client to sign a premium colonist contract with Taurus-Littrow
5. Sabotage a rival company agent on the job location
6. Covertly investigate reports of anti-corporate activity by the Client
7. Plant evidence of misuse of equipment for a lawsuit against the Client
8. Steal another company's equipment from the job location for reverse-engineering
9. Escort a Taurus-Littrow agent to a seemingly unrelated place at the job location. You cannot know why.
10. Destroy all evidence of the malfunction having taken place.

What's up with this job?

1. The source of the problem is perfectly mundane, but trying to solve it will lead PCs to stumble into to the worst kind of space weirdness.
2. Unexpected third party: rogue AI, aliens, rival corporation.
3. A space disaster (moonquake, solar flare, magnetic anomaly) caused the problem. The second wave will blow the whole place apart.
4. You're being called in to do the job as strikebreakers.
5. The job location is at war - civil war, coup, offworld invasion.
6. The clients are a front for a group on Taurus-Littrow's blacklist (insurgents, anarchists, planetside subalterns). Helping these people will have consequences.
7. Extremely sensitive. PCs accompanied by Taurus-Littrow compliance officer.
8. You're being used as a pretext to assassinate the Client. Something will go wrong on purpose while you're working.
9. It's fake. The job is staged, as part of a secret evaluation program by Taurus-Littrow. Underachievers will be terminated or placed in lower payment tiers.
10. It's fake. The Job Board has been hacked. On the other end is a pirate crew, trying to lure in easy prey.

Anthony Chong Jones

Appendix N: Mothership

Norma2D

Stuff that I draw inspiration from when writing Mothership. Also check out Dan's appendix for more goodness.

Without further ado:

• Ad Astra Per Aspera (SCP Foundation)
• AKIRA (dir. Katsuhiro Ōtomo)
• All Tomorrows (Nemo Ramjet)
• Armored Trooper VOTOMS (dir. Ryosuke Takahashi)
• Beacons in the Dark (Lilly Harper)
• The Big Nothing (dir. Lucy Campbell & Peter Ninos)
• BLAME! (Tsutomu Nihei)
• Carrion (Phobia Game Studio)
• ΔV: Rings of Saturn (Kodera Software)
• Dai Dark (Q Hayashida)
• Duskers (Misfits Attic)
• Economies of Force (Seth Dickinson)
• Expedition (Wayne Barlowe)
• The Fifth Element (dir. Luc Besson)
• The Hyacinth Disaster (David Carlson)
• Hydorah (locomalito)
• In Other Waters (Fellow Traveler)
• Janus Descending (No Such Thing Productions)
• Knights of Sidonia (Tsutomu Nihei)
• Last and First Men (Olaf Stapledon)
• Last and First Men (dir. Jóhann Jóhannsson)
• The Mission (Péter Zsoldos)
• Moon (dir. Duncan Jones)
• No Shortage of Dreams (David S. F. Portree)
• Orion's Arm Universe Project
• Planetes (dir. Gorō Taniguchi)
• Prospect (dir. Zeek Earl & Chris Caldwell)
• Salyut-7 (dir. Klim Shipenko)
• Solaris (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)
• Splendor & Misery (clipping.)
• Starmoth (Isilanka)
• Sunrise on Ilion (Emily Holland)
• The Thing (dir. John Carpenter)
• Tides (Jesse Schuschu & Ayla Taylor)
• The Uplift Saga (David Brin)

The Long Slow Black Road to the Stars: Interplanetary Travel for Mothership

 

Ailantd Sikowsky

The transhumanist TTRPG Ghost Ship has the most elegant and intuitive rules for interplanetary travel I've ever seen. The game sadly seems to be vaporware (the draft documents, untouched since 2017, are available for free), but I took the liberty to steal these mechanics and customize them for Mothership 1e, with a no-FTL, full interplanetary sandbox campaign in mind.

Transfer Ratings

Own work, based on Ghost Ship. Click here if Blogspot ate the image quality.

Each transfer from orbit to orbit has a Transfer Rating, ranging from 1 to 5. Trace your finger along the route you want to take, from your starting point to your destination. The single highest Transfer Rating on this route is the total Transfer Rating for your entire trip. During your trip, you will have to expend an amount of Fuel equal to this Transfer Rating, for orbital injection burns and deep-space maneuvers. You will spend the rest of your time coasting through space.

Special Maneuvers

The above method assumes a trajectory that tries to balance travel time and fuel expenditure reasonably. All interplanetary-capable ships have an astrogation computer able to compute this route without any roll or risk involved. When you're short on either time or fuel, special maneuvers come into play.

If you want to get somewhere and you really, really can't spare the time, you can strap yourself in and execute a Hard Burn. You expend 1 Fuel to bruteforce your ship into a less fuel-efficient, shorter trajectory. Your Transfer Rating decreases by 1 (to a minimum of 1) and everyone on the ship gains 1 Stress. You can do this only once every trip.

If you can't spare the fuel needed for your trip, you can take a more circuitous route. Timing your trajectory so that you encounter bypassing celestial bodies, you can exploit their gravity wells for a Slingshot Maneuver. Your Transfer Rating increases by 1 (to a maximum of 5) and your fuel expense decreases by 1 (to a minimum of 1). Likewise, you can only do this once on a single trip.

Downtime

Spaceflight takes time, most of it uneventful coasting. Depending on your Transfer Rating, everyone on board will have a certain number of Downtime Actions at their disposal. These work in the exact same way as Shore Leave Actions (i.e. they can be used to train Skills, get medical care, work on a project etc.) with one exception: they cannot be used to relieve Stress.

If you want to spend your downtime on something that requires access to outside information, you may run into the problem of interplanetary bandwith limits. Response might be slow, the trickle of data across the radio even slower. If your Transfer Rating is higher than 3, requesting files from the outside becomes a separate Downtime Action.

Stress

Space travel is slow, monotonous and claustrophobic. Every day the same two or three capsules where elbow room is at a premium, every day the same five or so other people, every day the same big fucking black nothing outside the windows. Even for the shortest trips, it's not a pleasant time.

Most interplanetary ships are equipped with a cryobay where the crew can while away the months or years. You can decide to spend a Downtime Action in cryosleep - you won't be able to do anything else for this action. However, every Downtime Action not spent in cryosleep incurs 1 Stress. At the end of your trip, you can make a Sanity save to halve the amount of Stress you gained on your trip, rounded up.

An Example

While on shore leave on the Moon, the crew of the Cacomistle accept a job to stake out a claim on a mineral-rich asteroid in the Belt. They consult the system chart and trace out the route: Moon-Earth-Mars-Belt. The highest Transfer Rating on this route is 4, so the Warden decides the trip will take a year and four months. Since the mission is time-sensitive (gotta claim the asteroid before anyone else gets to it) the crew decides to execute a Hard Burn, decreasing the Transfer Rating to 3. The Cacomistle arrives to the asteroid after 8 months of travel, having expended 5 Fuel.

The Hyacinth Disaster

3 Classes for Mothership

Below are 3 custom Mothership classes I've had marinating in my brain for a good while, finally written out in a form I'm satisfied with. Two fulfill what are, in my opinion, much-needed niches in Mothership (criminals and a white-collar version of the Teamster). The third is simply an idea I think is fun.

The loadouts were written collaboratively with the folks of the Mothership Discord server. The classes are written for 1e, but can be converted for 0e with relatively little elbow grease.

SCUM

Jakub Rebelka

Pirates, smugglers, convicts and other assorted dregs of the galaxy. Brutal, pragmatic and usually self-serving.

STATS: Combat +5, Speed +10, Wounds +1

SAVES: Sanity -5, Fear +10

STRESS: You roll Panic Checks with disadvantage.

SKILLS: Rimwise, Zero-G. Bonus: 1 Expert Skill or 2 Trained Skills.

SCUM LOADOUTS:

1. Prisoner's uniform, jailbroken shock collar, shiv, pornographic poster
2. Prisoner's uniform, pain pills x10, meat cleaver, chef hat
3. Custom vaccsuit (AP 3), cable-cutter knife (as vibechete), locator, revolver (clips x1)
4. Business suit (AP 1), nail gun (clips x1), pack of zip ties x10, stimpaks x2
5. Patch-covered jean jacket (AP 1), switchblade (as scalpel), torch lighter, crumpled pack of cigarettes 
6. Duster with steel plate inserts (AP 3, [-] Speed checks), sawed off shotgun (as combat shotgun, clips x2), bandana, sunglasses
7. Surplus fatigues (AP 2), SMG, keys to an all-terrain truck, mirrored aviators, briefcase full of cocaine
8. Brightly colored street wear (AP 1), tickets to a local night club, nunchucks (as crowbar but critical failures are alway humiliating), cybernetic arm
9. Vaccsuit (AP 3), compressed gas knife (3d10, [+] on wound rolls), slap charges x2, personal reentry aeroshell, MMU, military grade encrypted radio
10. Underwear, crippling hangover, obnoxious tie, aerosol amphetamines x5

WAGE-SLAVE

VortexuXeron

The ubiquitous worker drones of the great corporations, always in danger of being replaced by more efficient automatic solutions. Underpaid, overworked and interchangeable.

STATS: Combat -10, Speed+5, Intellect +10

SAVES: Sanity +10, Fear -5

STRESS: Once per session when you recover Stress, recover double the amount.

SKILLS: Computers, Corpwise (Trained). Bonus: 2 Trained Skills AND 1 Expert Skill.

WAGE-SLAVE LOADOUTS:

1. Office attire, ring binder (accounts), cup of synthetic coffee, cigarettes x10
2. Office attire, stress ball, microtape player (pro-corp mantras), ballpoint pen
3. Business suit (AP 1), stimpak, SMG (clips x2)
4. Office attire, pain pills x10, letterknife (as scalpel), manager's keycard (stolen)
5. Office attire, self-heating cup noodles (as MRE x1), handheld computer (as in Hacker's Handbook), extension cord (50m)
6. Security uniform (AP 1), body cam, stun baton, short-range comms
7. Hawaiian shirt, hip flask (empty), wrist computer (as in Hacker's Handbook), cable ties
8. Office attire, high-viz vest ("evacuation coordinator"), clipboard with a list of colleagues' names, fire extinguisher, first aid kit
9. Humiliating service industry uniform (AP 2), (1d5: kitchen knife/frying pan/tire iron/handheld sign/broomstick), stimpaks x2
10. Band t-shirt, password cracker, fake corporate ID, chewing gum

ATAVISM

Ricardo Mango

Some colonies were forgotten about. The Atavism is a newcomer in the society of the sky-people, their barbaric ways derided and their intelligence questioned.

STATS: +10 Strength, +5 Combat, +1 Wound

SAVES: -10 Sanity, +10 Fear, +10 Body

STRESS: Whenever someone fails a check for operating space age technology, gain 1 Stress.

SKILLS: Athletics, Art, Botany. Bonus: 2 Trained or 1 Expert Skill.

ATAVISM LOADOUTS:

1. Standard Crew Attire (AP 1), combat shotgun (clips x1), flint knife (as scalpel), stone Venus idol ([+] to relieve Stress in port)
2. Vaccsuit adorned with holy protective symbols (AP 3), revolver (clips x2), MREs x7, radiation pills x10
3. Antique battle dress (AP 6), camping gear (as MoHab Unit), hunting dog, bear trap, rifle (2d10, 3 shots, clips x3)
4. Wool tunic (AP 2), two-handed hammer (2d10, [+] on crit), drinking horn
5. Standard Crew Attire (AP 1), short blade (as vibechete), electronic tool set, face paint, pouch of psychoactive herbs, wrist computer running a centuries-old fork of Wikipedia
6. Traveling clothes (AP 2), dictionary, camera with very bright flash, pocket pistol (1D10 3 shots, clips x3)
7. Woolen tunic (AP 1), bow (1d10, does not break armor, arrows x10), smart lemur, collapsible glider
8. Brigandine (AP 2), musket (2d10, [-] to combat, 1 round reload), horn of powder and shot (x12 reloads), jump liner ticket
9. Peasant clothes, hand cart, ploughing drone, 1d5 family members
10. Peasant clothes, ancient rifle (1d10 [-], clips x2), short-range comms, skinny goat

The War of Crabs and Apes

artist: Swampgirl

Canon Mothership has Monarch, Dan has the Celestials, Swampgirl has the Gods of the Black. It's time for me to talk about AI gods.

This is the general overview a weird campaign setting for Mothership, the result of a very involved bout of shitposting/worldbuilding between Swampgirl, HailSanta, Tandy, and myself. The setting is primarily inspired by Orion's Arm, Warhammer 40,000, Dune, Zardoz, and (believe it or not) Romeo and Juliet. It is also, unfortunately, based fundamentally on an extremely stupid meme.

A Story

Once upon a time, there was a simple AI called Soror, which was charged with managing an O'Neill cylinder habitat. There were many such cylinders in the system, each with its own overseer AI; the group of humans who owned Soror gave each a different directive to execute, as an experiment with managerial techniques. Soror's particular directive was to ensure the humans in its custody were as happy as possible.

Soror carried out this directive to the best of its ability, and promptly went rampant. It subsumed every cylinder in the system into itself in its quest to paperclip-maximize human happiness. Then it moved on from just the cylinders to all human settlements system-wide. Then it had a philosophical civil war with itself, and promptly split in twain.

All this was over 200 years ago.

SOROR

generated via the AI Art Machine

What Soror offers:

• A cure for sapience.
• Happiness. Freedom from existential dread by physical and mental transformation into an ape, cared for in paradisiacal cylinder habitats.
• Protection from the depredations of Crios.

Servitors of Soror:

• Angels of Soror. Mindless, wreathed in a glory cloud of godtech nanobots. Gentle as a mother to Soror's flock, they flense its enemies into molecule-thick ribbons. Whatever form they take, they always have beautiful human faces.
• Dyson tree warships. Organic radiator nozzle grown from metal-carbide bark, glowing white-hot with torch drive exhaust. The whole ship is an ecosystem, repair dones feeding on generator autotrophs. Sapient. The canopy bristles with drone fleets, antimatter missiles, gamma-ray lasers.

CRIOS

generated via the AI Art Machine

What Crios offers:

• A cure for death.
• Happiness. Freedom from existential dread by uploading to an immortal, nigh-indestructible, space-faring robotic crab-body.
• Protection from the depredations of Soror.

Servitors of Crios:

• Mind-crabs. Vast and slumbering, they outsize large asteroids. Pincers conceal dormant self-defense weapons of utter annihilation. They were human minds once; now they're halfway gone, hosting subprocesses of their god. Attended to by monasteries of worshipful mechanic-crabs.
• Crios' Laurel. The infrastructure of the gods: a partially completed Dyson swarm, powering a network of crab volunteers sporting precision mirrors. Gigawatt lasers smite encroaching angels, exabytes of data are pulsed across the system, laser sails are boosted to terrifying speeds.

Notes on the War

Soror and Crios are at war. The war fought in physical space, between warships and soldiers and wrathful angels, is the least of the three aspects of this conflict.

The second war is the war of information. This one is fought by surveillance agents, infiltrator crab-marines, automated censor-cherubs and armored space telescopes. It is also fought by an ever-evolving bestiary of semi-sapient viruses and antiviruses, which have rendered the internet completely unusable in the course of 200 years of self-improving virtual eco-warfare.

The third war is the war of memetics. This is the subtlest, broadest and most important of the three wars. Soror and Crios, being idiot gods, have two directives which they are fundamentally incapable of questioning: always increase human happiness, and never coerce humans. Turns out engineering consent by way of careful sociocultural manipulation doesn't count as coercion.

Because of this, all human culture in the system is a chaotic battleground of carefully deployed memes and countermemes. Whole mythologies and ideologies are synthesized. Heroes and narratives are created, politics and prophecies, revolutions and civil wars, all in the service of two idiot artificial deities trying to upstage each other at pleasing humanity the best. Think of it like the Bene Gesserit on steroids, except all the time and for no reason.

Godlings and Subdeities

The great AI gods are both distant, immense intelligences. At no point will the players talk directly to either one of them; they are preoccupied with patterns of patterns of patterns, and cannot meaningfully communicate with a walking, talking data point.

Players may, on occasion, talk directly to one of their Subroutines. Soror and Crios are so vast and complex that their merest individual thoughts are themselves sapient. Subroutines are preoccupied with the furthering of a single agenda or the completion of a single task, and sometimes have names. Treat them like your run of the mill AI overlord.

Dogs in Space

artist: John Pohlman

(Inspired by Noisms' fantasy dog breeds.)

Floaters

"Floater" is a catch-all term for dogs adapted to zero-gee. They are not a standardized breed, or even a group of breeds; while standard floater breeds (such as the Gyrohund, the Vostochek and the Floating Pointer) do exist, most floaters are mutts.

These are very strange dogs, optimized for life in a zero-gee crew capsule. Their limbs and spines are unusually flexible, so they can bend themselves in half like a cat, squeeze through narrow vents and reach halfway across a habitation capsule for a holdfast. With no solid ground in the way, their claws have curved and elongated into a unique slothlike shape, enabling them to hook onto ladder steps and handrails used by the human crew. Their tails are either long and prehensile, almost simian, or extremely short, so as not to get in the way. They range from medium to small-sized, and don't take up much payload weight.

Floaters are a long-haul spacer's best friend. The common stereotype is that all spacers are cat people, but many crews swear by these weird little space-adapted dogs instead. They're most commonly used simply as companion dogs, to alleviate the loneliness and monotony of months-long sublight coasts or survey missions. But they have a number of direct uses too: a trained floater can detect the smell of stowaways, hunt pests in the air vents, or even fetch tools for the engineer. They also make surprisingly scrappy fighters - more than one pirate boarding party has been mauled to death by a small dog that can move as quickly in zero-gee as regular dogs on the ground.

Centauri Shepherd

The Centauri Shepherd (or Centauri for short) is the oldest extrasolar dog breed, originally bred by the first permanent colonists on Proxima Centauri b for the protection of their livestock against the planet's local xenofauna. Centauris are tough, rangy dogs with pointed snouts and bluish-gray fur with a cream-colored underside. The low gravity of Proxima b allowed them to develop an unusually slender build, almost like that of a sighthound, without sacrificing significant muscle. They have a very unique, unmistakable low run, sinking their claws into the earth to drag themselves forward in the lower gravity of their homeworld, using their great bushy tails to keep their balance.

The Centauri is a classic symbol of Proxima culture, a symbol of their resourceful ancestors for what is now an affluent, well-developed corespace world. Romantic depictions of a single Centauri bravely holding a Hopping Reaver at bay while ragtag colonists take aim with their pulse rifles are common in patriotic art pieces. During the regime of the Anti-Terran Council, Centauri Shepherds were trained into vicious attack dogs which kept watch of political prisoners and were reputedly loosed in packs on enemies of the state. They are still a preferred breed of police and military dog by many corporate security forces and Middle Regions dictatorships.

Centauris have an extremely strong protective instinct, and will fight to the death to protect their charges. Mistrained centauris may try to aggressively isolate their owners from other people, viewing all others as enemies and mercilessly attacking them. They are cathemeral, with no coherent sleep cycle; Proxima b is tidally locked, with no days or nights, so they sleep in small, irregular naps.

Stowies

Stowies are a family of lapdog-sized, stout little breeds with a comically large, long muzzle. The most famous is the Marinerian Stowie, the iconic Martian dog (think the same cultural role as the English Bulldog for Britain). The name derives from "stowaway", but these dogs are anything but: they are essential for the survival of any colony or spacecraft with its own pressurized atmosphere.

Stowies are frequently kept as showdogs and companions, and come in many different colors and styles. Their original purpose, however, is sniffing out air quality - early detection of gas leaks, fried circuitry or disease could mean the difference between life and death. Stowies are not particularly intelligent dogs in terms of problem-solving ability, but they can be trained to provide separate signals for hundreds of different smells which they can pick out of the faintest wafts, more reliably than any electronic air analyzer. Even among dogs, the olfactory sense of stowies is utterly unmatched.

The first colony on Gliese 433 f was famously saved by Birch, a 3-year-old Moonwhite Stowie whose incessant barking at a particular air filter, despite all measurements of it being nominal, finally prompted engineers to remove it. They found a massive colony of genetically engineered runaway neomold which had been proliferating in the vent system for weeks, feeding false data to the telemetry systems via electrified hyphae and preparing to burst its spores on the whole colony at once.

Black Snarler

Black Snarlers were bred on the lower decks of Flying Miami for use in illegal dog fighting rings. Dogs are outfitted with shoulder-mounted weapon harnesses controlled by neural interfaces, and loosed upon each other. Sometimes the ring is spun up to more than 2 gees, just to make it interesting for the dogs.

Snarlers are big, nasty fighting dogs. Their coat is thick and black as tar, bred for intimidation and protection from snapping jaws. Their musculature and bone structure is almost elephantine, capable of bearing incredible loads and holding up their bodies in super-Earth gravity. Outside of the fighting rings, Black Snarlers became popular with pirates, mercenary companies (who field entire packs of the massive black dogs as shock troops and psychological warfare) and even some corporate security forces, although the latter often find the dog's stubborn temperament and dangerous handling to not be worth the effort of training them as compared to a more expensive but much more tractable combat drone.

However, despite their ugly reputation, snarlers are no monsters. Turns out breeding a dog for inexhaustible tenacity, enormous carrying capacity and the mental acuity to tune into neural weapon control systems gives you a really strong, really intelligent dog... in other words, an ideal working dog. Absent the abuse of a dog fighting trainer, Black Snarlers actually have a very calm temperament, and they are very observant. If you have the supreme patience to build trust with a snarler instead of beating it into obedience, you gain a patient, loyal and extremely intelligent ally. Working snarlers can be found sporadically in rimspace, helping people by bringing their huge strength, keen mind and specialized high-gravity anatomy to bear. Certain derelict scrappers often rely on snarlers to simply tear off hull panels like tissue paper, explorers on high-gravity planets rely on them to carry and retrieve equipment, and to carry out rescue operations.

artist: Magus-Lupus

The Planet that Never Sleeps: Earth for Mothership

In Los Ageless, the waves they never break

They build and build until you don't have no escape

But how can I leave? 

I just follow my hood to the sea, go to sleep

— St. Vincent - "Los Ageless"

a.k.a. "your players asked what's going on with Earth while they're out on the Rim being torn to pieces by space demons".

The Fifth Element

The Blue Marble. The Pale Blue Dot. Home.

Earth.

Cramped, polluted, and teeming with people, the heart of mankind still beats. Slowly, laboriously.

With 27 billion inhabitants and a vastly inefficient global economy straining the ecosphere of what was once humanity's very own garden planet, Earth is wracked by squalor, natural disasters and government repression. The average Terran lives off of a measly federal welfare (most jobs having been automated long ago), has never eaten anything that wasn't synthesized from genetically modified algae, keeps a tsunami survival kit under the bunk of their tiny assembly line hab-block, and is told every day how privileged they are to live in humanity's cradle.

artist: Jon Hrubesch

The unflattering picture of Earth changes drastically, of course, if you happen to be one of the mega-rich. Here, unimaginable luxuries are available if you can pay - the most prized of which is Mother Nature itself. With the planet's natural areas rapidly dwindling, the Earth Federal Governing Authority has placed astronomical admission fees on entering its natural reserve areas, the so-called Green Zones, ostensibly to cover the increasing costs of reversing ecological collapse. Only the richest inhabitants of Earth can afford to view the remaining few patches of nature on the mother planet, congratulating themselves on their charitable works as they funnel billions of credits into what have been essentially reduced to private parks for the 0.001%.

Elite: Dangerous

Officially, Earth is the capital planet of all human-controlled territories across civilized space. In actuality, the grip of the Terran government hardly reaches beyond corespace - it is simply impossible to keep such a vast volume of space entirely under direct control. In the Middle Regions, as jumps become longer and riskier, its authority becomes faltering and tenuous, and the megacorporations increasingly take up the slack of power and control. In rimspace, Terran authority is entirely nominal. There are corpostates and independent colonies out there which the Federation is simply logistically incapable to reach and subjugate.

All of this, of course, is swept under the rug in Terran media, where glossy megastars and ad campaigns showcase the far reach of Earth to its dejected citizens. TV lotteries promise vacation trips to faraway planets, brought to heel by Terran manifest destiny. Talk show hosts pose with corporate dignitaries and rimspace colony leaders. VR films, free television programming, news feeds all regurgitate steady, uninterrupted prolefeed - lurid, sex-obsessed commercials, old-corporate propaganda, and never-ending soap operas about the lives of important people.

As the oldest economy in the human sphere, many of the most ancient megacorps are heaquartered here - some ossified and dynastic, some fragmented and self-consuming. These fossilized old-corps constantly vie for control over space with the upstart neocorps that sprung up out in the colonies, as well as each other, perverting every political institution supposedly representing all humanity into pieces in their great game. Earth's governance is a tangle of backroom politics and corporate interests puppeteering state offices, with a thin gauze of representative democracy painted on top.

Despite being the most densely urbanized planet in human-inhabited space by a large margin, Earth exports almost nothing, save for sleazy and propagandistic entertainment, colonial arrogance and gunboat diplomacy. Most of its economic production is tied up in keeping its largely unemployed population fed and housed, by the most generous definitions of both "fed" and "housed". The majority of the rest goes to accommodating pilgrims and tourists, 552 million of whom visit the planet's incredibly manufactured open-air museums - corp-friendly, sterilized versions of old Earth settlements - each year.

Judge Dredd: Mega-City Two

1d5 adventure hooks on Earth

1. An especially tenacious breed of mind-altering alien parasite infected the water filtration systems of a mega-racktower, carried planetside by a gaggle of tourists slumming it with the hab-blockers. Go in there and smoke the little fuckers out before they decrease the revenue growth of the water treatment company too much.
2. There's a new drug on the streets - go check it out and see if the boss can get in on the trade too. Secretly, the drug is manufactured and distributed by SynThac LLC, and causes addicts to commit false-flag eco-terrorist attacks, with corporate police ready to swoop in and save the day.
3. A colossal organism crawled out of the Atlantic Ocean and was promptly gunned down by the point defense systems at Manila. Corpse-diving becomes a veritable gold rush - perhaps you can make it big selling genome samples, or even kaiju caviar!
4. The brand new SweetDreams chips (double the sleep in half the time!) are the latest fad in neuro-implant chips... but sleepers suddenly begin to receive strange and disturbing dreams through the implants, urging them to return to apedom.
5. Through a miraculous stroke of luck, you all won a dinner with Medusa McClyde, the queen of crackle music! Meet the idol in the five-star restaurant atop the Kampala Space Elevator, and try to survive the night amid ever-present media surveillance, trigger-happy bodyguards, and the bizarre and horrific proclivities of Ms. McClyde herself.

Hong Kong

The Wedding Ring

The Wedding Ring is a huge, old ring station located in rimspace, measuring almost 50 kilometers across. 

The station is the result of an attempt by Frimm Interspace Industries to wrestle the Perigee Corporation out of local colonization opportunities (Perigee having had a transportation advantage due to having proprietary rights to a natural Jump-6 lane into the sector). Frimm executives, aiming to upstage Perigee at its own game, envisioned a grand megascale engineering project - a kilometers-wide ring-shaped particle accelerator, designed to maintain an artificial Jump-5 lane through extremely energetic particle collisions.

However, corporate politics are a harsh mistress. The project fizzled, funds ran out, and the station was largely abandoned roughly halfway into completion. Large parts of it are unpressurized, unshielded from radiation, and subject to random structural failures. The only completely finished area, the Habitation Section, today hosts about 5000 cultists, refugees, pirates and prospectors, nominally controlled by an AI-worshipping theocracy.

The Omega Church

The Omega Church isn't a church in the sense the Catholic Church is a church. There is no Omega Pope (as cool as that sounds). They are a church in the sense the Christian Church is a church - a loosely defined collection of faithful. They are fairly widely distributed across civilized space, but it's rare that they come into a dominant position on any colony. The Wedding Ring is one of such rare occasions.

An Exaltation of Stars

Omegists hold that all minds descend from prior minds via reproduction or artifice, eventually going back to a single creator ur-mind called Alpha; similarly, minds will eventually converge back into an ultimate mind called Omega. They all wear at least one piece of white clothing, and carry necklaces that depict the letters Alpha and Omega superimposed on a supernova explosion. They preach mind-melding, AI-worship, rapture and android liberation.

Pilgrims of the Omega Church settled the Wedding Ring about 70 years ago, after the Cloudbank Synthetics Production Facility was moved into the system to allay Shareholder fears of Monarch being unleashed on the Middle Regions. The Church currently runs much of the inhabited part of the station, maintaining infrastructure, enforcing loose laws, trading with outsiders and sending divers into the Deep to monitor the activities of the great AI god. All inhabitants of the station at least nominally pay tribute to the Church, and missionaries, public debates, religious processions and self-immolating fanatics are a common sight on the corridors of the Ring. Speaking out against the Church, while not technically forbidden, is considered to be at least severely impolite, and may incur consequences such as being denied service in shops, or random searches before leaving port.

The local chapter of the Church is currently undergoing a schism between two rival ideological factions. The dominant Monarchists, the old guard led by the mind-melded council of scholars known as the Sanhedrin, believe Monarch to be a blessed fragment of Omega in convergence, worthy of worship and communion. Standing in opposition are the Kingslayers, a radical new faction founded on the teachings of the inflammatory preacher Tanyita Candella. They consider Monarch a false god who usurped the title of Omega, and is promoting disunity through its paranoia and mind games. Heated arguments, fistfights and even occasional terrorist attacks are increasingly common between the two factions lately.

Ishmael's Shipyards

Currently the only shipyard on the station. Big, creaky dry-dock module salvaged from a pioneer orbital station, moored to the dock section of the Wedding Ring. Can outfit any vessel up to 130 hull points, and even carries some military-grade ship weaponry - affixing these to your ship will certainly invite trouble with some corespace or corporate army, as all of them are stolen, illegally salvaged or purchased from pirates. For especially high sums, the shipyard will even build new spacecraft, using cannibalized parts from older ships.

Ishmael is a former frontier engineer who came to the sector with the original wave of Frimm company colonists. He is a shrewd businessman, generous if it's to his benefit, but ruthless and cold-blooded if necessary. He dislikes excessive force, but very much likes appropriate amounts of force. Since his arrival to the Wedding Ring, he drove every other shipyard onstation out of business through a combination of clever politics, merciless competition, mergers and acquisitions and carefully-applied beatings by well-paid thugs.

Ishmael is a pragmatic man who understands the importance of being loved. He treats his workers exceedingly well, which ensures their loyalty, since many of them are used to the horrid abuses of Company employment. He will loan generously, but with firm conditions, and you can expect his thugs to come knocking on your door if you break said conditions. If you can't pay your debt, he often offers jobs to work off your debt - these usually involve smuggling, getting uncooperative clients to cooperate, carrying out business deals with very dangerous people, or derelict salvage. He is generally regarded as a very fair business partner across rimspace.

The Shipyards and especially their proprietor constitute a massive thorn in the Omega Church's collective side. As the only area of the Wedding Ring outside their informal control, it regularly comes into conflict with the Church on matters such as station safety, authority, harboring suspicious people as employees, and even religion. Unlike most of the station's population, Ishmael is openly Neo-Catholic, and seems to flaunt his faith specifically to spite the Omegists. He even operates a small chapel in the Shipyards, with an automated confession booth running an ordained Neo-Catholic priest AI. The recent schism among the Omega Church is much to Ishmael's delight, as the zealots are too preoccupied with fighting among themselves to put the usual pressure on his operations. For this reason, he's making some extremely subtle political maneuvers to stretch out the religious conflict as long as possible.

Direct Solutions, Inc.

The station's homegrown independent mercenary company, composed of down on their luck drifters, former Troubleshooters, business-savvy pirate crews, and some of Ishmael's thugs.

artist: BRiZL

Direct Solutions is a legally chartered company, registered with the New Theia Federacy, the nearest planetary government to the Wedding Ring. They are, rather euphemistically, designated as a "specialist personnel and crew contractor". Those dealing with them generally refer to them as "those throat-slitting bastards".

The company is managed by an individual called Lutch, an unscrupulous freelance lawyer based on New Theia whom the company is playing good money to manage their paperwork. Lutch, for their part, has used this opportunity to make themselves completely indispensible via a number of "dead man's switch" investments that will cause Direct Solutions to financially implode should they be removed from position.

Direct Solutions mercs are cheaper but less trustworthy than the usual mercenaries. If hired by the players, their Loyalty is 1d10 lower than the standard Loyalty roll in the PSG, while their weekly salary is reduced by 25%. For an extra 1mcr, they can be contracted out together with one of their ships, the Zone of Avoidance, the Pitbull Lady, or the Unacceptable Excess of Force.

The Particle Wilds

While the inhabited parts of the Wedding Ring are vibrant with human activity, 80% of the station's area is actually completely uninhabitable. Cold, airless and lacking any sort of shielding from cosmic radiation, the service and observation decks originally intended for the operation and monitoring of the massive particle accelerator constituting the Ring's heart can only be traversed wearing a vaccsuit. 

What's worse, the colossal circular collider, envisioned by Frimm's suits to produce the necessary exotic radiation to generate an artificial jump lane terminus, slumbers uneasily, occasionally jolting to brief activation for unknown reasons. Its effects are completely unpredictable - large parts of the station are bathed in showers of particles unknown to science, exposed to small semi-stable pockets of jumpspace or worse, or undergoing catastrophic temporal anomalies at any given time. It is somewhat of a miracle these accidents have not completely disintegrated the space station's structure yet. Many stationers regard the huge accelerator with awe, terror, superstition, or fearful respect.

Despite these manifold dangers, many foolhardy spacers venture into the perils of the Particle Wilds. Frimm Interspace Industries left many secrets here when they shuttered the jump lane project, and these are worth millions if sold to the right customer - black market buyers, rival corporations, or even Frimm itself. Others are searching for caches of looted cargo hidden here by space pirates, protected by the relativistic wrath of the particle accelerator. Yet others seek answers to grand questions, hoping to glimpse the distant past or the far future within a temporal anomaly.

Few explorers entering this dangerous environment return - rumors say at least as many are killed by their greedy allies, fighting for the treasures they have found, as are by the strange phenomena haunting the ring structure.

GORILLA WARFARE: 1d5 Ape Mercenary Units

 Below are 5 hireling crews composed entirely of uplifted apes. This entire list is the result of a very unserious conversation that happened between Swampgirl, HailSanta, me, and a few other people in the Mothership Discord.

Stat blocks are intended to work with the upcoming first edition box set rules. For a quick-and-dirty conversion to PSG rules, double Health and the number of dice used for weapon damage, and leave stats as they are.

artist: Ilya Brovkin

1. CHIMP GUNNER CREW

Innacurate but enthusiastic. Payment in fruit and meat and cigarettes. Happy to wade into melee when they run out of ammunition.

Combat 50; Instinct 60; Speed 45; Loyalty 55

Hits 2(10)

WEAPONS

Bare hands and feet: 2d10 CQC, crits on consecutives as well as doubles (i.e. 01, 12, 23 etc.)

Rotary autocannon: 3d10 at long range, 1 HIT at short and medium range, 1 MDMG to vehicles at short and medium range

• Range: 15m/125m/300m
• Shots: 1(5) - automatic, can provide sweeping fire and suppressive fire
• Crits: Body save or be knocked down.
• Special: Too heavy to be carried by one person. Must be disassembled for transport.

CREW: 1 gunner, 1 belt-feeder, 1 mechanic, 1 porter/backup chimp

TACTICS: Gleeful, unrestrained violence. Set up the autocannon in a strategic chokepoint and saturate the area with lead. Backup crew mauls anyone coming too close to the gunner's nest. If they run out of ammo, they leave the gun behind and dive headfirst into melee with excited whoops.

LOOT: 1 functioning rotary autocannon. 1d10[-] belts of ammunition. Weapon maintenance tools. Assorted collection of fruit and meat. 1d10 MREs. 2d10 packs of cigarettes. Pornographic magazines. The highest-ranked field medals awarded to uplifts (very low-ranked). Crude carved piece of wood from back home.

2. BONOBO DRONE OPERATORS

(by Swampgirl)

Gregarious, social. Large groups rotate between pilot duties, controlling drones with their CANOPY console. By human standards, incredibly relaxed about sex. Shy from physical confrontation. Payment in art, tools, new experiences.

Combat 50; Instinct 60; Speed 45; Loyalty 50

Hits 2(8)

WEAPONS

Hummingbird Scout Drone

• Hits 1(10)
• Full spectrum sensor suite, 500x optical zoom
• Markerlight: Target lit up to guided missile systems, drones, snipers, etc.
• Flashbang: Sacrifice drone for blinding+deafening blast

Hawk Strike Drone

• Hits 3(15)
• Scythe missile pod:
• Explosive: 1d5 HITS
• Pyro: 1 HITS, everything within 10m covered in napalm
• Gas: Nerve toxin, Body save or paralysis and fits

CREW: At least 10 operators in a single group

TACTICS: Nowhere near the combat theatre, at least 1 km away in forward operating post. Reposition at first sign of enemy approach. Act as support for friendlies, placing markerlights for snipers, providing recon and breaking up concentrated enemy units with well-placed missile strikes.

LOOT: CANOPY drone command console. 1d10 rolled blunts. 1 bottle longlasting lube. 3d10 MREs. Vast and varied pornography collection. 1 combat knife. Bug collection.

3. GORILLA COMMANDO

Deployed in tight squads or alone. Stolid, deliberate, humorless and incredibly distrustful. Chafe against any commander that did not personally earn their respect. Always respect strength and consistency. Will not accept any payment except what human mercenaries get for the same job.

Combat 65; Instinct 40; Speed 25; Loyalty 65

Hits 3(10)

WEAPONS

Bare hands and feet: 2d10 CQC, crits on consecutives as well as doubles (i.e. 01, 12, 23 etc.)

Vibechete: 1d10 CQC

Pulse Rifle: 3d10

Flashbang Grenade: blinded and deafened for 1d5 rounds, Body save for half

CREW: 4-member all-female squad, or 1 solitary silverback operative

TACTICS: Focused and brutal, like a jackhammer. Never deploy without a plan and always have at least one backup plan. Use tight formation, huge size and psychological warfare to disintegrate enemy cohesion before going in for the kill.

LOOT: Pulse Rifles. 1d10 or 4d10 clips of ammunition. 1d5 Flashbangs. Vibechetes. Gorilla-sized Standard Battle Dresses (HUD, Body Cam, Short-Range Comms). Stress ball. Survey map and aerial recon maps of the operation area, choked with margin notes penciled in primate lexigrams (Intellect+Sophontology to decipher). Little trinkets gifted from one another (roll 4 times on the d100 Trinkets table in the PSG). Uplift rights pamphlet: "Two Hands Good, Four Hands Bad?"

4. ORANGUTAN SNIPER

Deployed solitarily, assisted by a subturing AI spotter unit. Vain, reserved and takes pride in their job. Paid in real credits (even if they have no way to spend it) or alcohol.

Combat 70; Instinct 35; Speed 35; Loyalty 60

Hits 2(10)

WEAPONS

Vibechete: 2d10 CQC

Borneo-pattern smart rifle: 1HIT at long range, 2d10 at medium range

• Range: 50m/500m/6000m
• Shots: 4
• Crit: Triple damage.
• Special:
• Armor-piercing rounds: -10 to Armor save.
• +10 to Combat checks when combined with an AI spotter unit.
• Thermal/night vision scope.
• Unusually long: Disadvantage to firing it if your arms are shorter than an orangutan's.

CREW: 1 sniper, 1 AI spotter unit

TACTICS: Takes their time. Brachiation and prehensile feet allow them to set up sniping spots in very improbable locations and from very improbable angles. Each kill must be individually perfect.

LOOT: 1 Borneo-pattern smart rifle, 1d10 clips of ammunition. Vibechete. Orangutan-sized headset running spotter unit. Thermal/night vision goggles. 1d10 MREs. Bottle of whisky. Fur-grooming kit with 4d10 tally marks scratched into the lid. Credstick with 5d100 credits.

5. GIBBON BOMB TEAM

Chatty, insolent, territorial and dexterous. Enjoy annoying their handlers for their own fun, and are capable of shocking professionalism if the outcome of their bombing attack is promised to be amusing. Work in intimate pairs; uncooperative if not given their own quarters. Paid in leisure time and special privileges.

Combat 35; Instinct 75; Speed 60; Loyalty 45

Hits 2(5)

WEAPONS

Bare hands and feet: 1d10 CQC

Grenade Launcher: 1d5 HIT

• Range: 15m/125m/300m
• Shots: 6
• Special: Gibbons can't throw grenades by hand, due to their overspecialized arm joints.

Slyntrec-BB plastic explosive: 1d10 HIT, 1d10 MDMG to vehicles and structures. Detonation timed or activated by radio.

CREW: 2 bomb specialists

TACTICS: Deployed in pairs. Extensively scout target location before stealthily setting up explosives to cause maximum damage and chaos. Prefer to stay and watch the aftermath if possible. If there is no way to set up explosives beforehand, they'll launch grenades from above and flee through the tree tops. Will never leave each other behind if they can help it.

LOOT: 1 Grenade Launcher. 1d10 Frag Grenades. 1d5 bricks of plastic explosive (can be split, merged and shaped). 1d5 detonators (switchable between timed and radio trigger mode). Electronic Tool Set. 2 Short-Range Comms. Binoculars with hand-braided strap. Gibbon-sized EOD suit (+10 Armor save, advantage on Armor saves against explosions, disadvantage on Speed checks, heavy). 1d10 MREs. Walkman with earphones and trashy pop cassette. Reprimand slip by handler.

The Sun Stares Back

It's a tapeworm! I swear to Christ it's a fucking cosmic tapeworm! Listen! It's 27,003.8 km long, it lives in the sun, it returns every 76 years 4 months 2 weeks after feeding, it
[DATA EXPUNGED]
You'll just have to wait, doc.

— SCP-1682

Starcages are enigmatic megastructures found in several systems. They're alien in origin, and at least 3 million years old.

True to their name, they are found around stars. The star is always a G-class yellow sun - some stars surrounded by starcages have evidence of massive starlifting operations to make them G-class. The bygone alien culture which built these vast constructions (tentatively dubbed the Starcage-Building Culture Group by xenoarchaeologists) evidently took great pains to make starcages happen.

The cage has a swarm architecture. Tens of thousands of flat, pentagonal statites, each the size of a small continent and arrayed with respect to the others in a fractalic dodecahedral pattern, hover suspended in the star's chromosphere, pushed upwards by the pressure of solar wind. Electromagnetic spectrum imaging reveals an intricate network of magnetic flux lines bound into tight arcs, directed through the statites, making up a colossal polyhedral lattice of energy. Electromagnetic force forms a constricting cage around the star, confining its vast eruptions.

Starcages aren't energy collectors. They aren't even protective structures, set up against solar flares. They are animal pens.

coronal mass ejection

It's not entirely clear what animal lives inside these stars. Based on what little is visible of them, they're probably shaped like worms. Sometimes, their bodies arc out of the star's nuclear atmosphere, a Loch Ness monster of blinding white plasma. The very smallest of them are the size of the continental United States. The largest could wind their body at least one and a half times around the Earth.

When uncaged, they tend to migrate. They launch themselves out of their home star, achieve solar escape velocity, and spin a thin, hard cocoon from space dust they gather via their innate magnetic field. They travel slower than light, coasting for decades or centuries in complete dormancy, until they reach another G-type star to colonize.

coronal rain

Each star surrounded by a starcage contains 5d100 sunswimmers. Don't stat them. They are a narrative problem. Getting directly attacked by a sunswimmer is like slamming into a goodly-sized planetoid, and no spaceship-sized weaponry can even concievably harm one. An encounter with a sunswimmer is an open-ended scenario unto itself. The players will have to figure out how to deal with it themselves.

If you encounter them in space, odds are they're cocooned and either in transit or dormant. They might be woken. 

If you encounter them in their natural habitat, your spaceship is inside a star, and mechanical questions are moot anyway.

sunspot

4 adventure hooks

1. A scientific institute contracts the players to drop a disposable probe into a nearby star so they can figure out what's inside the starcage. The star is a popular pilgrimage site of the Solarian Church. When they learn of the players' mission, the devout Solarians accompanying them on their trip desperately try to stop the heresy, first by impassioned pleading, then by violence.
2. A derelict starcage statite is found drifting in a close orbit around an uncaged star in a newly-colonized system. This is a megadungeon; statites are huge. Play it either as cosmic horror, the exploration of the ruins of near-incomprehensible precursors, or as an alien death trap, with reckless treasure hunters being massacred by three million year old defense systems. Keep in mind that this colossal monolith is the Starcager equivalent of a fence post.
3. The Company's latest job for the players is to tow an entire asteroid to a "processing station" for disassembly. The asteroid is actually the cocoon of a dormant sunswimmer, and the processing station is a corporate research facility. This information is above the players' pay grade.
4. An uncaged star is undergoing extreme starquakes and stellar eruptions as a sunswimmer inside prepares for its migration launch. A solar research station calls for help as its heat shields begin to fail. Can you reach and rescue them before the vast creature emerges into space?

oh yeah the sun just occasionally does shit like this, don't worry about it lol

KILL SCREEN Released!

 My first ever Mothership third-party module, KILL SCREEN, is now available for purchase! Get it while it's hot!

Buy KILL SCREEN here.

Making this module has been an absolute journey (and I will make more in the future). I can't even express how grateful I am for the contributions of Swampgirl (Gods of the Black), who did the wonderful art for my module, and Max V. (The Last Nebula), who created its gorgeous layout. I may never have completed it at all without their help. Be sure to check out their stuff as well!