[MOTHERSHIP] The Filming of Ypsilon 14
Make movies, or die tryin'.
In my recent scenario Beneath Ice and Snow I included some homebrew rules for running Mothership as a documentary crew. I think they are pretty damn fun and I want to infect more people with the idea. So, I've made an unofficial expansion to Ypsilon 14 with my documentarian rules baked in. Enjoy!
TLDR: Click here to get a copy of The Filming of Ypsilon 14!
The Rules
Now in developing these rules for being a documentary crew, I had three key design rules:
- Making a film should be quick, involving just 1 roll.
- It should integrate with existing Mothership rules.
- There needs to be a way to get a high score, so that I can tell my players what to beat and see them struggle and die in pursuit of beating that number. Wonderful!
The first criteria was met by making it so that to take a "shot" the person with the camera had to make an Intelligence check. If they succeed, the shot goes well, and if they fail they presumably forgot to take the lens cap off. This worked well and also integrated with the Mothership ruleset well enough without any additions. However, it meant that making the movie didn't involve anyone else.
To bring in the rest of the team I added various tools: lighting, sound recording, and the presenter. In Beneath Ice and Snow the lighting and sound recording add +10 to the Intelligence of the cameraman taking the shot. In my play test games I also allowed it so that if a player was willing to embarrass themselves by improvising a commentary for the shot, that would also net you +10 to Intelligence. This is a lot of fun, and I highly recommend trying it, but there wasn't enough space in the trifold for this unfortunately!
Scoring Points
Now, how to get a high score? For this the table needs to do a bit of maths. Basically, your score is the difference between the cameraman's Intelligence and the rolled dice.
Example: Jayce is alone and wants to take a shot of the room they are in. They have an Intelligence of 45 and roll 10. The footage score is 35 for this shot. The room they are in has a Bonus Score of 25. So, the final score is 35+25 = 60. Jayce writes the score against tape 1.
Boom. Easy as that. If you've got someone with you, well you can add their bonuses to Jayce's intelligence.
Example 2: Robin has the lighting rig and floods the engine room with light. The remains of the crew are calcified husks, half melted into the steel shells of the antimatter drives. Jayce takes the shot and rolls 45. Jayce's Intelligence is 45 + 10 (from Robin's lighting rig), so 55 making it is a pass. The engine room has score of 50 points, and there is a bonus for filming the calcified husks of 50 points too. The final total then is: 55 + 50 + 50 = 155 points.
As you can see in the above example you get bonus points not just for the room, but also for capturing certain events or scenes on camera too. In The Filming of Ypsilon 14 there are also bonuses for capturing footage of a player being killed, or a particularly large explosion. Both of these ideas came from the excellent coop game The Headliners.
Outro
Anyway, thanks for reading to the end here, and I hope if you run this supplement you have a good time! I'd be very curious to know what your groups high score is, so if you run it drop me a comment on the itch page. Get The Filming of Ypsilon 14.
Oh and if you are cool person, why not get Beneath Ice and Snow too? The world needs more cool people after all.