Racking up a High Score
quick and dirty (and maybe a little crunchy) rules to add to your mothership game
The high score is the aspect of the mothership character sheet I keep fixating on. It doesn’t mean anything on its own, it’s just a way to track how long a character has survived a deadly game system. But ever since I ran Another Bug Hunt, I’ve been obsessed with the suggestions on how to use it for player advancement. The one suggested in the handbook is reputation. And I like that, you could weigh your rumor tables and add this high score, or use it as a boost to salary negotiations. One idea I’ve gotten recently is that it weighs any 50 / 50 chances. No more simple coin tosses: add the largest high score — or even every high score — and those are the new odds. Even 51 / 49 is a bit more interesting. You could weigh it in favor of the players to be more heroic, or tip it toward the detrimental and negative effects to make the world feel more deadly. I’ve also taken a little OSR approach, treating it as a +1, +2, +3 bonus where each stage gives you some effect you can use once per session. At +1, you can call it tenacity: ignore stress once per session. At +2, once per session you can roll again, but you have to take the new result. Call it “No, I can do this” I like keeping the advantage or disadvantage because you could go from rolling a failure on something you should have passed, to rolling a crit failure and now you’re stuck with that result. Once you get to at least +3, you can add whatever your high score is to a roll. It’s not luck, it’s skill.1
Even in my limited experience with other space faring games, I am obsessed with how to incorporate rules from Death in Space,2 Offworlders,3 and Orbital Blues.4 Maybe even CBR PNK and Blades, the Forged In The Fark systems have so much going on in terms of worldbuilding, downtime, and consequences to your actions. In a word: procedures. You can lead actions to take stress.5 Or use a criminal framework for your campaign and build a crew. Even the load mechanic (or simplified load mechanic in the expanded rules) can be a fun way to measure encumbrance and track items when you’re say, going into a megadungeon.
The easiest way to flip this the other way around — to strip a rule from Mothership and put it in another sci-fi game6 — is stress. Make stress a collective mechanic, tally it as players fail rolls, as situations get worse, as they accept risks or their surroundings get more deadly. When things go from bad to worse, have roll a panic check as usual. At the end of the session, have them roll a save or skill check as a group, and then whatever fraction of that group passes: they can convert that fraction of stress to experience.
And speaking of hacks, here’s the rest of the Throne of Salt 30 day blog challenge.
Loathsome Company Stooge - That jerk from job training who could not complete a single task correctly, was consistently rude, and never had an idea of their own, just the ones they would repeat five minutes after someone else in a meeting. And of course, they would get the credit, they’d get chosen for the promotion, and they are only a few cleanups away from being a company man - one of which might be making sure you are hunted down for that no call no show when you left your old job to go star hopping….
What’s on that old data chip? - Roll D10: Space jazz,7 philosophical lecture on the nature of the universe, instructions to play a very old card game, tasteful nude single bit art, a star map, a proprietary cake mix formula, order form for a limited edition pop star zine, and that nasty new computer virus
Nasty new computer virus - It’s a code that can hop from one motherboard to the next, a binary sequence so advanced it could even spoof a USB port into thinking it was plugged in, and thus perform a transfer. It was most commonly found jumping from cybernetic to cybernetic, causing malfunctions, slowdowns, and this persistent chirping noise. Thus, it was dubbed the Cr1cket Wir3le55 virus.
C-level scandal in the gossip feed - The only rule of the C-level is that you don’t admit fault. It was never the company to blame: it was user error, unforeseeable circumstances, or these new and challenging times. Risk is something you champion for years and then hoist onto tens of thousands of employees by waylaying them in an instant. So when someone owns up to the latest disaster, it is all anyone can talk about for a week.
Steal from the public domain day! - This is how I learned Citizen Kane was in the public domain! Rosebud the arctic land rover: perfect for traversing frozen moons, inhospitable planets, or whatever corporate megacity is covered in snowdrifts. Riding in it too long gives you pangs of nostalgia, though.
Earth animal far from home - They sent your childhood dog way further than that farm upstate.
Ancient alien artifact on tour - The knucklebones of the last man in space. They say he travelled to us from the future, before being sucked in a black hole, and died as he was trying to warn the people of Banquo IV (shout out to the shipbreaker’s guide) what happened to the others. His remains have been scattered, but he was alien to the people he was trying to contact, so they simply preserved what remained of his bones as a reliquary.
Tragic tale of time-debt - Ol Charlie was running out of time from the moment he was born, and working at the company didn’t help him none. The small town he lived in was stuck in the shadow of the gleaming company tower, and with no sense of work-life balance, and without a proper network to advocate for him, his time got stolen. Desperate to get it back, Charlie turned to some shady hackers who promise to make things right, to balance the scales, to return what was rightfully his. But when all that time caught up with him… Ol Charlie burnt out to a pile of dust.
Jury rigged garbage tools - I mean, knifewrench is right there, right?? Maybe just roll D5: A grabby claw with a rubber glove at the end, barely articulated fingers struggling to get purchase on something. A weighted toothbrush for dental hygiene in zero-G! A cane made of duct taped PVC piping. A taxidermied turtle doorstop with motorized legs (so you can move it by remote control), each limb from a different children’s toy.
Five things worth more than credits - Hidden knives, a good reputation, a trusted source, your original healthy organs, and your dignity.
Spacer’s favorite knockoff brand - Wutt’r, a genuine H2O replicant and replacement. Now with vitamin R?8
What happened to Lucky Tomas? - Lucky Tomas got sucked out into space after a hull breach, and floated into an airlock before he froze in the vacuum of space. Lucky Tomas passed through a carnivorous space plant’s whole digestive track, just slip-n-slide from one end to the other.
Corporate mascot war - A corporate day of remembrance goes from online posting and public statements of acknowledgement to memorials and reenactments so we “never forget”. Now, the battles of the before times are so produced, the cartoon animals that sold us cereal are leading armies that may actually be killing each other for real, who knows.
Worst planet on the Rim - Roll D5: Straight up lava, core is changing speed (and whatever the hell that could cause), continents shifting like Pangea in fast forward, the one so small you can walk the whole thing in ten minutes, or the planet with the out of control greenhouse effect that they still turned into an amusement park.
Interplanetary auxiliary language - A merchant conlang that started as a way to standardize distances among different cultures on a single planet’s moons. A language from another star system entirely, but spoken on a popular radio drama that made its way to planets. Or M'Horse code: the M is silent, the neighs and hoof clomps are not.
There is an urge to say you have to call these out, like some of those board game mechanics where you shout out the name as you do something special (I’m looking at you, Sushi Go!)
Item usage. If “nothing ever happens” when your characters fail a roll, the gun jams. they realize how low they are on ammo, their weapon outright breaks and has to be repaired. Death in space has a great cycle of scrap, salvage, and jury rigging your equipment: Mothership can make these incidents crises in the moment and incidental during downtime.
the easy one here is the abilities here. Offworlders is packed with great little boosts to your character. Become undetectable by taking ghost, deal more damage with firearms with Dead Eye, deal minor psychic Blasts. These abilities are pretty good in offworlders, and would be extraordinary in MoSh, so I’d say take one when your high score hits 5, 10, 15, etc.
Orbital Blues is really something. A much more story driven game that gives your character overt flaws and weights down its atmosphere with moodiness, that Blues mechanic is just ripe for mothership. The way Orbital Blues works, your brooding space outlaw gets sadder and sadder over the course of the game, and right when they’re at a tipping point, they expend that resource to make them more effective in a scene. For MoSh, why not decide what gives your character the blues, then indulge in that reckless behavior, take one stress, and roll with advantage (on your next roll or through the scene if it calls for it).
Because these game systems are so rooted in planning around scenarios, there’s a mechanic where the person who leads the execution of that plan also takes on the consequences. In MoSh, the assymetrical nature of stress buildup leads to moments where more lucky players are watching the other characters at the table rack up 15, 16, 17 stress. Here’s the hack: lead an action, describe how you’ll take on the stress if something goes wrong for a friend. If they fail, you take 1D5 stress. Furthermore, if you fail to follow through with what you described (situations change: maybe you can’t or won’t do what you said you would) the person you helped also takes 1D5 stress
Like any of the ones mentioned, plus Stay Frosty, Stillfleet, FIST, and more! Even just yesterday I learned about Hard Wired Island, which has such amazing writing to flesh out the tone of your world. And of course there’s Traveller. Maybe Mothership is proof that the people yearn for Traveller.
No, not jizz. Like Cosmic space jazz Kamasi Washington, Parliament Funkadelic, Herbie Hancock, things of this nature.
I told you this would be hack, I warned you!!