Welcome to Mothership®, the award-winning sci-fi horror RPG where you and your crew try to survive in the most inhospitable environment in the universe: outer space!
Mothership Core Set
Everything you need to play in one horrifying box. It's complete with all the 1e (First Edition) core rulebooks, an introductory module, and a set of dice. When we first started designing Mothership®, this was the set we envisioned.
Mothership Deluxe Set
The fastest way to build your collection. All the 1e (First Edition) core rulebooks in addition to four official modules. If you've just heard of Mothership®, or you want to make sure your collection is complete, look no further than the Deluxe Set.
Easy to Play. Hard to Survive.
Mothership® is designed from the ground up to be intuitive to run and easy to play, no system-mastery required. For players, our simple d100 Panic Engine ensures that you always know how likely you are to succeed at any given task.
Never Miss a Beat
For Wardens (GMs), we’ve made rules easy to reference, and designed everything to fit into clean “control panel” style spreads. That means if you’re looking at the combat rules, everything you need to know fits on the two pages open in front of you, no more flipping around to find all the edge cases for a simple question.
Jump Right In
Even the character sheet makes things easier: all the rules for character creation are printed on the sheet itself, meaning veteran players can zoom through creating a new character when their old character gets shredded by a deadly mutant xeno, and new players can get up and running without having to read through an entire player’s guide. All this with minimal supervision from the Warden who is probably busy last-minute prepping tonight’s session/ordering pizza.
Survival Horror
in Outer Space
You’ll excavate dangerous derelict spacecraft, explore strange unknown worlds, encounter hostile alien life and examine the horrors encroaching upon your every move.
What's in the box?
Mothership Core Set
- Player’s Survival Guide (1e)
- Warden’s Operation Manual
- Unconfirmed Contact Reports
- Shipbreaker’s Toolkit
- Another Bug Hunt Introductory Module
- D100 Dice Set & Panic Die
- 12+ Punchboard Pawns
- Double-Sided Poster Map in Monochrome
- Monochrome Tri-Fold Mini Warden’s Screen
Mothership Deluxe Set
- Player’s Survival Guide (1e)
- Warden’s Operation Manual
- Unconfirmed Contact Reports
- Shipbreaker’s Toolkit
- Another Bug Hunt Introductory Module
- D100 Dice Set & Panic Die
- 12+ Punchboard pawns
- Double-Sided Poster Map in Full Color
- Full Color Tri-Fold Full-Size Warden’s Screen
- Dead Planet Module
- A Pound of Flesh Module
- Gradient Descent Module
Companion App
Whether online or in-person, people the world over have been playing Mothership®, the award-winning scfi-fi horror RPG, for over five years. Join in the fun with the official Companion App.
Mothership Modules
Venture into the Void
With our library of over 100 campaigns, rules supplements, and in-universe texts. Vaccsuit not included.
What's New in First Edition?
Mothership® has been in development since 2017 and has won numerous awards since its release. We've spent the last few years playtesting and refining and playtesting again, and now we've got the most complete, easy to understand, terror-inducing rules on this planet—or any other. A quick summary of the changes in 1e (First Edition):
Combat and violence have been greatly clarified and simplified, replacing the old opposed roll system with a more intuitive "roll to hit then roll damage" system. Many edge cases have been smoothed out, and the whole thing overall is much better.
Health has now moved to a Wounds system, which is faster, more visceral, and much more evocative. Taking damage isn't just about losing abstract points, it's about suffering specific injuries that tell a story and prioritize quick thinking and difficult choices.
Armor is no longer a save, but rather destructible Armor Points. Ignore any damage less than your AP, but if you take more damage than your AP, your armor is destroyed. Time to raid the nearby crew-lockers...
We've removed levels all together, and characters start off a little stronger and can increase their Saves through Shore Leave, spending time training, resting, and gaining new skills.
All the classes have been rebalanced and skill selection has become much more specialized. If you're the person who is good at First Aid, you kick ass at it.
The Stress & Panic system has been rebalanced (no more Heart Attacks after taking a couple points of Stress... those were the days). Additionally, we've added the brand new d20 Panic Die. This is a die you only roll when making Panic Checks, which speeds things up greatly and makes Panic Checks a lot easier for new players to understand.
We removed a lot of weird edge cases to the rules and streamlined how combat and violent encounters work, removing a ton of rolls and vestigial nonsense.
A lot of quality-of-life changes have been made to the text, mostly in how it's explained and presented, to make it easier to understand for beginners.
Overall, we think it is absolutely the best version of Mothership® to date, and if you want to read more about the awesome changes we've made, check out the Player's Survival Guide.