Mothership: Player Questionnaire-ish

#1

As part of our session zero, I’d like to hand these questions out to the players after they’ve created characters. I’d like to have 2-3 for each of the four classes, for variety. Note that the questions imply they are aboard a prison ship, en route to their sentence. Feel like filling in some blanks?

TEAMSTER

  1. You did nothing wrong. You brought back a sample as contracted, you followed all the safety protocols, and transmitted it to your corporate handler. Business as usual. But here you are, en route to [your execution/penal colony]. What do you suppose went wrong, and who did you piss off?

ANDROID

  1. You killed your commanding officer on your last assignment. What made you do this, and why do your protocols dictate you would do it again in an instant?

SCIENTIST

  1. You were involved in a dangerous (and illegal?) experiment that left you scarred and innocent people dead. What was the nature of this experiment? Why have you been sentenced to [death/penal colony] because of your involvement?

MARINE

  1. You mutinied against the officer commanding your detachment. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but innocent people died, and here you are en route to [your execution/penal colony]. Why did you mutiny?

#2

I don’t really love these, I guess? Part of the fun of Mothership from my perspective is that Aliens universe thing of like, you’re just going to work and then everything turns to crap. Like, yeah, you know going in that it’s a crap job, but I feel like the biggest buzzkill horror-wise is not embracing the disconnect between what we know as players is going down and what the characters believe their likely future is.

THAT out of the way, if you’re fully committed to going the Aliens 3/Pitch Black/Outlander route, there’s a couple of ways to tweak these so that a) they create identification/sympathy and b) give the players hooks to try and prove they don’t deserve to be there.

(Firstly, if you’re going to ask two questions, just go ahead and make that second embedded question into the second question: 1. What made you do this? 2. Why do your protocols etc)

  1. is not bad, it makes the situation clearly not the fault of the Teamster, but I’d phrase it maybe as “you did everything right, which of your asshole crew messed with the paperwork so you’d take the blame for his fuck-up?”

  2. “Your commanding officer ordered you to kill him. How did he override your programming?”

  3. “How did a colleague’s misuse of your advice/research result in a disaster you got blamed for?”

  4. “What was the blatantly illegal order your commanding officer issued that caused the mutiny that killed everyone in the platoon but you?”

These all allow the players agency over their characters as well as provide hooks and cue you to what they find interesting about their predicaments. Starting a game with “You’re required to have actively murdered innocent people” is a chargen condition that’d probably make me nope out of a game. If the players really desperately want to be a piece of shit from the jump, they can narrate it that way, but with the questions phrased like above or similar, it’s not required.

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#3

Seconded. I like these suggestions for offering another side of the situation.

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#4

Having played Apocalypse World and Mothership a few times, I agree with the updated suggestions. The genre of these games means no one is going to play a plucky wide eyed captain or the like. Almost everyone wants to play a redeemable character. Those that don’t, just want to murder hobo.

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#5

Solid advice. I appreciate y’all steering me this way!

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#6

A couple thoughts on these. While they offer prompts for character backstory …

A) Is backstory even useful in Mothership? It doesn’t really seem like a game about incorporating PC narrative arcs directly, given that PC death is high probability. It’s fine and all to have some character identifiers, but the complex moral dilemmas they have failed, and how the strive to atone seem unlikely to matter much when a xenohorror bites thier head off 20 minutes into play.

B) The dilemmas here are extremely standard for the subject material and I wonder if they don’t do more to constrain character then create it. Can your marine have been a pirate? A cop? A revolutionary? Your scientist A religious scholar, university lecturer or big game guide?

In keeping with both of these I suspect a simple “failed career” style table for each might do more work to create interesting characters.

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#7

This is a really good point! The Dead Planet is deadly enough not to want any intra-party conflict. If the game is played like Aliens 2, the original characters could all be dead in the first session. In general, the characters are not expected to survive this adventure at all! I gave the players options for the style: 1) Alien tension, 2) Aliens grinder, or 3) heroic .The dangerous criminals does not work for the second or third style at all.

For Option 3: I would give the player advantage for every good idea or character backstory tie-in or cool idea. Because they are all heroes, the villianous or failed careers backstories would not make sense.

For option 2, I note that their ship cryo-beds are full of replacement PCs for when their characters died. No need for much character development here beyond the natural bonding of characters in danger.

Now for option 1, the failed career is a really great idea in the Alien tension style assuming you are creating your own adventures. This means they are not evil characters but there is plenty to distrust because they are unreliable characters. This would work GREAT in the Mothership motif. I cannot stress enough though how much you need to hold back as GM on the “hard moves” in PbtA speak or “GM fiat” in OSR speak to make this work though.

#8

“Failed Career” is more of a shorthand for a specific style of minimalist character backstory generation. A simple table of pasts without complexity - not heroic, and certainly not ones that create party conflict or give rise to many hooks. These one word pasts do offer advantages to players in that they allow the character to have knowledge and/or contacts if they can plausibly make the argument. One for a Mothership Marine might be as follows (I’ve put a few ideas about additional contacts or knowledge in parenthesis, but it wouldn’t necessarily be on the table itself). Note that they leave a lot of space for setting here - you could make them more setting specific (e.g. define “Judicial Enforcer” as “SWAT Team Member” for a more contemporary feel or as “Strong Arm of the Law” if you wanted something kinda Judge Dredd - you could also append special items or equipment to these for setting reinforcement).

  1. Judicial Enforcer (Law, Investigation, Law Enforcement or Criminal Contacts)
  2. Rebel (Hostile Environment Survival, Jerry Rigged Explosives, Revolutionary Contacts)
  3. Ship Security (What kind of ship - are you a steward and seducer of the wealthy on yachts or a caravan guard?)
  4. Officer Nobility/Religious Militant
  5. Pirate/Raider
  6. Regular State Military
  7. Corporate Security
  8. Death Squad Commando

Something like that - the barest building blocks of the character, because the goal is for a character that survives to evolve during play. In a game like Mothership the characters haven’t had their most formative experiences yet, they don’t come to the table with meaningful agendas - the game itself is the start of adventure, wonder and wild life for them and only in play does one find out who they are, but mostly this isn’t about who they were. At least that’d be my approach.

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#9

How do y’all feel about general world-building questions, such as these? Claustrophobic sci-fi settings always leave a lot to the imagination; do you think this effort to pin down details is ill-advised?

World-Building%20Questions

#10

Not really something I’d do for setting, I don’t believe in ‘Session Zero’ or “Microscope” mostly because setting building is easy for me and I tend to find players want to play, not create fluff, but generally I’m fine with pre-play cooperative setting building in concept - even for high lethality games.

The work isn’t lost with the first snap of the Xenobeast’s jaws or swarm of rats. I tend also to be leery of large amounts of world building prior to play, because heck, that’s a lot of wasted effort if after three sessions the campaign dies off. Do the minimum you need to play, and then do more as needed.

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#11

In general, I like this concept BUT…again there is very little point in it if you are going to jump into Dead Planet. Seriously, it is written for almost 0 survival.

I would only start with what is on the spaceship and how fast is space travel and go from there.
No government. No religion. No giant picture stuff to start.
The every day life - Yes.
Tech level on the ship - Yes

The rest of the questions I would bring up when the play pushes towards that. This game is built to run head first out of the ship into the unknown. Most players seem okay with that. If they want to loiter around in the ship a bit before that, then let them figure out this background in play. This game is fine for that as PCs swearing and superstitions are super fun and pretty natural to play out.

One more suggestion: I recommend telling your players to create a few of their own colloquialisms before the game starts to pepper their dialogue with to answer some of these questions in play.

Typical Swearing examples - “bloody hell!” and “Thank God!”,
These suggest there was at least in some point in history, England and that Christianity is implied.

Whereas these quotes from actual gameplay,
“Sweet space mother of Prospero Station!” and “I swear to the Goddess!” and
"What the drokks going on!?! We’re shit-close to those derelict hulks out there, and where the smegin-hell are we!?!?!
maybe not.

Boom. This crew is not from Earth (if they know of it at all) and there is some kind of non-Christianity religion, and implies the PCs are far from their ordinary space routes.

No prep required.

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#12

Very helpful, thanks!!

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#13

I don’t know the game being talked about specifically, but this seems like a call to Play to Find Out, which I can whole-heartedly agree with.

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