Rebellious bundle for the Sci-Fi horror tabletop RPG Mothership
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Two super cool ORU Actual Plays, and werewolves!
about 1 year ago
– Wed, Oct 11, 2023 at 10:44:47 AM
Hey dear backers, here’s a quick mid-week update to share two super cool Outer Rim Uprising actual plays (one in English, and one in French) and do signal boosting for a project I’m really excited about.
Before we start, here's a little recap of all the content planned to be released during the campaign. The best way to keep track of video/podcast links is to check updates, or the ORU Kickstarter project page under DEEP SPACE TRANSMISSIONS.
Sentience Assessment Procedure
ORU items fill a whole spectrum in terms of flavor and gameplay experience. On one side you have classical Mothership “Survive, Solve, Save” adventures like The Hunger in Achernar. At the center of the spectrum you’d find supplements filled with space horrors like Surviving Machine Parts, or decrypted/the.book.of.ghosts. They’re designed to be plugged quickly into your Mothership game. On the opposite side of that imaginary cosmic spectrum are supplements that offer not-so-classical game experiences, and push the boundaries of horror and spookiness. The Sentience Assessment Procedure is one of them. This mysterious desktop-calendar-shaped supplement can be used in a variety of fashions: as a character creation tool, to wrap up a campaign, as a one-on-one adventure or even as a player vs player supplement.
Sam Leigh (you might know for her RPG TikTok videos or her game Anamnesis) and Chris Airiau (ORU designer of Rusted to the core) produced an AMAZING actual play with the Sentience Assessment Procedure. Watching it put a grin on my face, and was such an immersive experience. The AP is just one hour long making it easier to fit it in your schedule. Go check it, it’s a great way to see how you can use ORU special supplements.
They Won’t Cage Us
Imagine Broyitov IV, a barren planet in a secluded system, sparsely populated, and shrouded in a barely breathable atmosphere. This is where Derrivin Detention chose to build their brand new multi-dome high-security facility: the Ashgate Prison. While the construction is still underway, the prison is already occupied by several inmates. You and your group are Broyitov IV citizens and fiercely opposed to the construction of the prison. Your self-assigned mission is: sabotage the prison, and stop its construction. That’s the adventure They Won’t Cage Us will embark you in. And that’s the actual play Pierre-Philippe Renaud at Coup Critique ran for Chris Airiau (in French). Coincidentally, that's another one on one game!
I’ve been waiting impatiently for The Almanac of Sanguine Paths by Monford Tales, and I love what I can see on its Kickstarter page. If you’re into full moons and werewolves, you’ll like it as well, and before you ask, the game comes with pre-built settings, and yes, one of them is Sci-Fi.
The Almanac is a hybrid game. It’s GM-less, it can be played by one player or two players, becoming a duet game. It’s both a journaling and a letter-writing game. I really love the way the game engine is super open, as many solo or journaling games are, but never leaves you alone. There are a few simple and super clever tools that’ll guide you throughout all the phases of the game. Like for example character and world creation where you'll detail the werewolf-human world and the relationship between the two species. On top of this the book just looks stunning. I missed Monford Tales’ previous game, The Dead Letter Society, and felt really bad about that. This is why I backed The Almanac of Sanguine Paths on day one. There are THREE days left before the end of the campaign, go back the game right now if you can, that’ll make you howl!
Add-ons, Freebie, Actual Play
about 1 year ago
– Fri, Oct 06, 2023 at 09:23:44 AM
Hey space hackers, we are close to 1000% FUNDED!
This is just mind blowing. I can’t tell you enough how much the team is happy and grateful for the overwhelming support. Thank you so much to all of you, you’re just awesome.
In this update: add-ons, actual play, an exclusive freebie, an interview and some signal boosting.
You asked for more Outer Rim Uprising goodness. We listened, and we are working on a set of cool add-ons, mostly tools for the Wardens and players, to facilitate play in the ORU universe. Here are the first two. You can expect more throughout the campaign.
Crew Patches
The bonus patches for the first-48h-backers are now available as add-ons. Wardens, equip your whole crew, embellish your vac suit and look rad as hell. [caution vac suit non included, remember to seal your helmet before space walks]
Custom character sheets
We’ve engineered 4 custom classes for ORU: Saboteur, Union, Zeitgeist and Uberdoid. Now you can grab the Tear-off custom character sheet notepad. Contains 100 sheets.
Illustration of the Saboteur custom class (Note that this is not the final sheet layout).
Stay tuned for more cool add-ons in the next updates!
Sync up with the Tony Plus One EXP encrypted streams on Twitch and Youtube for an actual play run by our very own Josh Domanski. The adventure is built out of the Campaign Handbook (available in the Guerilla, Uprising tiers and above) and other ORU items. Rendez-vous today October 6 at roughly 3pm ET. If you miss the live show, don't worry, the video will be accessible on Youtube.
Briefing: “You have a new mission. You’ve been contacted by the Light of the Interstellar Way. While the details were vague, they apparently have a vital piece of information swiped from Dyson Initiative and are willing to hand it over. Their representative has agreed to meet you at Les Trois Copains on the mining station of Alexandria-17 for an information handoff.”
Les Trois Copains by Evangeline Gallagher - Campaign Handbook
Below is an exclusive transcript of a long-distance beam chat with D. Kenny, designer of the adventure The Hunger in Achernar, filled with harrowing space horrors, and of the supplement decrypted/the.book.of.ghosts, which is both a space ghost generator and a collection of mini-fictions
D. are you there? The signal is weak. 00111001 00110000 00110000 00100101 01000110 01010101 01001110 01000100 01000101 01000100 - There you are.
The Hunger in Achernar is filled with space nightmares becoming real, almost physical. Where do they come from?
Nightmares derive from the need that my players and I uncovered during playtesting for more foreshadowing of the weirdness happening on the ship. Initially, there was great backstory and a good set up, but exploring the ship felt like just another derelict floating in space, with few opportunities to interact with the elements that made the horrors of The Hunger in Achernar unique. I created some nightmares to pair with the physical sensations of the star’s energy washing over the ship and the players loved it; they felt it added a dimension that had been otherwise missing from the opening scenes of the adventure. From there, I expanded my first nightmare visions into a table of ten and saw an opportunity to have the nightmares double as hallucinogenic, pseudo-prophetic visions of the past, present, and future of what was happening aboard the derelict ship, the CF Senespera.
The Hunger in Achernar - Classified picture of subjects H1, H23, H17-17
How can wardens use The Hunger of Achernar in the scope of a wider campaign, integrating it with other bundle entries?
There are a lot of ways to incorporate The Hunger in Achernar into a larger ORU campaign. There are going to be some direct hooks in the main campaign booklet. But also the rumour table is a great way in. There’s also the promise of the experimental skipdrive itself - the ship is rumoured to have been testing a new kind of Hyperdrive that can make instantaneous jumps between distant skip points, precluding the need for weeks or months long travel times. This kind of tech would be universe altering if real, and worth a fortune to those with the means to recover it. What could be a better motivator in a horror movie than good old, transgressive, overwhelming greed?
Your second contribution to the bundle, decrypted/the.book.of.ghosts is ghost generator. What kind of abominations can be spawned with it?
My goal was to create a tool that would produce horrors that felt very much in the vein of the paranormal, while also being firmly rooted in sci-fi tropes. The idea was inspired originally by Zedeck Siew’s “Hantu!”, where he had a similar project. Except, for him, his goal was to produce ghosts that were uniquely South East Asian in flavour. One of the essays in the book talks about how he’s had people “recognize” the ghosts he’s generated for the book from stories they heard growing up and were then shocked to find out that they are randomly generated on his table. It is the combination of familiar tropes in new, interesting and horrific ways that makes this magic happen. I’m hoping that my ghost generator does the same thing for Mothership fans. My goal is to have the players explore some forgotten facility, feel the sudden chill in the air as dead screens spring to life with cryptic code, and know that something terrible approaches from just outside the airlock.
There’s a lot happening in the Mothership and larger Sci-Fi/Horror RPG scene this fall. We’ll take the occasion of these updates to do some signal boosting. We will share a few curated projects from really talented people we think ORU enjoyers might like.
The Progeny - By Violet Ballard
A boardgame/wargame/ttrpg hybrid you can both use as a standalone game or as a module for Mothership. Violet is a super prolific member of the indie RPG community, particularly focused on microgames. The Progeny is their latest project and is crowdfunding right now. It’s inspired by the old MicroQuests made for The Fantasy Trip and David Cronenberg’s classic film The Brood. You can play solo or wardenless, using the included simplified Mothership rules and crawl procedure, or you can use the materials as a one-shot pamphlet adventure and player aids for use as a traditional Mothership module.
Why do I like this game?
Its versatility. It’s made for solo, wardenless play and can be used as a classical MoSh adventure.
Its creepiness. A transdimensional portal, a creature called “Mama”, a dark science research complex gone silent.
It looks good and is inspired by cool stuff like old MicroQuests made for The Fantasy Trip and David Cronenberg’s classic film The Brood.
We’ll send roughly one by week, featuring both info about Outer Rim Uprising, new add-ons, links to actual plays, interviews, and signal boosting about oher cool projects. ORU happened thanks to massive support of the scene, and we want to give back.
