Mining and Salvaging Rules for Mothership 1E

24 April 2022 ☼ Mothership

I actually posted these a few weeks ago on the Mothership Discord, but for the sake of making things more widely available, here are a couple pages of asteroid mining and derelict salvaging rules for Mothership 1E! Familiarity with my previous set of Debt rules is useful, but definitely not required. Heck, a lot of the prompts in there are probably system neutral!

A couple quick designer’s notes, since that’s apparently how I’ve taken to structuring these damn posts.

• The main design goal here was to turn the potentially flat action of “we roll dice a few times and earn credits” into an interesting dilemma, challenge, puzzle or hook for players to engage with. Tables playing sci-fi games like Mothership typically want to dabble in these sorts of “blue collar” space activities, but keeping that interesting generally requires a Warden who is willing to shoulder the work of writing a full-blown module for each trip into a derelict. The hope here is that these tables have plenty of content to quickly drop in to a session and expand as necessary, while also having a procedure in place for abstracting things out if they start to drag.
• In order to continually push players into doing stuff that’s interesting, finding a valuable asteroid or wreck without having someone tell you about it as a mission reward is very difficult. Of course, players can still roll for it, and doing so either gains them some useful information to act on or tosses an NPC group at them to bounce off of. Both keep the game moving!
• I think the Hard Way “you only find something on a Critical Success” rule could be expanded to also work for player exploration. In that case, the relevant table would have a bunch of planets that have something valuable for exploitation by the Company, and on a failure, the planet is “just another rock”. I already have a few notes on this, but haven’t decided yet whether I should roll it up into a full post.
• I was able to slip references in to all three first-person modules. I’m actually pretty happy with the Pound of Flesh ones. :D

If you end up using these at your table, please let me know, including which asteroids/derelicts you ended up visiting!