Mothership: Making Panicking More Fun
You have 10 seconds to reach the airlock before the ship explodes, roll a Speed check. Oh no, a Critical Fail! Your boot catches on a loose hatch, you fall hard onto the metal floor. Your stress is high, give me a panic roll, this could be it... For the next week you're suspicious of your crewmates. Huh?
The above example of play in Mothership is a little contrived but very much captures my feelings of the Mothership panic and stress system. It generally fails to be satisfying, in part because the entries themselves are damp squibs and in part because the result often feels random and irrelevant.
The idea for this post came after reading the excellent review of every entry in the Mothership panic table. One of the key insights of the review is the breakdown of what makes for a great panic table entry, these being:
- They have immediate impact.
- Adapt to multiple situations.
- Feel dangerous, dramatic, or deadly. If you want more details, I'd highly recommend giving the post above a look but right now in this post I'm going to propose my idea for making panicking more fun in Mothership.
An Alternative to Panic Tables: Panic Tracks
My solution to solving the panic table is instead to use "panic tracks". The idea behind a panic track is that each time you panic you move up the track, each step on the track requires a stress threshold to unlock. To keep things interesting, each step also has a 2nd activation variant for situations where you do not exceed the next threshold in the track. The effect on each step along the track should be connected thematically to the last step, by doing this you get rid of the possibility of a panic roll feeling underwhelming when your stress is high, as each step along the track has a bigger impact. Finally, using a track gets rid of the arbitrariness since each step is connected to the last resulting in a mini-arc for your character in a session.
To give a more practical example, below is a panic track for a character developing an "Unhealthy Obsession":
| Name | Stress Threshold | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Fascination | 2 | Add a Master skill related to something you become fascinated by. [+] whenever you use this skill in a roll and gain +1 stress each time. 2nd Activation: Gain +2 Stress. |
| Obsession | 6 | Whenever you don't use your Interest in a skill check, gain +2 stress. 2nd Activation: [-] unless you talk to your Interest. +2 stress to all nearby crewmates. |
| All Consuming | 12 | In addition to Obsession, whenever you fail a skill check, replace an existing skill with the name of your Interest. 2nd Activation: Replace another skill. |
| Nothing Else Matters | 20 | Your Interest is all that you can focus on, nothing else matters now. Describe a cruel act you perform on your crewmates to ensure they can't steal it from you. To take it. It's yours. Your character disappears, probably becoming an antagonist. Create a new character. |
Let's walk through some of key features of this Panic Track:
- Each step has a stress threshold. If you fail a panic roll (i.e. roll under your stress) you only activate the step that is equal to or less than your current stress.
- Each step has a 2nd Activation description, as it is possible that you won't have moved onto the next step before your next panic roll and repeating the same thing isn't fun.
- You'll also notice that each step tries to keep to the earlier points of Panic table events being: immediate, adaptable, and dramatic.
How this would work in play is something like this:
Leeroy opens up a cabinet on an abandoned spaceship and finds a frozen, severed hand. The Warden asks for a Fear save, Leeroy fails, so the Warden asks for a Panic roll. It's the start of the session so Leeroy has 2 stress, he rolls the panic die and gets 2. The Warden then chooses the Obsessive Panic track for Leeroy, who quickly decides that his item of interest is the severed hand and writes in a blank master skill "Severed Hand".
Brilliant, but as the session goes on Leeroy gets some more unlucky rolls, below, he gets a critical failure requiring a panic roll:
Leeroy's stress at this point is 5, he rolls under on the Panic die. Since his stress is less than the stress threshold for the next step on the track (Obsession) he doesn't mark it and instead the "Second Activation" effect of the first step on the track (Fascination) activates and he gets +2 Stress.
So if you keep your stress low, you don't progress up the track. However, when Leeroy later gains more stress and fails a panic roll:
Leeroy has to mark Obsession because his stress is now 8 and he rolled less with his panic roll. The initial effect of Obsession activates meaning he must now always try to use his Severed Hand in future skill checks else he will rapidly gain stress.
I have designed a few of these panic tracks and they can be found on my itch.io page. I have made several tracks for different situations: mysterious followers appearing, imagined ailments, and a previously unknown parasitic infection. The choice of which one to use in your session I think should be a discussion between the Warden and the players and should reflect the scenario and situation if possible.
At the moment I haven't actually play tested these panic tracks, but I am intending to try them at my next few Mothership sessions this month and will report back with how well they work. If in the mean time you also try out my Panic Tracks I'd love to hear how things go.
Download the panic tables from my itch.io page HERE.