Monday, July 29, 2019

What hath God wrought? Planetbound Mothership and Plagiarism

Mothership is a fantastic scifi horror RPG. It's a fantastic scifi RPG. I love NPCs having Combat and Instinct as their two catch-all stats. I love hirelings also having a Loyalty save to see if they help the PCs or act like Total Cads. And Dead Planet is strong.
Bixby and Lyon, and Route 11D
 I also love that Throne Of Salt put together a planetbound setting on their blog for it with lots of callouts to space opera, and a conversion guide for Eclipse Phase monsters, and also all the uplifts from EP converted to PC classes. Though I got into running RPGs because of Numenera, I started obsessively buying and reading RPGs again because of Eclipse Phase. I have all their 1e books up to Rimward. So it's nice to see someone dust them off and combine transhumanism / fancy technology with The Company running roughshod over all our necks, and a more grounded, planetbound game.

I am basically ripping off their first Mothership Actual Play as an intro scenario. The PC(s) are taking a strange box from the water-desalinization town of Bixby (in the bottom of that map) to the walled city of Lyon. FRIEND has asked them to do this and can pay 45,000 credits. The crew only owes 88k on their Grizzly, so they take the job even if it is on short notice, an all-night drive after a long day of work. That's what amphetamine gum dispensers are for. 

A6 Grizzly, 8 wheels of vacc-sealed low-agility
On the way up Route 11D, the PCs will hear some strange static whispering on the radio, see the destruction that came to Roland's Bait Shop - it's auto-sentries having ignored whatever bored a hole into the slab of the building. They'll hear Roland's kids pleading that they stop and help them get out of the sealed emergency bunker beneath the rest stop.

They'll see what the Eyes Church called down from the orbital heavens. The God of Route 11D.