In case my setup will be useful to anyone else, I decided to write a little bit about how I have framed a campaign for the Mothership TTRPG. I see semi-frequent questions on the Mothership Discord about how to run a campaign, so maybe write-ups like this are helpful to the community at large. I know that this is the sort of content I was looking for when I started running Mothership. As with anything, take anything useful you find here and leave the rest.
MINOR SPOILER ALERTS: I do talk about a few of the modules I have used and there could be tiny spoilers for players. I won’t go into too much detail, but be aware.
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
The overarching frame
In order to account for the possibility of character deaths and players not always being about to make it to a session, I decided that the characters work as privateers whose ship has a lien on it by my custom megacorporation, TRG Corporation, which operates mostly in Core space.
TRG is sending the crew and a corporate handler to the Outer Rim to Hardlight Station which is controlled and run by Nakatomi Solutions. TRG is looking to expand their reach to the Outer Rim; sending all of the characters in to do some work is a way they can explore the area without a lot of risk. In addition to making some money to pay off the ship, the crew is always on the lookout for side jobs they can do. They really want to establish a reputation out here in the Rim, too. They’ll need to - Nakatomi won’t hire out just anyone. As they complete work for TRG, they also get to build that reputation and compete for work from Nakatomi (and other Outer Rim corporations).
The most basic incentive they have is to pick up various jobs for TRG in order to pay towards the lien on their ship. While I know that ships are quite expensive, I set the amount at something achievable over a longer campaign: 4 million credits. I also often increase the payout for jobs over what is suggested in the published module - TRG is taking a cut, some will go to the lien, and the players will need some money, too. Economic horror is not a thing I want to spend a lot of time on because real life is horror enough in this way for most folks. So, I suppose my advice to folks is: hand-wave the stuff you and your table don’t want to have to track or deal with; discuss at the table and decide what those things are and how you want to handle them as a group.
Why a privateering group?
My players can roll up new characters as needed/wanted and they can slot them in as other privateers. If a couple of the regular players are unable to make a session or we want to invite some friends to the table who are new to Mothership, we can run one-shots instead of the campaign “arc” sessions. Players can choose whether or not the characters in the one shot are connected to the main action or not. Here’s how I pitched it to my table:
What does this mean for you as a player? You will be able to roll up and play pretty much as many characters as you want. You want to play a marine in the main/longer storyline, but try a scientist in a one-shot? Do it. You want to use one of these side characters in the main storyline later on? I’m here for it. The events and conclusions of the one-shots and smaller adventures can contribute to the larger arc. So, any money you make on a smaller adventure still counts towards the crew paying off ship debt. Any information you find out can be shared with your crew when you have a chance to rendezvous. Any reputation changes will affect the whole crew. And so forth.
What modules have I used so far?
I used Dying Hard on Hardlight Station to set up the base of operations for the crew on Hardlight Station. I also took advantage of the fact that it has many job seeds that link up to other published modules. And the first of these that I used was The Cleaning of Prison Station Echo, which is both an adventure and a sandbox with many other locations, NPCs, and hooks. The crew decided to do some double-dipping (my table is crazy good at maxing out potential payoffs) by taking the job from TeraTek to infiltrate the prison and install monitoring on the prison AI but also simply signing up for the janitorial jobs directly for the prison. (They also found another way to get paid, but I won’t go into all of the details here so that I don’t spoil too much).
Overall, we spent 6 sessions on Carnath: adventure itself, but a lot of the intrigue from the sandbox portion, including a heist hook that I filled in which ended up being a dramatic way to end the crew’s time on Carnath. After this, we ran the USS Scorpion, Please Respond module as a “meanwhile” adventure. We placed this one as happening to other folks in the privateering group while the main crew were messing around on Carnath.
Subsequently, we had a downtime session with a one year break to allow characters to heal, do some training, and do some more mundane work as a break from the horror show. But they got hooked right back in and we ran Year of the Rat and Decagone. While the crew was off doing this, some intrigue developed back on Hardlight Station (homebrew stuff, not the intrigue from the module) that now has the crew trying to get some further infomation about a cult. I’ll write a bit more about this later because it involves using some Cloud Empress material.
I have several modules I can slot in, especially now that Await the Burning Gods is arriving imminently. In case any of my players happen across this, I will leave the details vague for now and report back later.
How has all of this worked out in practice?
Since I am relatively new at running any sort of TTRPG, I have been figuring it out as I go in terms of how to sustain a longer storyline, so the occasional one-shots in the mix have been great breaks for me. They seem to have been great breaks for the players, too, because some of them have become attached to their “main” characters and they like to have some more disposable characters. Additionally, sometimes a one-shot has been a nice palate cleanser after a tough session or long arc (like our arc on Carnath). It has also been fun to do these couple of one-shots and pick up a few new faces at the table and introduce them to the game.
And while I have an off-ramp planned for this particular campaign, there will be room for us to return to these characters/this frame and work in any modules we aren’t able to get to.