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After retrofire, the Vostok service module unexpectedly remained attached to the reentry module by a bundle of wires. Sure, it has narrative guidance for horror scenarios and seeds for starting adventures, as well as puzzle guidance and NPC creation. The layout does probably lean more towards the Mothership side of things than the riotous chaos of Mork Borg’s pages. They spent a night sheltering in the capsule from the cold, and a second night in a temporary hut built by rescuers before skiing with them to a clearing where a helicopter flew them to Perm. One particularly morbid element of the Mothership character is the high score, the number of sessions the character has survived (it’s stated a typical average is 4).
Enemy stat blocks have a defense rating, hit points, either an attack bonus or human stats for Body/Tech, and morale. The mission nearly ended in disaster when the rocket suffered a second-stage separation failure during launch. For characters whose overall ability scores end up being negative, they also get a starting bonus item. Mothership, though, in addition to being not very different at all in setting assumptions and gameplay assumptions, ends up being an easier, more usable, and more enjoyable game overall, not just in comparison to Death in Space but honestly in comparison to most RPGs of its rules density out there.
Thousands of hours of play and theorycrafting later (much of it with Tyler), he was grateful to be offered an outlet to exorcise some of the head full of characters and imagined arguments with DMs about how semantics relate to spell effects. Important but never pointless: each page has a well-kept aesthetic to be perfectly functional to the game. While the randomized nature of character creation hearkens back to older game designs, the game also utilizes advantage and disadvantage. Initiative is “popcorn initiative” (check out where we talked about this in the Surprise and Initiative episode, feel free to ctrl+f the page for popcorn for a quick explanation) but with a goofy twist: whoever goes last in a turn gets to choose who goes first in the next turn.
Because the universe is at least a little bit broken, when a character dies, they roll on the Death in Space table. That said, the rules jump straight into talking about running a campaign and making characters, and while this is a book with some simple and easy to understand rules, the way the text rushes full speed ahead without addressing some of the basics of RPGs means that this might skip right past some introductory explanation needed by newcomers to the hobby.
However, the default setting of Tenebris has plenty of dark, gritty sci-fi flavor and is interesting enough to run as-is for a campaign or two.
In a small park on the side of the road is a memorial monument: a black column with a bust of Komarov at the top. Rounds are generally about 10 seconds long, and each character can perform an action and move up to 15 meters. The default number needed to succeed is 12 for ability checks, or if in combat, the target's defense rating.
It further declares drawing inspiration from several games including the ALIEN RPG which, I reviewed previously and Mörk Borg.
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