Mothership’s box set gives newbie game masters something to hold on to

polygon.com:

All too often, tabletop role-playing games get lost in their own fine print. As the author of a core rulebook, you want to keep things short and sweet, but it can be easy to confuse carefully explaining a game with unnecessarily expanding it. The designers of Tuesday Knight Games’ award-winning TTRPG Mothership have successfully resisted that urge.

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The science fiction horror game’s final form, a first edition starter set, knows exactly what it is — a grim and grizzly experience for players, and a challenging crucible for those running the action. Setting and themes notwithstanding, Mothership’s is probably one of the most welcoming guides for game masters that’s been published in years.

Mothership is a mature game that takes its inspiration from sci-fi classics like Alien and Event Horizon. In it, players take on the roles of scientists, teamsters, androids, and marines on the hunt for unexplained phenomena in derelict space stations and abandoned colony worlds. Unlike in other game systems, however, provoking violence is rarely the best course of action. That’s because combat is both brutal and deadly.

How deadly? Well, each player’s character sheet has a field used to list the number of play sessions they’ve survived. The average “high score,” as the developers call it, is four. With only three to four players recommended for each session, it’s all but guaranteed that every time you sit down at the table, someone is going to die. That’s an incredibly intimidating bit of information for newbie game masters, but thankfully the provided materials are