For Sunday, 26 July, I’m thankful for Mothership.
I’ve been reading Mothership’s Player’s Survival Guide — getting ready to run it this fall — and I was struck by how perfectly it captures its subject. I was also reminded of another game that did the same thing for its genre when it came out in 1988, Cyberpunk.
Both of these games come in a black box. Both are stripped down to their core functions. And both accomplish their mission admirably. But it’s really their aesthetics that hit me the most. Their hard lean into black and white presentation, tight page count and hyperfocus on the necessary are remarkable.
And because Mothership is setting-agnostic, you could very easily map it onto 2013’s Near Orbit and 2020’s Deep Space to establish your campaign background.
Seriously, do yourself a favour and flip through those two books. The art and sensibilities are straight-up Mothership. And they’ll give you plenty of corporations, governments and organizations more than willing to send your crews to their doom.
You could also use Cyberpunk as a bolt-on sub-system for interacting with — and dealing with — digital horrors and terrors in the web.
Finally, I feel I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention another of my favourite games that would add an excellent third layer to a Cyberpunk/Mothership campaign, High Colonies.
Man, 1988 was a banger year.
