Hello and welcome to the Weekly Scroll Podcast.
My name is Ryan. And I personally think it's fine
if we break airlock and quarantine procedures.
OK, it's an alien dependence. You know, I got the alien
reference and then I had a COVID flashback and was like, maybe
you fucking do. That's why it's an airlock and
quarantine, because then I was like, if I say quarantine
procedures, everyone's going to have no I'm style flashbacks.
Yeah, I got you. I got you, though.
I got the Alien reference. And that's because today we're
not doing the Alien RPG, we're saving that one.
But today we're going to be going over Mothership 1 E, which
will never not annoy me that it's just not called 2 E since 0
E existed for years. That's so funny because I
watched our original episode, We did this, which was episode 13,
two years ago, and you did this then.
Yeah, I'll do it forever because I think it's, I personally think
it's ridiculous to to have a game that exists and then put a
new game that exists and called the second version, the first
version. But you know, that's just me.
That's that's my personal opinion.
I am annoyed by many things. This is one of them.
Fair. Yeah.
We can always just call it mothership.
I guess There is only one version now.
It is what it is. But today we're going to be
going over mothership. Part of that is because we've
been meaning to do it for a while.
Part of why it's taken a while is because it did take a little
bit of time to get into our aunt as it did with everybody else's
aunt, but also because this is going to be Mothership month
starting Tuesday the 12th. Marsh, MO, Some Marsh, MO here
starting Tuesday the 12th. It is Mothership month put on by
Tuesday Night Games. There's going to be lots of
projects. There's going to be a new a new
thing that Tuesday Night Games is putting out.
It's going to be on Backward Kit with a bunch of other linked
projects and whatnot. So yeah, yeah, there we go.
But they're just going to call it Wani every time the new one
comes out. So, so that that's happening.
So a bunch of stuff is happening.
A bunch of mothership stuff's happening because it is
Mothership month, right? So we are going to have like a
mini kind of like mothership month ish here on the show
starting with today. We're going to be doing this
review this month. We're going to be doing a couple
of APS. We're going to be having like a,
a spotlight episode to not, not to briefly talk about like the
main mothership thing. But I have a feeling that it's
probably going to fun, right, to talk about all of the other
thing, all of the other mothership projects that are
going to come out that are not associated with the primary
mothership project. So we can get some more eyes on
those and we are going to be doing a a whole month of space
or sci-fi themed reviews. So every review for the rest of
this month will be space or sci-fi slash both reviewed.
Some fun ones coming up. I'm excited.
Me too. Yeah, so we'll see how that
goes. So so so we're doing Mothership,
right? And you got the deluxe set.
I got the deluxe set plus more. I've set up a a a camera we've
only used once, but I want to use going forward from now and
let let's quick take a look at the the physicals.
Oh oh, you don't have an install the Kickstarter page up, do you?
Oh no, I closed it. It's cool.
I got it. No, I got it.
OK. Well, never mind, I won't.
Kickstarter Mothership. Let's see.
OK, so everyone knows the original mothership came out
quite a while ago. The new mothership, I don't even
know when it funded, I think it was like 2 years ago at this
point. But when that project came out,
it funded for. A lot of money for one of money.
Yeah, about $1,405,569 on a $20,000 goal with 15,699
backers. Again, I don't remember what day
it funded on. There's 40 updates and I don't
feel like scrolling that far back.
But you know, we did get this a couple of months ago and we've
been waiting for a time to to review it.
And so that time is upon us. We're going to do that today.
And I said I wasn't going to Scroll down and figure out, but
then I started scrolling down. So it funded successfully on
December 2nd, 2021. So we're talking about almost
three years ago at this point. But again, it did deliver months
ago at this point. So it did take two, a little
over 2 years to come out. But anyway.
The volume of like what they ended up having to do, I
understand, you know. Yeah, it's not a big deal.
I mean, they did update relatively well.
I mean, you know, I'm glad they're doing Marshmallow
because anytime you have a Kickstarter that takes longer
than expected to come out, a lot of the excitement for getting it
waivers, you know what I mean? I think that's could be part of
the reason we haven't seen quite as much 1 E off as we did with
with original mothership. But I've a feeling marshmallow's
going to turn that around and and we'll see that.
But we do want to show for those in podcast mine.
This isn't going to be helpful to you.
We'll use word pictures, but I will Nah, we actually want to
kind of go through the the box a little bit here.
So I'm using this half down Cam I have and I of course, I went I
went balls to the wall. I got the deluxe edition, which
is beautiful gold box right here.
I also got the regular edition box set, which is half as large.
And I did get of course, all the adventures and a bonus like
holding box because I do have like an entire shelf of of
mothership stuff behind me. And it also came with AT shirt
I've never opened. So that's that I help.
You did I get AT shirt. What the fuck?
You should have got one with it. Well, maybe you didn't with the
deluxe. I don't know if it came with a
deluxe or it came with like just like the the Super beef boy 1.
So in the bonus storage box, it did come with a couple of
patches and all of the like 1 E conversions.
So a couple of patches there to dust.
You shall return the landing crew and launch crew survives
off save a lot of pamphlets here, a lot of pamphlets even
more pamphlets keeps pamphletting and there is a like
a sticker sheet in the bottom so that you can like label the box
and stuff like that. I'll quickly flip through the
regular edition box. The cover of it looks exactly
like the cover of the Zine. It just says corset instead of
player's survival guide on it. It does have a bunch of stuff on
the back that has like the includes this and stuff like
that. I mean it's it's really nice.
It's a beautiful box. The it's it's multi textured.
So all of the white has like that kind of like like Sheen and
Sheen texture to it versus Matt in the background.
So it's a little bit raised just a little.
It's it's real nice. It's real nice box.
And what came in that was some dice 2 D 10s and AD 20, which is
what you need for the game, some standy bases.
And then it came with obviously the player survival guide, the
Warden's operation manual, the ship Breakers toolkit.
It came with the unconfirmed contact reports.
It came with the mothership companion thing like like to go
use the app. There is a small GM screen in
this one. Got some standees.
You've got what is this? It's like a big poster situation
and then you've got the adventure, another bug hunt.
So that's what all came in the regular corset of the game, and
in the deluxe set it's basically the same.
You just get a nicer box like that's pretty much.
For the nicer box. You basically, yeah.
You just pay for the nicer box and it is a nicer box.
It is a beautiful golden box. It is too big to fit on any of
my shelves, which is actually kind of annoying.
It does say mothership on every side, which I'm always going to
love because then no matter where you you put it on your
shelves, it will say that. But then.
I definitely wish that I had gotten just the regular box set
and not the deluxe box set because the regular box set is
the same size as all of the other box sets I have on top of
my shelf. And when it fit there nicely,
the deluxe set, while yeah, it's a beautiful box, it is very big.
Yeah, yeah, it is a big box. So you do get a bigger gym
screen, which is really neat and big.
It has a very like it's so it's mechanical, but it definitely
has a very kind of like Geiger esque situation going on with
that. It's got the screen and
everything going on there. It's got the same poster, it's
got even more standees and then it's got literally everything
else that was in the core box. Again, you're basically playing
for a really nice box. It is everything that's the same
I you do get more adventures is really the big difference.
So you get the player survivor guide, you get ship breaker, you
get warden man and we get all that kind of stuff.
You know the buck hunt, but then I also got dead Planet, a Pound
of flesh and gradient descent for one.
The box itself is gorgeous. It it is got magnetic clicking
like compartments on the side. So there's compartment A,
compartment B. Inside the compartments you do
have the dice and the standees. You have some some boxes that
you can fill as with some other stuff with there's a lot of
spaces for you to put like pencils, more dice, things like
that. Done.
Yeah, a a a very small gun for some of that stuff.
So it is a cool box. It is a nice box.
It was worth it to kind of get all of the extra adventures you
do get. It is nicer for a reason.
You did pay for the niceness. I personally think it was It was
worth it. I do think it's a nice box.
Again, the only problem is it is bigger than everything else I
have. So it does get, I guess its own
place on the shelf because because it does and and that's
it. So that is the physical deluxe
box, core box and extra extra storage box there for for
mothership. Beautiful.
Yeah, Look at all of that and how much, how much was all of
that? I don't remember what the
Kickstarter was to get like needle in pledge.
The deluxe set, both right now on Tuesday Night Games and also
on the Kickstarter, was $99.00. The core set, which was the
smaller box you did first, is once again, both on Tuesday
Night Games and on the Kickstarter, was $59.00.
So frankly, incredibly reasonably priced in my opinion.
Yeah, I mean, I think it was a pretty good deal.
What? So did you?
I was, I was closing the window. Did you say what?
Like the entire All In pledge was like the ball Swall pledge.
Oh no, because I'm not a freak that needed to get both sets, I
mean. Well, I I am obviously so.
Let's see that tier you're talking about.
The Mothership Mega Bundle was a 199.
Hey, you know what? I'll take it.
I think all of that all together for both box sets and the
T-shirt and everything, yeah, absolutely worth it for $199.
Yeah, totally. So that one did add the, like
you said, the extra storage box you got all those pamphlet
modules of the and the shirt and two more things.
OK, so going into mothership, so we we approach this a little bit
differently because I believe that you said that you actually
went back and like watched our previous episode.
Yeah, I listened to about maybe an hour of us reviewing it and
then I was tired of the sound of my voice and and didn't want to
kill myself, so I sure I turned it off before I drove myself
insane. Yeah, I hate the sound of my own
voice as well. We were worse at this back then
because this is like episode 13 of our show.
We've definitely gotten a lot better.
Yeah, I don't think we were dumb, but I definitely think we
were fine. I think.
Maybe I'm talking more about myself.
Oh, OK. All right.
Well, then I think you are always wonderful.
Thanks. But but So what?
So you watched it? I didn't.
I purposely did not listen to what I previously thought about
mothership original mothership. I also did not read original
mothership until after I read 1 E and and thought about it and
then I went back and and read original so that I could have
like an unkind of varnished opinion of of what I thought
about this game on its own compared to the previous one.
And what what's your? What's your first initial like
one sentence you want to say before we get into this?
I like this one better. I agree, yeah.
I I genuinely do in many ways, yeah.
Yeah, I do still think it has like in my opinion, a very a
big, I don't want to call it a flaw.
I have, I have an issue. I have an issue.
And obviously, you know, we have thoughts and feelings and
opinions and stuff like that. But something maybe we should do
more disclaimer for those that might listen to this, because
mothership's popular, we might get some people out of our
general orbit that listen to this episode just so you know
what it is we do here on the show.
Let's even go back to the big window so you can see our faces.
This is our opinion of games, right?
We in no way, shape or form believe that we are authorities
on the matter. This is how we feel about games,
and it is very much, I don't say tainted.
It is colored by our opinions of what we like about games.
We are pretty nitpicky and pretty pedantic and that is part
that's part of our charm. We we pick and we poke and we
prod at these games. It is almost like some some
amateur dev editing. Sometimes we're very strong
about an opinion sometimes. We play devil's advocate about
things sometimes. We can't have a completely
different opinion by the time we finish our episodes because we
talked through it together. So Hunter and I have not
discussed this game prior to it. We are reading it through
together for you and for us to really formulate our opinion.
So again, sometimes we're extra picky and extra pedantic, but
that's on purpose because we want to poke holes and and poke
at it. And that doesn't mean we don't
like it. If you don't want to hear all of
our bullshit, everything is always time stamped.
Just skip to the end when we go to the scores and you'll hear
all the shit we're about to say in it a slightly more condensed
way with metrics. So let's do this thing.
Good talk. All right, mothership sci-fi
horror RPG. Is it though?
We will find out. So again, the original cover of
the box is exactly or cover. The game is almost exactly what
it was before. I mean, if I if I skip to this,
you'll see that the the the white box is slightly down a
little bit. There's no like R there's no
registered trademark thing comparatively.
And I think the the font on or the text on player survivor
guide is is like maybe 10:50, you know, in size different, but
it's basically an exact clone. It still has what's his face on
the front. Do you remember what this guy's
unofficial name is? I?
Thought you were going to remember it because I I, I was
reading the last time I was like fuck, what is was this?
Freddy or Bob or yeah, whatever it is, there's people in chat.
The woman that can't be able to tell us.
Yeah, leave it in the comments. What's the unofficial name of
the disemboweled spaceman on the cover of it is so continuing in
obviously the similar to the first ones, there's a weapons
and damage. There's tables, weapons, damage,
armor and stuff right on the original cover and why we'll
we'll get into why that's a thing that just contributes to
one of the issues that I have with this game.
But weapons, damage and armor right on the front pages.
Mothership sci-fi horror RPG player survival guide Content
warning Mothership is a horror game.
Is it for game for mature audiences?
It contains violence, foul language, some sexual content,
drug use, and depictions of mental illness, trauma, stress,
and panic that may not be suitable for all.
All audiences. Please be advised, it's a great
content warning. I think it's in every scene and
for what it is and what it wants to be, I think it's good to have
that here. I agree, I think it's very
appropriate specifically for what mothership tries to do,
which is to traumatize you. It does.
I do really enjoy all of the stuff below it.
Created, edited, develop it it. It looks very much like a the
underneath of a movie poster. Yeah.
So I really enjoy that a lot. The art here, I assume is a Sean
McCoy piece in the background. And then the very first thing
you get is how to make your character, which I don't mind
generally I want to talk about mechanics a little bit more, but
the good thing about the way that they do this is first of
all they switch it to a full 2 page spread.
It's. Much better.
Yeah.
Yeah, I do have the other one. There's no reason not to.
Kind of like we compare as we go because I've already done this.
So the the original 1 did have a table of contents which this one
doesn't and it annoys me that it doesn't.
It does start with character creation like before, but it did
have a lot of words you didn't need and the character creation
page was kind of jammed onto 1 sideways page.
Now let's see if it's, I don't think it's going to let me do 2
page spread without adding an extra page, but I can add an
extra page in real quick. We can do 2 page scrolling.
Oh, it does. So now you get a two page spread
with all of the character creation rules around it.
On the page itself is cleaner. It's more streamlined.
The skills and stuff are more streamlined.
So, so yeah, did you usually you do character creation, so did
you want to run through character creation real quick as
I do? This or would you rather I'll
run through character creation And my comment about this is
like, you know, I've really been converted to the like soft
introduction of mechanics before case, but this one actually kind
of does that as you go through. I agree.
I agree and that's why I said I don't mind this one as much
because it does give you an explanation.
What bothers me when you do characterization with no
explanation of what, why you're going to use your saves and
things like that, but because it's a picture of the character
sheet which has that information on it, it is it's, I don't mind
that it's in the front. This also could have been later
and I would have been OK with it, but I don't mind it here.
Yeah, so the mothership creating your character is divided up
into nine easy steps. They are listed here.
The first one that's going to be nice, simple is going to be roll
your stats. So in this game you do have
stats and saves, two different things.
These stats are strength, speed, intellect and combat.
I always have really appreciated that combat is its own stats
game you can keep. Going.
You can be very strong or very fast and still suck at combat.
I appreciate that. I don't like it.
I. Don't.
I don't. It is my core problem with the
game. But I'm going to let you keep
going and I'll get to it later. You know what?
Fuck you, Ryan. Yeah.
And these, these stats, much like stats and other games,
represent how good your character is doing things.
This one specifically says under pressure.
Yeah, so you're going to roll 210 sided dice, much less dice
than used to roll. Add them together and then add
25 and record the result for each stat.
A stat 36 is average, but don't get too hung up on numbers right
now because you won't get a fucking 36 in a bunch of stats,
I promise you. Yeah, Step 2, Rolling saves.
Characters have 3 saves. That is sanity, fear, and body,
and it's just a representation of how resistant you are to
different kinds of dangers and hazards.
Once again, you'll roll 210 sided dice, add them together,
and then add ten and record the result for each saved.
So I feel like this is where it starts to, I mean immediately
diverts from the original version and that your stats and
saves are a tad lower overall. So this game is even more lethal
and deadly than it was previously.
A thing that I've appreciated. I didn't ever actually play the
0 edition of Mothership. I've only played one East, but
my player characters all died. Yeah.
The next step is Step 3. You get to choose your class.
They still have the same four classes they did before, which
is Marines, Androids, scientists, and Teamsters.
Marines being people who are Indian fight military trained,
androids being kind of terrifying, artificial humans
that are on your ship, Scientists being doctors, anyone
who will cut open an alien or a person infected by an alien.
Or maybe not. And then Teamsters are your blue
collar workers that are along for the ride.
Sometimes they're actually the heroes.
I did quick want to point out a couple of things.
One thing we kind of skipped that we talked about in the
beginning, there's no table of contents, but there are
bookmarks. But it is a very hyperlinked
game. The layout itself frequently has
the those circles, those long always, let's say, read about
stats on page 18, read about stats.
Those are all hyperlinked in the PDF, which I mean, it's not in
the physical, which still means the table of contents would be
nice. But it is nice that all of those
are are are in there. Which is nice because actually
last time we reviewed this when we reviewed 0 addition, we did
critique the fact that there were no inline hyperlinks even
though it referred to pages in the text.
Moving on to Step 5, you have gain stress your character.
'S kind of stressed. 4 just get 4 and this.
This is one thing that I thought was weird.
I did the same thing when I read it.
Because when reading. Four across the bottom, yeah.
Step 4 Yeah you roll Health characters can suffer suffer a
certain number of wounds before they die.
Each class is different. Starting Max wounds.
Characters gain a wound when they reach 0 health.
You're going to roll 110 sided die and then add ten and record
that result for maximum health. So go ahead.
No, you. Go.
No, you go. I was.
Going to say so that is different.
Yes, it's worse. It's worse for you.
It's a better mechanic. Though it's a way better no
that's what I'm saying. It is worse for the player and
makes his game immediately more deadly and is a better mechanic.
I think in the idea that this is a like horror survival RPG that
this is a great addition to it. It is fucking brutal and I
thoroughly enjoy it. I think my players enjoy it as
well. Yeah, so I did play some 0, not
enough to really Remember Remember super well.
I've mostly played one E with with, you know, our homies, a
lot of it here on the podcast. But regardless, you know, I'm a
big wounds guy. I think this is good.
It's cleaner. It is it's cleaner.
And I don't know, I had a table at the time that was that was
for once very into the idea of like dying and making new
characters. I think also because making
characters in this is really easy.
Yeah. So they they were like, it was
very brutal and an enjoyable way.
So now going to Step 5, which is gaining stress.
Your character's current stress and minimum stress are two,
basically your minimum stress. You always have two stress, you
know you. Can you can actually have an
increase to minimum stress threshold too so.
Yes, you can increase, but you can never go.
I don't think you can ever go below 2.
No, you can't. Yeah, that is what minimum
means. Well, yeah.
And then the you note your trauma response.
So each class deals with stress and panic differently, which
comes into play. Yeah, you're going to mark your
trauma response for future reference.
I do very much enjoy that. Where is that on the character
sheet? It's only.
Numbered with direct. Arrows from the previous page.
Oh, you scrolled back on? Yeah, it's over on the previous
page. I'm not in spreads and mine.
I'm on page by page. Same.
Yeah, so you mark your trauma response and then choose a
skill. So your classes come with a few
skills that are pre loaded. Additionally, each class gets a
a number of bonus skills to select.
So to to choose a skill, you must have at least one
prerequisite skill. They're indicated by the arrows
leading from 1:00 to the other. I actually really love this like
skill tree that they give you visually, I think it's great.
I think it's it's kind of video gaming, but not in a bad way.
It's very easy to understand. So if you're looking at the Oh
yeah, also I know, yeah, it's it's much cleaner and than the
previous version, there are less skills.
Yeah, the the previous versions character sheet I will say still
at a fantastic job of explaining it still used well.
We say that more games should use constantly is like flow
charts and things like that. This game does it really well
because I think one of the things that Mothership has
always done, both in the original version and this
version is keep an eye on the fact that it is an instruction
manual. And I think part of it being
like sci-fi helped that a little bit because it is.
There is still like there's a voice to the instruction.
But the original character sheet was great.
The new character sheet with the more streamlined rules and
everything is so exponentially better.
It is better, yeah. Yeah, so just an example on
skills, as you can see, one leads to the other.
There is trained, expert and master.
So train gives you a + 10 bonus, expert plus 15, masters plus 20.
And if you look at just the top skill, linguist is one you'd get
immediately. Through that you could get
psychology and through that so phenol, so another word,
sophontology. Is that what it is?
Yeah. Perfect.
Yeah, I'm really good at reading and stuff.
So after choosing skills, we'll go to step #8, which is roll,
loadout, Trinket and patch. Your loadout is the beginning
gear that you get. There are loadouts there.
There's AD 10 table for each different class that show it
says what you start with, some rather than others.
Obviously the trinket and patch are just little character things
that you have. They aren't necessarily like
mechanic focus things, although there are adventures that will
refer to your trinket. I'm thinking specifically of
gradient descent that will give you small bonus, but it's just
an interesting thing that your character has.
It gives them a little bit of personality and identity.
And then, Oh yeah, also in your rule, you also roll for credits,
which I believe is 2 D 10 and multiply that by 10 for how much
monies you start with and then finish.
You're going to write your characters name and pronouns,
mark A0 above high score and then you're you're ready to go.
So honestly, me explaining this process is probably longer than
actually doing it. It is very, very quick.
Oh yeah, and I do love the same thing they did before and
they'll do now. And that all games should do is
have a filled out character sheet and the all of what you
need to fill that character sheet out is just this one
spread with that in front of you all the time.
It doesn't take 10 pages after giving you an explanation of the
character sheet to actually give you an explanation of the
character sheet, right? This is only the bare minimum
information that you need. And that is one thing that I
also like about this being really early in the book too, is
you get this information again later.
And then there's an actual like undone character sheet in the
back. Like the rules for all this
stuff like comes shortly, but it's really nice that you do
have like a literally a completely filled out character
sheet with name like the the things checked off and
everything so you can see how to do it as you're reading through
it. It's really fucking fantastic.
This is a a great a great little spread here.
Yeah, I tell you, you know when we played.
So we played. What was the name of that?
Who's we? Me and my table My like in
person game played. What was that box set of
mothership pamphlets? I don't even know where it is on
my. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know. What I'm talking about right
though, yes, Like Tombship of the Lich or something like that.
Terra from the cosmos. Yes, we played Terra from the
Cosmos. We played a couple adventures in
that. And before we did that we had
like a zero session where I pulled this up on my TV and we
scrolled through it together. And pretty much after that page,
they were like, OK, I have a good understanding of what's
going on already. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, it helps that it's not extremely complicated and the
game is much more streamlined than previously and it wasn't
like wasn't super bad before, but I would struggle to call it
quote UN quote rules light, even though I'm getting to point
where I fucking hate those words almost as much as OSR.
But it's it's definitely super, super streamlined now.
I would say the biggest difference if he if I is the the
fact that it's streamlined like more so than in the individual
difference. I would say the fact that all of
it is, is the thing that stands out kind of the most.
Yeah. And moving on to the next page.
Great point, by the way, is the credits page, this page for me
laugh purely because the art feels weird for being on the
credits page. Like I guess it's not weird in
the context of the game. Like it's not weird in the
context of the game, but just to be on the page.
It's like credits, this is all about money.
Here's a horrifying union monster.
That's what you were saying before and yeah, I totally get
it. I will say one thing about the
art that's interesting is it's all great.
We're going to go through like a ton of different art pages, but
I think like there's so many different people in it.
I'm always going to prefer when like one artist is consistent
throughout the book. But if you're not going to do
that, having every single RP by someone different is also an
option. But they're all gorgeous.
This place, this this page obviously is is stunning.
So. Yeah, very great pseudo pilot
esque thing or space jockey, whatever they called him.
Oh yeah. So credits it the credits the
primary currency. Exist.
It just shows you the yeah, and you're starting credits.
Like I said before, it's two D 10 * 10 credits.
So you start with and they've got the, you know, shorthand for
credits. It they work the same way as
most other things. Well, I see.
If you didn't read this page, you can probably still
understand how. This works, yeah.
One thing interesting about the layout of the book too that
you'll notice is everything is page and then point and then
paragraph of that page, right? So it is page 6 and then two
things 1. You get starting credits listed
here again, even though you got it on that previous character
sheet. And I get, I will always, I will
always love when things in it, when it is necessary reiterate
stuff. But this is the first paragraph
and starting credits is 6.1. I guess the first thing could
have been 6.1 and this is 6.2, but it is 6.1.
So if there's three important parts on page 7, it would be
7.17.27.3. So you can always reference the
specific like if someone tells you it's 14.2, you know to go to
page 14 second paragraph. So that's it's what they did in
the original 1. And it's a great way, great way
to do it in this one as well. Yeah.
And also I think I think things like that, like I think it's
great. And we always talk about Troika
having that and then being really strong.
But I think once again, it really fits into that like
sci-fi feature instruction manual that you have in your
hand for how to be the, you know, the pilot on this ship.
Yeah. So we got to loadouts.
This is a more streamlined version of what they did before.
It kind of takes a lot of the the weight off of picking what
you get or the previous. I think the loadouts previously
were bigger. Doesn't really matter.
Who cares? My memory is blurry.
Yeah. So you, you basically have AD 10
table to roll on. And you know, some of these are
great. And also some of them you're
like, yeah. Why don't we let's, let's,
let's, you know, we, we, it's D 10 tables.
Let's just hit through the tables because I do.
And for this, of course, I have to use my my digital dice roller
here. Love this bad boy.
So why don't you do 1 and I'll do 1 and you do 1 and I'll do
one. Do you wanna?
Do you want me to hit Marine or you want?
Yeah, you do Marine. I'll do Android.
OK so for marine I just tap so the good thing with this is I
just tap D10 boop it's an 8. I love this fucking thing so
much so for eight it is a dress uniform which is armor point 1A
revolver with one round and a challenge coin.
One thing that's interesting is it says underlined items are not
described in the equipment section.
Use common sense to determine their use.
They do that a couple times throughout the books, like use
common sense, like be reasonable.
I like it to a point. I'll I'll say if I don't, I
don't remember a point when I didn't like it, but it kind of
there's there's stuff. Anyway, keep going.
What did you do? I do like it.
So in this so far, I'm like, yeah, obviously you know what
fucking camping gear is. You know, you know what a
satchel is, You know what a screwdriver does?
I don't need to ride. You don't need to ride a bunch
of stuff about it. For Android, I rolled A5.
So I started with a standard crew attire, which is one on our
point, not very good. A stun baton and a small pet in
parentheses. Organic, just to just to let you
know. Scientist loadout let me hit D
10 again. I got a 5 so I got a lab coat
with AP1 cybernetic diagnostic scanner and a portable computer
terminal. Nice.
I rolled for Teamster and I rolled you know a pretty good
one. I think I rolled A10 which on
this one and this it is 0 to 9. So when you roll the zero side,
it is, yeah. So I rolled a vac suit, which is
3 armor points, a laser cutter with one extra battery, a patch
kit, three of them, a tool belt with assorted tools, which I
think for the Teamster is like a really great start to be very
useful in a lot of situations. Yeah.
Yeah, that's a, that's a really good one.
Yeah, it's which one was all I was looking at earlier.
It's like, Oh yeah, if you roll 9, you start with loungewear,
which is one arm point, a crowbar, a STEM pack and six
pack of beer. I'm like that.
Yeah, you're that they couldn't be more polar opposite on on
those right there. None of them are outright
totally useless, which is good, I mean.
Outside of the crowbar, what are you getting out of #9 and.
You got stem pack, you know, I mean be careful because you can
get sick from stem pack addiction.
So get. Your stem pack addiction while
you drink your 6 pack of beer. Let's get, let's get, let's get,
let's get cross faded here anyway, trinkets.
Yeah, so trinkets are is AD 100 table and these are just good
luck charms or things you have found out in life that just adds
a little bit of character to your character.
What'd you roll, Ryan? Good thing about this is look, I
have AD 100 button boom. So let's see D100.
I got an 88 so I got a pith helmet.
OK, a pith helmet. It's full.
Pith. It's all pith.
Pithy. The soft, spongy tissues in the
center of the stems of most vascular plants, consisting
mainly of parenchyma, the soft inner substance of health of
feather or hair. The spinal cord.
So a spinal cord helmet dope. Nice.
I rolled 27, so I got ivory dice.
So I just have some ivory dice. Yeah, kind of sick actually,
although ivory is inhumane and horrifying as a trade, yes.
Yeah, Did I? I was scrolling quick.
Is there something from Xena on Xenomorph?
OK. I was like, I scrolled fast and
thought I saw something from Xena and I was like, man at
work, Yeah. There is some like there, there
are very interesting, like titanium toothpaste, kind of
like a funny one. And yeah, there's a lot of
really good small stuff. None of it matters, you know.
Well, it's a trinket. Yeah, I.
Think it's good? I think it's.
A good little thing. So, so Christian who is smarter
than us told us. Yeah.
The the pith helmet is basically the, the, the old colonizer
helmet, the British kind of tan, like, you know, kind of pointed
in the front and back, you know, that's a pith helmet.
So dope. What the old man's wearing in
Disney's animated Tarzan movie. Yeah, a real shithead colonizer
hat. So I got a colonizer hat and you
got ivory dice and we're assholes.
Yeah, we're. Bad people.
Yeah. All right.
What's next? Next is your patch, another D100
table that you know, genuinely like stuff like this doesn't
actually matter, but it adds just a little bit of flavor to
your character and I really do enjoy it.
I rolled in 84, so I have a cat that says good boy and four cat
slippers. Why now?
Nice, nice. I rolled a three.
So mine is a red shirt logo, which does not bode well, but
but there's so many good ones. Yeah, there's so many good ones
on here, like keep well lubricated, I thought was funny.
Front towards enemy with a claymore mine on it.
Oh that's so good. Allergic to bullshit and it's a
medical style patch. What are some of the really good
ones that I really loved? The Bohica patch.
Bend over, here it comes again. Or though I really love the all
out of fucks to give, but it's a picture of an astronaut with
turned out pockets. See, if I were them, you know,
what I would have done is I would have had a sticker, a
sticker pack that had a hundred of these stickers.
Design all these though. Yeah, well.
They only made $1.4 million. You know, maybe they could have
paid all right. What 76?
Fuck off in Russian. Yeah, sick.
Yeah, a lot. There's a hundred of these, so
we're not going to go through album, but a lot of them are
really, really great so. Yeah.
Next is equipment. This is just a list of gear and
tools available to characters at the start of the game.
There's plenty of good stuff on here.
It's it's all a lot more utilitarian than what we were
just talking about, But yeah, great stuff, good stuff.
And then pets. That's right.
You can start with a pet. Your pets have stats and it's
going to be sad when they die because they will.
There is organic and synthetic. I rolled an Android right with a
organic pet. So the pets are going to have
one wound. That's 10 health to get to that
wound. It has an instinct stat that
kind of takes you over for all of its stats.
It's got one trained skill. It has advantage on rest saves
and one stress whenever a pet takes damage.
Panic check if pet is killed. Minimum stress plus one that's.
All for organic, yeah. Yeah, that's for organic.
Yeah, I am reading organic. But here's the thing though.
Here's the thing though, is anywhere in this book does it
tell you the thing about instinct being the catch all for
all stats in this book? Not in this book, no.
Yeah, see. I don't.
Know yeah, yeah, the skills of the pets are great.
I mean, the synthetic 1 is a little bit different, but but
yeah, it's cool that there are there.
Were there there weren't? Were there pets in the original
book? I vaguely remember there being
I, I don't quote me on it, but I think there were.
The word pets is not in the PDF so.
Maybe not, I'm just remembering reading this previously like a
year ago. Yeah, I definitely think not
making instinct clear like here is a good part to put.
Instinct is the catch all, you know.
But yeah, anyway. Carrying capacity Use Common
Sense has a couple things here. You know most people can carry
about a fourth their body weight.
Average Marine is expected to carry 90 to 160 lbs in combat,
and depending on the setting, Androids may be built to carry
one to five times that amount. Wind out character can carry one
light thing in each hand and one heavy thing with both hands.
Perfect. That's the thing, all right,
and. Then you have the weapon page.
I fucking love the weapon page. I love the art with the weapons
and the staff below them. I think it's great.
Yep, this. I think the next two pages will
lead into Yep, the my first rant about the thing that I don't
like about this game yeah, weapons are dope.
Do you want to pick one and just like talk about it?
Well, so here's the thing too. Is that like the kind of combat
weapons. I think in the original book it
split combat weapons and like utilitarian weapons into like
two different spreads. If I remember correctly in this
book, it I think all the combat weapons on the left page, but
they're not all combat weapons because I think the flare guns
and the trank pistol are on the left page, but everything on the
right is more utilitarian. Did you want to pick one of the
like any any of these and just like go through a gun?
Yeah, I'll go ahead and go through the the foam gun and
fucking, but it's on the bottom right hand side since the Halls
B series foam gun. It costs 500 credits.
It is range close it. It's it's quick hardening foam
that shoots out, does one damage, has three shots.
It the wound type is blunt force, which does matter.
And the special is body save or become stuck, strength checks,
disadvantage to escape great things.
Just lock down something, you know, Yeah.
And that's basically the stat block for weapons.
It's got the name, it's got the type of the the amount of money
and then range damage shots, wounds special for each one,
which is cool. It's a nice that the weapons
have stat blocks and the art is great.
I mean, I, I didn't, I, I personally like Sean Mccoy's,
you know, art on the in the original book.
A lot of it was very interesting and the weapons page on that one
slap too. It is it is neat that they did
kind of upgraded a bit. So comparatively, if you look at
if you look at like the smart rifle here, I'm glad that they
left it basically the same gun just kind of you know.
It's a more detailed drawing. Yeah, it's just, it looks like
more of a gun though. Yeah, and then armor another two
page spread. Yeah, No 2, bitch, Brad, there's
armor. It has stuff on it.
You know, where are the important bits?
The important bits are kind of, I mean, it just sends them
across. Yeah, it's across the bottom.
I think what you'll probably deal with most is like standard
crew attire, standard battle dress and vac suits.
Those are all very important ones that you will see way more
commonly than the more advanced armor.
This is not really meant to be a combat game.
There is combat in this game. It's very stressful though and
you die. Yeah, vac suit, not vac sack.
Remember that, people. Who said Vac Sat.
Nothing, don't worry about it. But yeah, so listed here though
it is, it is. It has like a brand name and
then the type and it just gives like your armor points for each.
And I think only one of them has the damage reduction, which
we'll go over later, but it is kind of neat.
I mean, again, this is basically the exact same spread as the
original game. Just obviously the art is
exponentially better and cooler and stuff like that.
But I do like all of the little tags across all of them that
explain like the comms and stuff.
And I do like that some of them like or multiples like, I don't
know why, but like the, you know, on the top left, the short
range comms, there's arrows that go to two of the armors.
So I like that they kind of like tagged a bunch of different
parts that way. It's a cool spread.
It's a little busy, but it looks really neat.
It's a great, it's a great piece of art.
It's definitely better than spreads because you can see that
each of the like labels for what kind of armor there is is below
the person. Like that person looking up.
It's that's what they're wearing.
Yeah. It's like, it's like their waist
or knees, Yeah. On the far left one the like a
advanced battle dress. Well, it has a body Cam, it's
got headlamps, a heads up display, short range comms.
Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, it's cool.
Safety instructions. All right, so beginning of my
first rant and it sounds like we're going to disagree on this.
So let's look at the art of this page on safety instructions.
It is a giant quasi Cthulian, but if Cthulhu was more of like
an elephant holding, literally holding a man sized person in
their hands. So you can imagine how giant
that is, right? And then it goes to how to be a
great player. Mothership can be a very
challenging game. You should expect I'm going to
read through some of these and then go back to things.
So you should expect character characters to die, play smart,
etcetera. Violence to be punishing.
If you're fighting, you're losing.
Violence is deadly and should be avoided at all costs.
We're going to come back to that one.
The odds to be stacked against you roles are punishing, blah,
blah, blah. To make difficult choices, to
pay attention just as safe focus, stay, stay plugged in and
then a safe play environment which you know, safety tools.
It's great. There's a big section of it in
the Warden's manual. This is good to have here.
But let's let's go back to the one that like really just irked
me as I went through this game. Violence to be punishing.
If you're fighting, you're losing.
Violence is deadly and should be avoided at all costs, right.
One thing that you just said, this is not a combat game.
What are the four stats again? There is a combat stat.
Oh wait, there's a combat stat and then on this page, page 16,
it says violence should be avoided at all cost.
I would love to scroll back the last two spreads here and or
let's kick the spreads. The one before this is armor.
The one before that is guns. There's a whole page spread of
guns, a whole page spread of armor, and then a box here that
says avoid combat at all costs. A.
Little bit of disconnect there. Come on.
And not only that. OK, so when you go to the armor
page, right? Standard career tire, standard
career tire. That's that's let's let's take
that one out of the mix of five different armor, five different
armors here, right? So then you have advanced battle
dress, standard battle dress, a hazard suit and a vac suit.
That means that 50% of all armor outside of literally basic
clothing is combat armor. It is battle armor.
So you have a whole page of guns that are for combat, 50% of all
your armor being specifically for combat, mostly for marines
to fight. You have a marine class, you
have a combat stat, and then you have this saying that oh, don't
fight. This isn't a fighting game.
It's not a combat game. You're not supposed to fight.
It's, it's kind of a, it's kind of a, an armed retreat game
though, you know? To an extent, but it's it's it's
in the same way that Pete like anyone that trying to say that 5
E is in a combat game when most of the game is combat rules.
It's an asinine argument, right? Like, you know, we'll go over a
little bit more, but I I'm a big fan of of like Stafford beer.
They basically said this thing that's like a system is what it
does, right? It's specifically it's it's it's
posse. What what's the what's a
heuristic for it? Posse wid the purpose of a
system is what it does right? And that's why I think that
personally, like whenever you argue or anyone argues that
like, well, 5 E is a great social game because it doesn't
have social rules, so you can do whatever you want, but it's full
of combat rules. It's a fucking combat game
because nowhere in the book does it say we specifically did not
give you social rules so that you can do whatever you want.
So then that is not part of the system.
That is you reading into the intent of the system.
But that I think as I read this version of the game is something
that kept bothering me over and over and over again, is that to
keep saying repeatedly, and this isn't the last time we'll see
it, that this isn't a combat game.
But it not only that, I wouldn't mind if it was worded a little
differently, but it literally says you should avoid violence
at all costs. But like the pre like then the
game shouldn't have marines, combat armor, like machine guns
and all that stuff. You know what I mean?
Like that, that's one thing that I noticed the most about this.
That kind of irked me and and we'll we'll talk about it a
little bit more as we go forward from here.
Yeah, so, so Christian and chat Christian who's a Meat Castle
game Ware who obviously friend of the show, member of the show
and fantastic mothership creator.
Best friend of the show. Yeah best friend of the show has
a point that I will acknowledge even if I don't completely agree
with. They said except in 5 E you can
get through pretty much all situations by fighting, but you
can't tear all the weapons and even the stat is a tease.
It's pumping you up. It's making you think you can
take on the alien threat. You're bad ass and have a big
gun of of course you can, but you probably can't.
I acknowledge the point. I will disagree as we continue.
It's not even necessarily that you can't.
It's the way that it's communicated right?
I feel like this game wants to be alien, but it's aliens like
this to me. And as we continue to go through
this, I'll make this point now and and reiterate it later.
This is not a sci-fi horror game.
There are in the rules, there is basically no horror.
This is a sci-fi action game. This wants to be alien.
It is aliens and and I think a lot of that comes down to the
communication like even just the simple fact that there is a
combat stat immediately takes it out for me.
The fact that there's a marine at all takes it out for me.
Marines, in my opinion, we'll get to anyway.
So that's that's my first rant of that type, but we'll continue
to go through. So do you have a thought on
that? I don't know that I don't
necessarily disagree with you. I do appreciate the like
uselessness of weapons and a lot of the situation do I come
across in this game, I mean, especially having run this a few
times, it's just like, yeah, bro, go home with your fucking
gun. Have fun dying so.
Yeah. And like, I guess within the
rules, like as they're codified, like there's stress and there's
panic And to that, that for me is very like 4 esque, right?
There's not like a like in sand. I mean there is a sand of these
4. Yeah, yeah.
So when we get to that, I have more to say about that so.
We'll get there. Yeah, trust me, this rat goes
for the whole game, which is not long.
We're 70 betas into a 44 page book.
So we're, we're, we're cruising. So mothership is a tipping up
role-playing game. You and your friends get
together, blah, blah, blah. One is the warden blah, blah,
blah. So this is how to play the game.
This is the basic like what is a TTRPG page?
It's OK. The the the warden's manual,
which where we might touch on briefly at the end, does this
way better. It's 5 minutes here, I guess.
But this also comes to some other things where like if this
is here, then who is the book for?
And then if that's the case and with some of the rules, blah,
blah, blah, we'll get to that. So it says you can attempt to do
anything you want and are not limited by what is on your
character sheet. Most things you want to do just
happen. Remind me next time I start
ranting to to to look at Twitter.
It says you should ask a lot of questions that there and there
are stat checks, there are saves, etcetera, etcetera.
Read more about that later. When you fail a stat check or a
save, your character gains one or more stress.
That's how stress goes. We'll talk about stress again a
little bit later. There's panic checks, which
again we'll talk about a little bit later.
When the characters get hurt, there's they lose health.
When they lose all their health, they take a wound.
If they have more health after that, it just resets and they
keep going. That's cool.
With these basics of mine, you're ready to handle 90% of
the situations that come up in the game.
For everything else, you and the Warden can just make up a house
rule, which is bolded. There is a whole house rule
section in the Warden's Warden's operation manual, so that's
cool. Again, we'll touch on that
briefly. Maybe, maybe we'll do an episode
later where we really dig through the operations manual.
I think that would be interesting because we talk
about how we like games to be run in the in the the GM
sections of games a lot. But I think it would be neat to
kind of go through that because a lot of people universally
consider that to be one of the best GM guides out there.
And I do think it's extremely it's, it's really.
Good, yeah. Yeah.
So we we might go through that, but we're not going to do it
this time. There's a section on dice
notation, which we're not going to go over because you know how
D1 hundreds work. There is a player supply
checklist which has pictures also of all the things you need,
pen, paper, the guide, the sheets, etcetera, blah, blah,
blah. And then we get into more of the
meat of the game. So stat checks and saves.
I do love the the art across the entire spread here.
I do love that the PDF is designed to go into spreads,
which is fantastic, but it's very much scientists exploring
shit and fucking with stuff they shouldn't and aliens coming to
get them, which I think is a good core part of the game.
I do think it's interesting that one of them doesn't have a
helmet on though in this piece of art.
Oh you're right, it is an Android.
That's great. It is a solid piece of art.
I really enjoy it. So page 18, we're getting into
the, like I said, the meat of the mechanic.
So we have stat checks and saves 18.118 point 2.
So stat check whenever you want to do something, it is AD 100
roll under system, right? So if you have a stat that's 35,
you have a 35 per chance of success.
You got to roll under 35. That is a stat check.
You roll less than your stat, you succeed.
If you fail, you gain stress. 90 to 99 is always a failure.
We talked about the stats already, strength, speed,
intellect and combat. And then there are saves, which
are different. This is stat checks is when you
want to do something. Saves is when you want to avoid
something. It's the exact same thing.
You just rolled your saves a little differently, but it's the
IT literally is the exact same thing.
D100 roll under. If you fail, gain stress.
Your saves are sanity, fear, and body.
You know what those are? It's rationalizing into
inconsistencies. It's keeping a level head and
it's anything to do with your body like reflexes, hunger,
disease, anything like that. What is your high score?
There is a spot on the character sheet for a high score, which is
neat. Basically it's just how many.
I believe it's how many sessions you run until you die.
You survived, yeah. Yeah, that's great.
I love that, that you can just like keep your high score going
forward. Yeah, there is.
I don't remember. I think it might be something
from Christian Eichorn. And it's something I'm going to
steal if I as soon as I can ever remember it.
But they have like a secret. Like like accomplishments, you
don't even play a video game and it's like you've done this
thing. They literally have like an
accomplishment list and I want to steal that so bad for a game
and just be like if you got you get 3 rapid kills, I'll be like
hey, pull out your sheet and I'll like check off something
for you and you actually get like cool achievements as you
go. This is like a little mini
version of that and I really. Like that happened while your
character playing you were like multi kill.
Yeah. Oh dude.
And you got like a soundboard and everything.
You need a voice. You know.
Yeah, yeah, Just do the voice. You're right.
That's better. Modifying stat checks and saves
Page 19191 Modifying stat checks and saves.
There's a there's a couple ways to do that.
One is advantage and disadvantage.
There's a long paragraph here that basically says roll twice,
take the highest or take the lowest.
You know how advantage works. It's no different here.
Yep, critical successes and failures.
I do love this. It's double S if you succeed,
but you rolled a double, you get a crit success.
If you fail and roll double, you get a crit failure.
That's great. I enjoy that a lot.
So something very good or something very bad happens.
There's no real explanation of what that means.
I wish there was a little bit more and but you know, it is
what it is. Skills we talked about that you
have them, they're helpful. If a character has a skill that
is relevant to the task at hand, you can add the bonus to that.
So when we looked at the skill tree before on the character
sheet, it showed that the skills were I think 1015 and 20 for the
three levels of skill. So say you have and then there
is a example of play here calling for a check.
There are a great number of examples of play throughout the
book. I obviously we love them.
If you listen to show at all, we love those almost as much as we
love hyperlinks. This one specifically talks
about or, or let's say for example, you have a, a stat of
35, right? And you have advantage for some
reason. So you get to roll twice and you
have like a basic skill, the lowest level skill.
So it's 35 modified to a 45 by your skill and then you get to
roll twice. That's all, basically all the
ways that you could increase your things.
And if you happen to succeed and say you've got a 44, you would
then get a critical success after using your skills and
getting advantage. That's basically all the ways
you could modify a role to a thing.
Super fucking easy super. Yeah, I do like that if you have
useful items, like it's just advantage, like don't worry
about it being a bonus to anything.
There's no more numbers you need to add to this, like that's only
for skills. If you have useful gear, it's
just advantage. Yeah, very clean.
We're we're we started our Warhammer Fantasy Role Play 2E
game, which is AD 100 system and two, D6 is always going to be my
favorite, but D1 hundreds are really starting to climb up that
list for me. I am very much enjoying them.
Yeah, it just, the flat numbers are so nice.
They just be like, oh, 35% chance That sucks.
You know, stress, there's a part here that I don't like, so we'll
get to it. They did use one of the original
pieces here from Sean McCoy. I do like that they scattered
those throughout. So the unknown horrors of the
cosmos are vast and the emptiness of space take a toll
on a person. Stress is a measure of that
toll, bringing you closer to panic.
The higher your stress, the more likely you are to panic, right?
So how do you gain stress? Every time we have talked about
it, every time you fail shit, you take one at least, right?
You start with a minimum of two. The maximum stress you can have
is 20. Any stress you take over 20
reduces the most relevant stat by that amount, which I like.
It has a touch, it's got a touch of of into the odd in it a
little bit. A little bit, a little bit of
stat damage. I could see it, yeah.
I like that. Does it ever?
I don't remember. Does it talk about how to get
stat return back when we get to rest singling later?
OK cool. I didn't remember if it did
that. How do you relieve stress?
I don't like this. I don't like it at all.
Let me talk about it. So you can relieve stress by
resting in a relatively safe place.
To do this, you make a rest save using your worst save.
Hate that I I genuinely dislike this.
If you if you succeed, reduce your stress by the ones digit
rolled. EG for example if you roll 24
under your worst save of 30, reduce your stress by 4.
If you fail, you gain 1 stress instead.
I'm gonna continue this and then talk about I don't like it.
Players can gain advantage on their resave by participating in
consensual sex, recreational drug use, a night of heavy
drinking, prayer stuff, whatever unsafe locations you have
disadvantage and then or you can do shore leave for that.
You can check out hot stuff on shortly from what?
But so there's a section here on sex.
It says get everyone's at the tables consent before dealing
with sex in your game. Set clear boundaries for what is
acceptable and check in regularly in case anything
changes. Cool, there's sex in the game.
Some people like that some people don't.
It is what it is. I I don't like this rule.
I think it's bad. I don't say that often.
You think it's just clunky or is it?
I think it's. For you, it's not even brutal.
It's not. There's no.
It is entirely up to to chance in a way that I dislike, right.
So say, for example, here, maybe I'm reading it wrong.
And then we can look at the original version, which I love
way more. I thought the original 1 was
great. So if you so it says to do this,
make a rest save using your worst save.
Let's break that down. Why?
Yeah, why? Why the worst save?
Why not the most applicable one? Or why not like body or the one
that maybe you took damage in? Why specifically always the
worst one? That makes no sense, like in the
fiction of the game. Like it makes no sense that it
will always be your worst save no matter what.
Yeah, I mean, I guess my thought process on it is that this game
is supposed to be brutal on the player characters.
Like their characters and their characters are temporary beings
that are meant to be wasting away and die.
It kind of has like, almost like the Call of Cthulhu characters
where your characters really just get worse until you retire
them. I mean, I understand that to a
point, Chris, you made a good point.
Says the thing that you are worst at handling is a thing you
are most stressed about. OK, I don't dislike that.
I don't disagree with that point.
I'll take that. If you succeed, reduce your
stress by the ones digit rolled. So if you rolled 24 under your
worst save of 30, reduce your stress by 4.
This is what I don't like. Say that your worst stress is,
is we'll say 30, right? OK, so say you roll.
Let's say you roll A2. OK.
You can barely roll better than that.
That's basically the best you can possibly do, and you get 2
back right? Then let's set your save as a 30
and you roll a 29. Basically the closest you could
get to possibly failing. You get 9 stress reduced.
So the level to which you succeed has no bearing
whatsoever. Read the original rule to me or
pull it up. Let's look at the original rule.
Oh yeah. So that's that's one thing I did
want to look up. Let's actually go to the table
of contents because there is one in this and the and when.
So when I read that I didn't remember the original rule.
I was like, I would just do it like this.
That's ridiculous. And then I went read the
original rule and it's exactly what I would have done.
So going into where is stress? So that's 25 two.
So how do you relieve stress? Getting rid of stress is a lot
like healing from rest whenever you So this is the original for
those of us now I'm reading mothership original, the
original recipe. Whenever you rest for at least
six hours, you're going to attempt a fear save.
OK, so there is a specific stat, which again with Christians
point, I don't necessarily mind like it being the worst, but
like still, if you're successful, then you can relieve
one stress point for every 10 points your save succeeded
rounded down. But also success is double it.
So in that instance, right, if you roll a 29, you get 1, but if
you roll A2, you get more. So the more successful you are
at your save, the more stress you get reduced, right?
Versus the other one where it's just AI guess it's still a like
a random number, but it's like it's the difference between a 2
and a 29 is huge when you're talking about like that is
literally the level to which you succeed versus just randomly
using the second number. Because again, the difference
between a 21 and a 29 is one point versus 9 points.
Yeah, and I, I, I don't know, there's not like there's not
like gradients of, of success in mothership, like it is either
successful or not. And I, I personally think that
your point is really good in a game where the characters are
meant to be long standing like like permanent fixtures or semi
permanent fixtures in the game. Like you can go through in
mothership, you can go through more than one character in like
1 adventure. I'm like, I appreciate the fact
that it's like it gives you the option to to rest, but like
wrestling potentially doesn't give you that much back.
And like it potentially you're in a Titan spiral.
Like the spiral just keeps tightening until your character
either gets shore leave. You make it through an
adventure, which you can do if you play smart, or you are your
your character is retired to to death.
I don't know. It doesn't it doesn't bother me.
So it just bothers you. Like I understand the logic of
what you're saying, right? And maybe I'd consider being
like, yeah, hey, listen, if you roll, you know, zero to 10, you
create success this or whatever, Forrest.
But like for me, I'm like, your characters are impermanent.
This you're in a spiral that there's very little to no
potential to pull out of. You're going to fucking die.
Things are going to get. Worse, but that's not that's not
a like, I don't think that that's a good argument.
Like I think just being like, well, it's supposed to be hard.
So it's like isn't a good argument to say that like
mechanically you're it's basically hand waving being like
it's OK that it's a bad mechanic because like it's things just
suck. Fair.
It is clunky. It is clunky.
It is like a yeah. It's just weird and this is what
is stuck out like a sore thumb to me because everything else in
the game became so streamlined that to take something that I
considered extremely a, a well streamlined rule.
Because the other thing too is like, you're not going to get a
ton back regardless, right? And like there is an option, I
guess in that that you could actually earn more than you
possibly could in the original one, right?
Because if your stats are 30, right, if you roll A10, you're
still only getting two points. You can never get more than two
or three points. So if you're talking about
brutality, it makes way more sense to go with the one where
you can only get 2, maybe three points Max versus potentially
getting 9 back, right? So it's, it's a weird way where
maybe that's part of the reason because you could technically
have more back, but then that's literally counterintuitive to
your entire argument that it's supposed to be brutal.
So like, it's, it's weird. I don't understand the
rationale. And even Christian and chat, who
is again, one of our mothership experts for a reason is a whole
is I got like 6 things here from him.
But one of the things they say is specifically a there aren't
mixed levels of success. So being so 2 being better than
29 isn't really a thing, even though I agree that my brain
also feels that way. Like it should mean I was more
successful. I mean, because that's the
logical way to look at it. And, and if there is no real
rationale to not do it that way, then the way that our brain
works seems to me like the way that you should go with right.
So it's it's, it's weird. I maybe I was a little bold
saying I hated it. I just think it's clunky in ways
that the rest of the game aren't.
And I thought the original 1 was just more streamlined.
And it's weird that this one kind of mechanic becomes less
streamlined in a way that I think I just, I just don't enjoy
anyway. So I can read from the
conversion kit the part where it talks about resting if you want.
Oh, OK. Yeah, absolutely it doesn't.
Say a lot on it, but I think it kind of lends to like not much
actually. So when resting, players now
make a rest save based on their worst save on success, their
stress is reduced by 1. The ones that is rolled, as we
just said, as usual, players should seek to improve this save
through recreational activity. So maybe the idea is they're
trying to incentivize players like, hey, this is your worst
save. Like you, this is what you need
to be improving through recreational activity.
But that doesn't fucking matter, right?
It doesn't fucking matter, right?
Because like again, it is a flat save, right?
Like improve it, cool. But then like the amount to
which you get back has nothing to do with whether you improved
it or not. It is just the flat pass fail,
which again, there's aren't levels of success to a point,
right? Because even double S at your
crits not high or low. So that's what you can lean back
on in this book is basically like there is no mixed success.
My brain is very geared during success.
It's my favorite and maybe that's why it's bothering me
when before, clearly there was a level of that in the better you
do, the more you get back, which is just a rational way to look
at. I rested better.
I think you're fucking wrong. No, I think that makes a really
great. Point and I would love to
continue this conversation further moving forward though.
Moving forward, panic. Yeah.
So this changed dramatically, too dramatically, right?
Yeah. And I, when I first read it, I
did not like it. And I read it again and I was
like, I actually love this. So to to to counteract what I
was just talking about. Yeah, I'm going to be honest, I
have almost no memory of the original version in in in play,
but I'm like, I feel like this is a lot different.
At least when I first read this, Sir, I did.
Well, just know that it used to be two D 10s and now it's AD 20.
Right, OK. I remember even reading that
they were switching to that and I was like, why?
That's dumb. And then again, I, when I first
read this, I did not like it. And then I really looked at it
and then I like it. So for, for those that, that are
waiting for, for us to talk about it, what is a panic check,
right? A panic check.
So we're talking about panic, which is is stress.
Stress gives you panic, right? Stress damage, emotional wear
and tear. That can give you a panic check.
So a panic check determines whether your character keeps are
cool, right? To make a panic check, you roll
a D20 and attempt to roll greater than your current
stress. You have to roll higher than
your stress, which makes sense because the more stress you
have, the harder it is to roll under it, right?
Because it's way harder to roll above a 19 than it is a above
A2, right? That's how math works, right?
Because even even D 20s, it's just a 5% for every number,
right? If you roll less than or equal
to your current stress level and you look up your, you look up
your result on the panic table. OK, I think before it was 2
rolls. You make a stress check and then
you roll for the panic effect. It is now streamlined into one
roll. So when you roll a panic check,
you just roll a panic check and the panic check results is is
your thing. I, I usually 100 walks away,
keep talking. But like this is the point that
I want to belabor with him and he disappeared on me.
So I'm going to go to when the making when to make panic checks
and then come back to this when he comes back because I don't
think he's wearing his earbuds even though I sent him some when
to make panic checks. You make panic checks anytime
you roll, like crit fail or a stat check or save.
Additionally, the word may call for a panic check at any other
appropriate time. I'll go through these and then
we'll go back. So maybe you could do it,
including, but I'd love to, watching a crew member die,
witnessing more than one crew member panic at the same time
whenever your ship rolls a critical fail, and counting a
strange or horrifying entity when all hope is lost.
Whenever you, the player want. You can panic whenever you want.
So going back to panic checks, do you?
Do you? Are you?
Were you listening? I was not because I don't have a
dongle for those headphones. That's why they're not in my
ear. OK, so to make a panic check,
you roll the panic die. I'll reiterate this.
It's a 1D20 and you attempt to roll greater than your current
stress, right, right. And then if you roll less than
or equal to the stress, you fail and you and you use that number
on the panic table. The original game had a stress
check of 2D10 and if you roll over your current stress, you
don't panic and you relieve one stress.
But then if you rolled under you would panic and then you would
roll another 2D10 on the panic table.
So 2 rolls, 2D2 different D10 rolls to see if you panicked and
to what the effect were. Yes, and then much more
streamlined, so. Well, not only that, not only
that. So it is.
And then I was like, why is it lesser?
But yeah, well, why is it less than or equal to?
And then what popped into my head was, as always, is well,
when you only roll one dice instead of two, there's no bell
curve. So it doesn't fucking matter
what the numbers are because whatever number one is whenever
#18 are you have literally the same 5% chance of success every
fucking time. So why I hate when lists do best
to worst on A1 die roll? Because it's all the same
percentage chance, right? Except, and that's when I went
back and looked at this again, and this is when I was like, oh,
I actually love this. So it is less than or equal to
your current stress. You fail, right?
So say your current stress is 8. OK, right?
So and then you roll an 8. So everything less than or equal
to what you rolled is an option, right?
They're like on them as your stress gets fucking worse.
Yes, yeah. So if you.
Have 20 fucking stress. The whole table is up for grabs.
Yeah, the whole yeah, every anything can happen to you.
But if you only have 4 stress, then you know, only numbers one
through 4 are is your possibility of stress.
Yeah. And that's so that is good.
That's. Good.
The spiral of things getting worse, you know.
Yes, and that makes sense in a list that goes from good to bad
because anything over that number you can't even get to.
So if your stress is only 8, you know, the worst thing that you
can have is like loss of confidence or anything below
that. So I really like that.
I think it's way more streamlined to have one D20 roll
and I, I do think the opposite of stress relief.
In my opinion, this was a massively improved, massively
streamlined system. Great, love it.
Fantastic. Shout Panic Engine.
Is that what they're calling it now?
I think they're trying to, I guess we'll see.
Cool condition. Some results on the panic table
give you conditions. So for example, 12 Haunted gain
a new condition. Something starts visiting the
character at night, in their dreams, out of the corner of
their eye, and soon it will start making demands.
Amazing, fantastic one, yeah. Yeah yes Christian said Ryan
needs a 0.5 E to be his ideal on the ship.
I agree. I actually went on Reddit
surprisingly after this and looked at a bunch of stuff and I
found a lot of people saying that they did a mash up of 0 and
one and 0.5 would be great. Another condition spiraling at
17 is gain the new condition. There's no names for the
condition, you just have it right and it says panic checks
are at a disadvantage, which sucks.
That's pretty bad. Yeah, and #20 is just retire.
I love the idea of someone rolling 20 and being like, you
know what guys? Fuck this.
And there's some walking gone. Out of here, yeah.
Just just gone. Like there's this insane entity
just like all over the place. Blood is booming over there and
it's like fuck it, I'm out. And they just like walk away.
You never see them again. Love that.
That's great. Moving in the skill section.
We're we're just going to cruise through this super fast.
We kind of already talked about no skill gives you no bonus,
Train gives you plus 10, Expert gives you plus 15, Master gives
you plus 20, and then has them all listed out what they all do
and how they're applicable. It's great.
You should go through it before you play this game.
We're not reading all of it. No, it's insane, but I do love
the levels of skills and how they basically those are those
are your modifiers, right, and and how you can level up in the
tree to that Love that that really, really fantastic.
I do like that with no skill, there's a possibility that if
you try something that you have no skill in and the situation
sucks, you could roll disadvantage for it.
Like I love it's. Actually just worse for you,
yeah. Yeah, like you, you're not good
at that. And you're like upside down and
can't breathe. So like, of course you're gonna
roll with disadvantage. Really, really love that.
It's fantastic. And the art across the top is
great as well. Another another strip across on
the two page spread, this time with unsurprisingly, people with
guns like shooting at monsters. So, skill training.
You know what I regret? I regret not just having
Christian on for this episode. Bro, we've talked about having
like a three player episode and we absolutely should have had
Christian come on. I might even have a three player
screen like ready to go. Yeah, if I did, I would honestly
just be like fuck it, get in here.
So talk to me about training a skill.
Yeah, hey, you can do it. There are different amounts of
times and credits for all these things.
To gain train skills, you'll need 2 years of training plus
10,000 credits and materials Expert is 4 years plus 50,000
credits, and then Master is 6 years plus 200,000 credits.
To train an expert skill requires one training skill
prerequisite, and training Master skill requires one expert
skill. It's just the way it would work.
Obviously we've deducted this before and yeah, why does it
take so long? Because it does.
You're, you're studying a thing. You're trying to become a master
of a thing. You're.
Not just going to have like 3 campfires since I'm going to be
like a master fucking sword. Man, magic.
You are a person. Yeah.
You know what this kind of this kind of reminds me of this
traveller. I was going to tell you,
Traveller, a lot of this. Is travelers, yeah.
I mean, you know, good. Yeah, yes, Traveller is the
fantastic class. Traveler is a fantastic game.
And we should. We will go over.
Yeah, we'll go over. I do love this page.
I mean, clearly we you can see it from a mile.
This is Zach, Zach Hazard up and beautiful piece of art here.
Love their work. I think they have multiple
pieces in here. This is literally straight up
just fucking not super troopers. Oh.
Starship Fascism. Yeah, Starship Troopers.
And I love it. It's great.
They're. Super Starship Troopers.
Yeah, a little addendum I think is very good here on 25.
One is military training. Military training is a is a
special exception to the regular rules of skill training for two
reasons. First, it's free.
It only costs your life. Yeah, and and 2nd characters
must sign a six year contract with the local Colonial Marine
regiment. To find out what happened during
the service, make a combat check.
This is which is which is make success.
Just throwing this out there. There's a pressing information
success in the system. Just throwing out there.
Just throwing out there, just saying So what?
Happens. There's a, there's a crit,
there's a So if you succeed, right, you gain military
training, athletics in two train skills, you gain plus 10 to
combat and reduce another stat by 10.
That's right. Your combat went up, you might
have gotten Dumber and you gain the Marines trauma response,
which is a specific trauma response.
If you create success, you may take an expert skill instead of
those two trade skills so you get everything else.
On a failure you gain military training, athletics in one
training skill and the Marines trauma response.
And on a crit field you were killed in action.
Go ahead and make another character, which is the most
fucking traveler thing ever because you can kill your
character in your military training.
Character creation and traveler. Great addition to this.
Yeah, it's dope. I love it.
You know what my favorite thing about this is?
Remember this specifically that literally anyone could just
become combat trained. Fucking Marine, right?
Right. Right.
Yeah, cool. So violent encounters, right?
Literally the next section here. Violence.
Literally the next words read. Read them out for me.
Read the next words for me right after.
Violence in mothership is incredibly dangerous and should
be avoided at all costs. When all else fails that this is
how to resolve the encounter. Did they do it on purpose to
literally, literally literally put both times they boldly say
do not fight directly after pages about combat and weapons
and armor because the the juxtaposition of those two
things. This is my problem and and I'll
expound on what I said before, it's not necessarily that you
can't fight and you'll probably die doing it.
It's the communication of that, right?
And it's the way that it's written, right?
Avoided at all costs. Never do it.
Like I wouldn't mind so much if it said combat's going to suck
for you, right? But it specifically says do not
fight, right? Right after literally a two page
spread of marines fighting monsters and a block about
military training and how to gain plus 10.
And I'm sorry, what's that? Is it your combat stat?
This is what I'm talking about. And This is why, again, this is
Aliens, not Alien. This is not a space horror game.
This is a sci-fi action game, right?
And the vast majority of the actual rules as written horror
in this game, right, doesn't exist.
And the vast majority of that is going to come from the G, from
the Warden and from the adventures, which are not the
rules, right? Yeah.
That's, that's very fair. A lot of my adventures, I mean,
I don't know. I think I also appreciate that
this game has the the the potential to not be a horror
game because I like the who's that one rider?
Hold on, where is it? Damn, I should have pulled it
out before. What?
Give me a little bit and I'll
think of it for you. The.
The the the mothership adventure creator that wrote a couple of
the like definitely non horror modules that I really like.
Such as fuck if I could God damn find it.
Jesus. Well, as you hunt, I'll continue
with my point. I'll hunt you.
You continue doing anything. Christian says it's because
that's the struggle. Therein lies the fun and the
risk reward. It could be like, there's no
fighting in this game. No, but there could be fighting,
right? And that is my point, right, is
that this game is designed to fight stuff.
And just because it's going to suck for you doesn't mean it's
not designed to fight stuff. And that's the problem.
If this game actually wanted to be horror, right, this is how I
would quickly do this. I would not have combat be a
stat. I think that literally, because
here's the problem too, is like, you know this, right?
You know this and you've I'm talking to Christian, but let's
talk to everybody. If if you, if this is the game
that you're picking up and reading, you're going to read
this as there is this is a combat game.
This is a space I have combated stat.
I can take a fucking sniper rifle.
I can wear advanced battle gear. It's a fight game is the very
first thing that you're going to think as you go through this.
It's not a horror game, but the front of the book.
Wait a minute. What's it say?
That's right. It's a sci-fi horror RPG, not
sci-fi action horror, which is what it is because the so so
real quick, let's make this a horror game.
Get rid of combat as a stat. Call it something different,
right? Make combat not one stat.
Just split it across your strength and speed for your
melee in your range. Remove the marine as a
character, put it as a contractor, right?
Or as an optional class if you want to play more of an
adventure style, right. Get rid of all of the guns
except for pistol that are combat things, right?
And then what you have is you have Teamsters and Andrew droids
in scientists in a situation where their best gun might be a
flare gun or a flamethrower. And none of them have combat
training, right. And if you want that have that
be optional later. But to have combat as a stat, to
be a marine as a base class staff military training is a
base option. Like it makes it again, this is
a sci-fi action game. This is not a sci-fi horror
game. And that is fine as a sci-fi
action game. It's fucking fantastic.
I enjoy the hell out of this right, but rules is written the
the way that this game is communicated.
There's a disconnect between this sentence right here that
says it is incredibly dangerous and should be avoided all cost
and the way that the rules are because once again, once again,
the purpose of a system is what it does.
The the system is communicating to you that this is an action
adventure game. And then words in are telling
you, wait a minute. No, like there's a disconnect in
the way that you're reading it and then how the rules are
working and how the rules are communicated to you.
I mean, let's go even farther. This is and then and this will
be the end of my rant, then we'll finish this out.
But the other rant I had was stealth.
There are no stealth stats in this game, even though it is a
huge part of horror and and Sean McCoy actually went on Twitter
to address this. I have the tweets.
Oh, I do vaguely remember that, yeah.
Yeah, and I think and it, I just think I it's in my opinion, it
is not a good justification. And this game would be better if
there were sneak stats and the and and the the justification
for it makes absolutely no sense to me even with other things
that were written. So let's go through the entire
tweet thread here. And then the response is my
favorite part, right? So it says great thread.
This is why we didn't design A mothership with stealth
mechanics. But the game is also about
running and hiding. We don't have fleeing rules
either. Here's why I love stealth
mechanics. MGS is one of my favorite games.
I always play thief. Combat is punishing a
mothership. Hiding is smart.
Why don't we have stealth mechanics?
Because we wanted the most conversation around that part of
the game. Instantly started to lose me
there, right? It says, What I mean is that one
of the parts of the game that I didn't What I mean is that it
was the one part of the game that I didn't want you to be
able to skip over with a role. I wanted this moment.
I want to hide. OK, where are you hiding?
Shit, what's around me? Gears, locker, surgical
ventilation shafts, shit, it's coming.
OK, the lockers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It keeps going, right? It basically says like, I want
the most conversation around that, so I'm not going to have a
role which I'll get to that after.
Hiding is important. Hiding is important, so
important. I want that.
I want all the tension, all those questions and answer
sessions that blah blah blah. Like all the best stealth games
do this. They have mechanics for where
the guards spot you and how much shadow will hide you, but you
have to make decisions, not numerical ones generally.
Does that look dark enough? Are they going to walk this way?
Removing those mechanics from the game forced Wardens to come
up with their own mechanics that would work for their table or to
have a conversation about one of the favorite parts of the game.
Where are you going to hide? There's so much contradiction in
that tweet thread that I don't even know where to begin.
Like the idea that you have to remove a mechanic in order to
have a conversation when literally the very first rule on
how to play the game is you can do anything you want.
Like, and so much of the ward manual is about like having
conversations every every you know, rules, light or indie,
whatever teacher, every do we look at is like everything is a
conversation to have a conversation.
Like the idea that like you have to get rid of a mechanic in
order to have a conversation to me is just an asinine point.
Like it makes no sense whatsoever.
And then there literally is a point where it says like all the
best stealth games have stealth mechanics, whatever.
There's a reason for that because like at that point, then
there is the entirety of whether a player gets caught or not,
right? Relies on the GM, right?
You have removed all possibility of fate or any aspect outside of
whether the GM decides whether you get caught or not, whether
you're hiding or not. And then the idea that like, oh,
every warden will just make up their own mechanic.
Well, then just make a mechanic and if they want to tweak it,
they can just like the entire rest of the game.
It makes no sense. But like the my favorite part of
this, and I don't mean to like knock on Sean at all.
Again, this is fantastic game. The response to this was thanks
for this, I love it. How did you communicate this to
people running and playing your game so that they understand how
to interact with this void without dismissing it?
EG Oh there's no rules for hiding, you just can do that.
The response was, honestly, we just kind of trusted that people
were smart and that they'd figure it out.
So there is no communication anywhere, that there aren't
stealth mechanics specifically because we want you to have a
conversation. There's just a complete void
with no communication for it whatsoever.
That that's, that's insane to me.
That's insane to just be like, oh, we thought that like the
TTRBG community as a whole would just be like, oh, it's OK to not
have a mechanic. We'll just make that.
It's it's it's do. You think the lack of a stealth
mechanic is actually a glaring deficit of this as a system?
I mean personally I would house rule that obviously to deal with
that, but like I think it's something that should have been
addressed in the actual text of the game.
Why would not first? First of all, make a stealth
mechanic. But if you're not going to have
a stealth mechanic, address why you don't have one so that you
can communicate why there's this massive void.
Because so many people are like, wait a minute, why can't you
stealth? Why can't you hide, right?
Because again, a system is what it does.
A system is what the rules communicate to you.
There's no stealth check. There is no hide check.
So OK, we'll just make why not even just have like something
simple and specifically communicate that like, hey, you,
you can do that. Like having a void is fine if
you explain why the void is there, because then that void
becomes a part of the system, not an absence from the system,
right? Without communication, it's
pointless. You're just flapping in the wind
to nobody. Anyway.
Continuing on. Well, well, Cruz, see this last
page's turn order. Violent confrontation time is
split into roughly 10 second intervals of rounds.
Warden describes the situation. It's like every combat you've
ever thought of, it exists. Surprise is a thing.
It exists. If you're stunned by an ambush,
the warden calls for a fear save.
Those who succeed are able to react.
Those that don't aren't. If you want a strict tornado,
there's a a box here. Fantastic art here.
I love this like splitting person, this person fleeing even
without fleeing rules and this bad ass like it's great.
And again, throughout this, there's been numerous, numerous
more examples of play as we go as well.
So there's a list here of what can I do?
This is another part that I think it's a little hand WAVY
for me. Characters can generally move
somewhere within close range and then do one thing before the
situation changes. Think of the situation like a
real life scenario. Think about what you would do in
those circumstances. Then describe it to the warden.
If you can't accomplish everything you want to do in one
round, or your choices are especially foolhardy or
dangerous, the Warden will do their best to let you know and
explain the risks involved. And then there's a non exhausted
list of all the things you can do.
Attack, bandage, wound, check vital signs, move again, fire a
vehicle's weapon, maneuver, or pilot.
So basically it's saying like do whatever the fuck you want to do
and the GM will decide if you can do it all in one turn.
I don't mind. It's a little hand WAVY.
I mean, we're again, we're playing Warhammer Fantasy 2E and
it's very much like half action, full action.
I like that there's a little bit more free formness to it.
I wouldn't mind. Maybe it's like a touch more
structure to this. So I'm torn again on the
communicating where basically like hand waves, you can kind of
do some of this, but you know, like decide, do whatever on your
own. I like it, but I think a little
bit more structure would have been nice.
Yeah, I, I think, I think I'm good with this amount of of
scaffolding. Yeah, I mean, it's not even I
need like, I mean, there is an example play to the left that
talks about like what? What what's a possibility of you
can do and stuff like that again like this.
This is one of those things though, where like, this is
great for us, right? But it comes down to like, who
is this game written for then, right?
Is it for people that have a ton of experience with a lot of
different games, or is it for people that really haven't
played a lot of games? I think there's this kind of
hand wave. Experience game.
Like this? I don't know this game.
But like, you could play this as your second game.
Yeah, yeah. If you have a good warden, this
is fine. If you're a beginner warden, I
think that people would. If you have a beginner warden, a
beginner group, I think something like this would really
like the lack of a defined action economy.
Might. They might struggle a little
bit. Anyway, moving on.
Do you want to talk about attack and defense?
You want me to keep going? Attack and defense.
Yeah, I scrolled down because I was reading something, but also
shout out the original art piece from the original book.
Yeah. So how do you attack?
You're going to make a combat check.
It's successful. You could just roll the weapons
damage and subtract it from the enemy's health.
If you fail, the situation gets worse and you gain 1 stress.
Just like if you fail any role damage.
Yeah. You subtract your whatever
damage you take from your health.
If your health ever reaches zero, you gain a wound and you
get to roll on the wound table and then reset your health to
its maximum and subtract any carryover damage.
Once you. I love it.
You're here. What's up?
I love it, I love it. Yeah, very simple, very easy to
do. You have 10, right?
You take 5 damage when you're at 1, you gain 1 wound, you go down
to six for the next one. Depending on how many wounds you
have, you might be on your last leg there.
I really love, I love that it's almost like for every wound you
could possibly take, you have you have a health bar for every
single wound is what it amounts to, yeah.
Absolutely. Still still.
It's like I always feel like saying it out loud makes it
sound like you have more health than you actually do because you
don't have a lot and you will die.
Yeah, I mean, if you start with two wounds, right, and you roll
A10 for your health, you have 20 HP basically.
Work in the last one. It had it was HP in a whole
thing. Yeah, you could have like a ton
of HP 2IN the last one. Yeah, potentially.
After I mean, this game is definitely more brutal, but like
I'm never going to not love that.
Yeah, yeah. Armor, yeah.
You pretty much ignore damage unless it does over your armor,
in which case you you take that damage and I think your armor
does break, right? Yeah, Yeah, it's interesting.
Yeah. So you, you can basically take
damage forever until something breaks your armor and then
you're fucked. Which, yeah, I, I don't, there's
not a lot of games that do it that way.
And it's really interesting, but it makes sense, right?
Like if the things are just digging off you, they're just
digging off you until one breaks it.
Yeah, You know, if you have battle armor, a bullet, they a
bullet's probably not going to hurt you unless it's a good shot
or whatever, you know? Weapons with anti armor ignore
and destroy armor whenever they hit, and some armor also has Dr.
damage reduction which always reduces incoming damage by the
amount stated. Even if the armor is destroyed
or the weapon has anti armor. Damage reduction occurs first
for any other like damages calculated to armor.
This and yeah, cover. Cover is essentially like
another layer of armor you can take.
There is insignificant light and heavy cover.
They'll have their armor points. Heavy cover also has damage
reduction overall. And then once they run out of
armor, it's especially like the your cover is getting blown out
from around you. It's very easy, very
lightweight, very simple. Yeah, I like it.
I like it. I it's it's a little bit more
advanced than the last cover, which is good.
Yeah, but not so advanced to be clunky, I think.
I think it's a good. Yeah.
It's a good version of it. I agree.
Next we got wounds and death. So wounds, we already talked
about it, but I do like that there are wound types.
Blunt force, bleeding, gunshot, fire, explosive gourd, massive.
Do you have five types of wounds?
I love that. That's great.
And then there's a severity column too.
So you could have flesh wound, minor injury, major injury,
lethal injury and fatal injury, right?
And there is a wound table here and I love that.
So you can literally just be like, well, this was a major
injury and it was fire. So you go over and you get a
major burn. Fantastic.
I love this. This is a a beautiful wound
system. Everything about the wound
system might be one of my favorite things in this version.
I think my favorite thing is that they took all the the
spaceship, the spaceship stuff out of the game.
But I love the wounds. I love the wound types.
It's super easy. You don't have a million of
them. Love it.
It's great. Death is interesting.
I think death is really fun, so when you die the the warden
makes the death save. How do I do it though?
But I usually hate that they do it under a cup, right?
And they they leave it face down and it is not until someone
checks on the player that they didn't turn it over and everyone
at the same time figures out how bad they are, right?
I love that it's I don't love it.
I don't remember if that's in the original 1 but my God, I
think that's fucking hysterical. I love it.
Either, although I don't remember laughing that hard of
the rule in the original 1 so. But it's great, very.
Funny. Yeah, like you could, you could
theoretically survive and not know for rounds.
You could die and not know for rounds.
And I love this. Someone just comes in and just
like kicks your body and you're like, or you're just like
fucking dead. It's fantastic.
There's there's 4 levels of it, you know, unconscious,
unconscious and dying comatose are dead and I and I love them
all. They're fat and the great thing
too is like 5 to 9 you die 56789 That's literally half the
options. You're just fucking dead.
So I I love it. It's really great.
Feasibly it yeah, yes, it's you're a lot of these.
You're still a comatose. You still, you're probably still
dead and unconscious and dying. Depending on the situation, you
have one to five rounds to figure it the fuck out.
But I love that though, because like like 5 E for example, we we
probably have to have a bunch of the counter on to this.
But like there is no yeah, there is no real fear of death because
realistically the the death saves you succeed so fucking
often and there's so many options to get like one healing
from somebody that like the risk of death is basically nil.
But in this, unless you roll A10 or A0, whatever they want to
call it there, you're basically fucking dead.
If you get to dead, you're dead. Like, and I love that, like
death is death and you should fear it and and that sucks.
I love it. I if the game is, it makes no
sense to have a brutal game that you never die from.
Yeah, I agree. Yeah, you're in this one.
Yeah, range and distance. First of all, I love the spread
here and partially, partially because it's like the the so
they're fighting an insane creature at the top right and
it's adjacent close range, long range and extreme range.
And there are people fighting this monster at all of those
ranges. So I love the visual like
representation of like adjacent is literally being eaten. close
range is like within like within reach.
Long range is firing and extreme range they're running away and
they just love that so much. And the great thing too about
the ranges is they're super easy, but the descriptions right
adjacent, it can touch you close range, it can get to you.
Long range, you can shoot it. Extreme range, you can hear them
scream. I love that.
There's rough distances across
the bottom. We get in some stuff like
survival, that's important, but we can kind of cruise through,
cruise through. There's atmospheres, so
sometimes there's toxic, corrosive atmospheres and they
will do damage on your body, right?
Bleeding damage we discussed before, but basically you take
one damage per round until you stop the bleeding, etcetera.
There's more cryo sickness. If you get stuck in suspended
animation, you could get cryo sickness.
And while you're cryo sick you get a disadvantage on all your
roles for a week and that sucks. Sucks dude.
Have the whole party just wake up with cryo sickness.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're all you all wake
up, out cryo, sleep unscheduled. There's an issue.
You're fucked. You're fucked, have fun.
There's a thing in the ship, by the way.
Exhaustion is exhaustion. You get disadvantaged and and
things like that, etcetera. Food and water.
After 24 hours without food, you roll the disadvantage to all
roles. When water and scarce is scarce
and you're tracking it closely, you're a disadvantage in all
roles. So it's brutal.
Again, you, like you said, the game is fucking brutal.
Oxygen is important. You can 15 seconds out in space
with nothing and then one D5, etcetera, etcetera.
There's a whole section here about like as a ship or support
system is losing oxygen. Your roles get worse and worse
and there's multipliers based on how many passengers.
It's a great system. We're not going to dig through
it, but it's really, really great radiation sickness and the
damage that can cause the amount of radiation armor with
radiation shielding Stimpak overdose.
So the I did notice that they got rid of addiction.
There was an addiction block in the old game.
They they removed that that's. Probably 5.
Yeah, because at the end of the day, realistically, like it's
whatever, it's not a big loss. There's it talks about
temperature, extreme cold and heat.
Medical care. Another page here from Zach, but
so medical care is important so you can have short term or long
term recovery. So on short term recovery, once
per day when resting, a character's body attempts to
heal itself naturally after 6 plus hours of rest, make a body
save is if successful, reset health to maximum.
Wounds stay the same. I love that.
It's great. It's great.
So like if you take a wound, your health bar is done.
You can, but you can redo the health bar that you're in and
then long term recovery, you recover all wounds, conditions,
everything's great. You're solid, but you have to
pay for it, obviously. Got you.
Yeah, and there's a whole list here of medical treatments I
love. Real, real, real quick, on the
list of medical treatments, I love that there's like a 1%
chance of stuff happening in in a couple of them.
My favorite one is cognitive defragmentation.
There is a 1% chance of just total amnesia.
Just like you do it, you wake up and you're like, fuck, I rolled
A1. I don't remember anything.
And you get disadvantage on intellect checks, sanity saves
and fear saves for a month. Four weeks, 4 weeks, that's.
Crazy. Yeah, I love that.
There's a lot someone said that is really good.
I love that piece of art here though, which is basically like
what amounts to a chess burster, but it's like a tentacle and
they're all fighting to hold it down.
And there's that obviously the one like combat security dude
with like a space axe like coming up over the top.
Such a great piece. Pushing the other guy in the
face. Yeah, he's like, yeah, so good.
There's a giant example of play here with some some space people
fucking around with urns they probably shouldn't be.
It's really good. There's a section here on ports,
as in like a port that your ship can dock at.
So this is talking about Shorely, which is on the next
page. So there's XCBA and S class
ports which are basically like shitty full of criminals to like
cream the crop like massive cities and stuff.
Fantastic piece of art at the top.
Love the love the art style at the top of this page of these 33
space people. There's a whole section here on
shore leave which I they got rid of XP in this, which I like and
they replaced it with shore leave.
And the way that shore leave works is you pay a shore leave
cost, you make a sanity save right again, make success,
success, crit success, failure or crit failure and you actually
convert your stress, the amount of stress you have into points
that you add to your saves. I love it.
Great. I love it, it's super clean,
it's better. So for example, a success means
you convert some of the stress into improved saves.
Each port converts a different amount of stress as shown.
Whatever stress you don't convert is relieved and it takes
you back. But like failure, you don't
convert or relieve any stress and you make a panic check on a
crit fail that sucks for you. So for example, like like an X
class, the shortly cost is one D 100 * 10,000 credits and you
convert 2D10 stress, I guess with advantage.
But if you're an S class and you can do 2 D 10 * 100,000 credits,
you converse all of it. So it's great.
Another example of play. How long is short leave as long
as you fucking what two week vacation?
What happens on shortly we talked about South Contractors
is the next thing that's different.
I don't know. Were they?
I don't. Were they called contractors
last time? No, they were mercenaries
before. Yeah, I don't really remember,
but I know what they. Are, you know, Yeah.
So contractors. Yeah, contractors are a thing.
You can hire them. Their stats are easier.
There's a whole breakdown here. Combat instinct, again,
instinct. This is the first time in the
book that they talk about what instinct means and then that
it's a catch all for everything. Not at pets, but it's not
really. Yeah.
Anyway, there's a section there on hiring contractors, which I
think is roughly the same list as before, kind of
archaeologists, asteroid miners, engineers, hackers, all that
kind of things. They have loyalty, you can equip
them. But one thing I did notice, the
mercenary scum are gone. I don't know if you remember the
mercenary scum. Mercenary scum are like some of
my favorite dude they like. So let me find them.
So the ship. I'm so glad they took all that
ship stuff out. I remember.
I think that's the only thing I remember from last time being
like God this is already so dense.
Why are we talking about building ships?
I do remember that. I mean there is a whole other
Zine for it now. Perfect.
Where it fucking should be, Yeah.
It's actually great. Yeah, so mercenary scum.
There are scum archetypes. The WT Ronin, the witness, the
sexbot Android, the preening pseudo intellectual, the dude,
the rich kid, the hitchhiker. They had like entire archetypes
with descriptions and loadouts and stuff specific to the
mercenary scum and I loved them and they were interesting.
I can see for for brevity why they took it out, but yeah.
And then after that you just have the character sheet in the
back and that's the that's the entire game.
I do like the very Backpage of the actual Zine is how to play.
Yeah, check saves, panic, check skills advantage, the violence
section, which is half the book, half the Backpage again.
So there is the Warden's operation manual, which is the
GM guide. And we've said this over and
over and over again. I've definitely firmly in the
camp of stop giving me a giant book, give me multiple zines and
then put player stuff in a player Zine and AGM stuff in AGM
Zine, and this does it fantastically well.
There's the ship breaker tool kit, which is basically ship
stuff, which I love that that's in its own Zine.
There is the unconfirmed contact reports which is basically a
bestiary. It's yeah, it's a, it's a
bestiary and like, plus it's very interesting.
They get some really great ideas for like the horrors you can
find space. It's also not incredibly full of
there's only really like a few different things in it because
they have like a long piece for each of them.
Very interesting, definitely check it out.
It's cool. There's a whole page in the
front about how to read the stat block and then every page is
basically like a dope piece of art with just a stat block
across the top and then just like vibey stuff and I love it.
That's like my favorite way to do everything is just like give
me some stats and then give me vibes and I'll fuck with it.
You know what I mean? But all the art throughout is is
stunning and fantastic. And that is going to be our, our
talk. And we're going to do this as a
book. I think 44 pages is enough.
And I'm, I'm kind of lumping the wardens manually in like a
little like. They're.
All Zenes, but like we're not going to go over them
individually, but I do think that they add to the overall
Ness of the game. So for those that they don't
know, we we do quantify our terrible opinions into actual
numbered metrics. There are five of them for books
3 for Zenes. We're going to go for for a book
on this quote UN quote. Usually for Zen for us, it's
under 30 pages. It's a very light thing, right?
And that's mostly for things that like don't have a lot of
art or don't have a lot of stuff because there's a light, right?
But for book, which we will call this, we have art and layout,
which is the art and the layout of the book visually, the
visuals of it. Usability is how usable is a
book? Does it have hyperlinks?
Are things in a good order? Does it make sense kind of
throughout the rule set is the core rules of the game.
If they're an original rule set, do we, do we like it?
If it's adapted, how well is it adapted?
Originality is exactly that. It's originality across any of
these metrics or more. And then value is buying for
your buck. It's not direct cost, it's how
much stuff you get, whether that is like a ton of adventures that
come with it, bonus adventures after companion apps, whatever,
that's it. So starting at the top with art
and layout visually, what are your thoughts?
I think it's great. I think they improved upon the
art. I mean, I had no issue with the
art in the original 1, but I do like they people are money into
it and say they're higher fidelity for lack of a better
thing for me to say. I mean, the layout's always been
pretty good. It's always been very legible.
I like the organization of it. Of course, that's under
usability. Yeah, I feel great about this.
I mean, it's a, it's a really solid, you know, like 7.5 for
me, you know? Yeah, it's it's definitely
solid, but not outstanding. It's serviceable and and and a
little bit better. I think the art through the art
throughout is fantastic. And again, like I like Shawn
Mccoy's art before it was it was, it was very, it had it's
very own distinct style and I did enjoy it.
I'm glad, I'm glad that some of the pieces made it in the second
book. I can see why some specific
pieces didn't like the gun pieces.
I can see why they updated that art and stuff like that.
The armor pieces, I can see why they did that.
But yeah, I think the layout's great.
And I do think that since they took out a bunch of stuff and
streamlined a bunch of stuff, it's almost the exact same
number of pages as the original scene, but it is way less dense.
There's way more room to breathe.
It's actually. Crazy that it's almost the exact
same number of pages because. It's within like two or three
pages of the of the original. Way easier to go through.
That's what I'm saying. But that's because it's not so
fucking dense. Like there's way more more to
breathe, I think yeah, I think a solid 7.
I think, I think layout by itself would probably be like a
it's like a step up from like average, maybe a little bit
more. But and I think the art is
great. Yeah, it's not jam packed.
It's not an art book, but the art pieces that are there are
are gorgeous. So we'll go ahead and go with
A74 art usability. OK, so there's no table of
contents, which I think is obnoxious, but for PDF wise, it
does have bookmarks and it is extensively hyperlinked.
I think that any time it references something somewhere
else, there's a big old button that says click here to go
somewhere else, right? That doesn't help you in the PDF
though, I'm sorry. In the physical scene though, to
know where things are. So again, a table of constants I
think would be nice. I didn't miss it somehow in the
back or something, right? Nope.
They decided to take it out. So I, I do think that it, it
could use one, 44 pages is enough, I think to have that.
And I think the order, I think it's in a fantastic order.
It flowed extremely well. There's no nothing I read where
I was like, I wish that was later.
I did a really fantastic job of that.
I love the fact that there is the you flip the scene over and
the the rules are literally right down the.
Back, yeah. Yeah, I'm going to say you open
the back one there's. I have the original ratings that
we gave the original version and.
Let's go over them after. Well, we we're not going to go
over them because we did a bad job and we gave it too high of
ratings and we're going to give this one appropriate.
We, we, we used to give way too high ratings, I remember.
When really generous. Yeah, we're not anymore.
I remember the specific episode or, or around the time where
we're like, hey, can we just like, like everything is too
good? Yeah.
And I think also that we got more as we understood games
more. More discerning.
Or became more discerning, right.
So usability, I think it's it's really solid if it had a table
of contents. I've been pretty high on this
but. I, I agree to, I still think
like it's a it's very usable. It makes a lot of sense.
I still give this like a good seven.
You know, yeah, 7 easy, 7 easy for this.
Yeah, because again, Troika gets a 10, so the highest you could
possibly get here is a nine. So a 7 is up there.
I think the table condens. I probably would have threw an
aim at this. It's the only thing that it's
lacking. But I do think that it is
something that it it is lacking. Rule set straight up.
This is better than than original.
Easily, Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, I understand your, your
frustration with the the the rest rule and I think that
there's a lot of good logic behind that one.
But other than that one, overall way happier with this version.
Yeah, yeah, I honestly, was there anything else I bitched
about specifically besides the combat thing?
Was that the only rule that I was like, that's the sore thumb?
Yeah, no, that was pretty much it.
That and the rest, which is the fact that it has combat.
No. The rest, Yeah.
Oh, no, no, no. Yeah.
That that, that is an existential kind of like thing
outside of the world. Comments on how the the the
philosophy, the game. Communicates itself.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which doesn't come through in
here, so, you know, I got a bitch about it, but I, I, I, I I
think this is great. I think this is fucking great.
I have no complaints. I mean, for me, I like this
because I can as the as the warden, because I'm never going
to play this because I'm always a fucking warden.
I can run a sci-fi horror in this.
I can run a oh, Joel Hines was the creator earlier that I was
talking about, which are not horror games in and of
themselves, not horror adventures.
Right, But it does have the open format for it to be a sci-fi
adventure. I mean, I'm feeling good about
rule set. Yeah, I mean, so so my knock on
the rules that I guess is specifically I will say that
like realistically rules has read and this isn't a horror
game because even when you look at like the panic table, there's
very little that's horror in there, you know what I mean?
Like what like some of the conditions you get like, oh, I
have nightmares like that could be that horror.
That table could be in any dungeon table.
I've seen darker tables in dungeon games.
You know what I mean? That like outside of being like,
oh, you sometimes encounter horrors like there's no rules in
the game that are that are horror rules, right?
There is no stealth mechanic. There is no you have like a fear
save, I guess, But again, you could have that in a lot of
stuff like the the overall for this game, I think is that like
again, it it it presents itself as alien, but it is very, very
clearly aliens. It is a sci-fi action game with
some horror elements. It is not a sci-fi horror game
in my opinion. So for rule set, I think that's
the only knock for me is that. It it says the rule set is this,
but it is really that. Yeah, but.
I think what's going on in the rule set is good.
Great, great. Yeah.
What are your? Thoughts.
I don't know. I'm I'm between 7:00 and 8:00 on
this one. I I was I was a pretty easy 8 on
this if you're a cool but 8. Eight.
I'm good. On that eight, yeah, eight I I
enjoy. Again, my issue is the
communication of it, not the rules themselves.
This is a fantastic fucking game.
If I was going to play a space adventure game, I think this
easily goes to number one. I mean, I really enjoy Death in
Space, but the streamlined nature of this game blows pretty
much everything else out of the water.
I enjoy it a lot. Originality.
I mean every aspect of it from like a narrative standpoint is
unoriginal, you know? I mean like it's all based on
like 3 pieces of media. Yeah, it's also hard because
this game has been around for quite a while now, and so now I
know of a bunch of like. Like 2018.
That's a long time for our space, you know.
Yeah. I mean, I think it's good.
I think it, I like the panic engine that they're trying to
get up and running here. I think it's a good idea.
The way it the way it works. I think it's really good.
I mean, it is a a thriller space adventure.
Go ahead. You know, just something I
noticed that like I'll never stop again being annoyed that
this is called 1 E but technically, and maybe this is
pointed out to me before so I'm just an asshole.
The 2018 Zine is called the Alpha Zine Edition.
In the Zine itself, it never claims to be the original
edition. It claims to be an alpha version
of the You've been the. Problem this whole time.
Oh I'm fine with that. Like I still think it should
have been called to be, but I'm I'm wrong and I'm I will admit
that I'm very wrong. It's it's completely appropriate
for to call this one E when the original was called alpha
technically, but it's still going to bother me.
But as you were saying, with the originality, I mean, it it it's
it's alien, it's aliens, it's a couple other things in space.
You're right. It has been out for six years
prior, you know, as totality of the game.
I mean we got to get points for some of the rules and we got to
get points for like the the the games that came from this big do
do the panic engine and instrumentality.
But like panicking and stressing and stuff like that is not
original this game either. They just do it well and better.
Now, I mean, this is, this is one of those things that where
we have to look at originality and say, OK, like clearly it's
not an original idea, right? But does it take that idea and
do something fun and original with it, or at least do it in a
fun, interesting way, right. And I think it does.
I think it does as well. I'll be interesting when we do
Alien RPG. If this feels more like Alien.
If that feels more like Alien. I will also be interested.
I still haven't read it honestly, so that'll be another
one. I have like everything for it
and I've never read it, just like half a free league stuff.
So what do you think for originality?
I'm thinking a good six to seven.
Let's be nice, let's do A7. It's.
Nice. Value.
I think it's pretty valuable. I mean listen, if you get this
fucking game right, there are 1,000,000 supplementary modules
for adventure. I mean there's just an endless
amount of shit that you could play.
You could play this game for fucking ever.
If you get whole breach, you have 40 hours to fucking play
right there. Maybe more honestly.
As As for like price, like I said, the box set 59 for the
core deluxe is 99. But if you get just the just
take me to the page I want to go to the player survival guide
Digital is $0.00. But like, but also like we've,
we've clearly stated that you can't really play with just that
anymore. You know what?
I mean you can't. So the warden manual, it's
$20.00 for physical and PDF or just $20.00 for the PDF.
Yeah, we talked about that. Which is a reasonably priced
PDF, and for a physical plus PDF I would say is incredibly
affordable. Yeah.
I mean, if, if, if the is it the Alphazine that's $0.00 or is it
the new Zine that's $0.00? I don't know what am I looking
at. I look at the 1st edition baby.
Yeah, again, please, my God, people out there, I understand
that you need to make money and pay rent and stuff like that,
but like developing a community by releasing your game for free
and then making them pay later for a cooler version is how it's
done like that is how that is how Mouse Rider made so much
money like that is how Karen Tui made a quarter $1,000,000.
That's how Mother Ship made a fucking $1.4 million.
Like if people can play the game and then they enjoy it, they
will buy it. Trust me.
So basically if all you need is the Warden's manual and the the
book, for 20 bucks you could get the PDFs of both.
So that's a great deal value wise.
And like you said, there's a million fucking.
I have so much mother shit so much that like I couldn't play.
No, no, I've read a shit load of it because it's from our
friends. But like yeah, I have not been
able to read all of it. And if I play nothing but
mothership I, it would take me years to get through the content
that I have. So I think value wise it's
pretty good. I think the box set, first of
all, it's a gorgeous box set that you get like what 5 zenes
in plus AGM screen that for 60 bucks is an insane fucking deal
because I've seen people have $60.00 fucking PDFs out there.
I. Honestly thought that we were
going to go see that the deluxe set was like 200 bucks.
Same same. I expected at least 150. $9 I'm
like fuck. That's actually because it comes
with a bunch of adventures that start.
Oh, it comes with the survival guide, the Warden's manual, the
underconfirmed contract report, ship break a stool, another bug
hunt, the dice set, the punch ponds, the double sided poster,
the full color trifold warden screen, and then the modules
Dead planet # of Flesh, Gradient Descent, and PDFs for everything
for 100. Bucks fingers, so I can't.
Count Anymore, but the corset for honestly the better deal
unless you want the crazy box still gives you so much.
It's everything I just said. It's just a it's just a few less
standees. It's a smaller gym screen and
then you don't get like the the the big Zine modules at the in
except for another bug hunt for $60.00.
So again, the box and all of that is insane.
Because you get another bug hunt either way.
Yes. And and really very good.
It's an insane. Deal.
Because once again, we have seen $60.00 fucking PDFs for like one
book and you get all of that. I think that's an insane deal.
So I mean, I'm high on this because first of all, again, the
player Survivor guide is fucking free and then to get everything
that you need is $60.00 is crazy.
So what are you thinking? I do.
I don't know what are you. Are you thinking A9?
I'm thinking of nine because like we always say that like how
can you not give high score to a free fucking game?
Yeah, you can. And then also, it's just like,
you know what, if you want to buy an adventure right now to
play with it and you don't have a lot of money, there's a $5
pamphlet. You can get The Haunting of
Epsilon 14 for five fucking dollars, you know, like, and
there's more pamphlets than just that.
They're also like $1.99 or whatever.
There's so much stuff, you know? Yeah, there's so much.
And again, I know that I, I, I, I will be bothered by the so so
total 3938. What was the original we already
gave it? 36.
Oh, well then like like we. OK, so this is a much better
version than that though I will say.
Yes it is and but our our our ratings were still flawed in the
last one. I am glad it was higher.
This one deserves to be. But yeah, it was 36 last time.
It took a hit on art and style in the last one, apparently.
Well, because I think we appreciate Sean's art now and at
the time, I think maybe we expected a little bit more from
it, you know? We've got a lot better.
But also, it was art and style, and we again, we've adjusted our
entire metric system since then. But overall, give your final
thoughts, I'll get my final thoughts and we'll get the fuck
out of you. I like this game, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, good thoughts. My thoughts cut me off in like
45 seconds. Fantastic sci-fi adventure game.
I really fucking enjoy it. Probably maybe.
I've had a classic traveler. Probably my favorite sci-fi
game. I do really enjoy Death in
Space, but I think this does what Death in Space does in an
even more streamlined. Way really wants to do.
Yeah, and no, no. And I, I'd love Death in Space,
but let's be honest, I think Death in Space has more horror
mechanics when you bring in cosmic mutations, stuff like
that. So I would say Death in Space.
What's interesting is Death in Space is specifically a sci-fi
action game that has more horror stuff in it than Mothership,
which is a horror game that has more streamlined sci-fi action
on it 10. Seconds.
You cut, you were talking so fuck off.
So at the end of the day, I think that it is a sci-fi action
game. I think that what I said before,
the combat, the marines, all the guns and stuff like that really
reduces the horror for me. And that's fine because guess
what? I fucking love Aliens.
I think it's a fantastic movie and and you can play Alien in
this. I wouldn't have minded if there
was a little bit of a differentiation between the two.
But fantastic game. I'm glad that we're going to
play it on Sunday with some of the homies.
Yeah. So I'll have this episode out
tomorrow. So if you're watching this
tomorrow, Saturday, November, like 9th or something like that,
join us on Sunday for an AP. It's going to be myself, it's
going to be Hunter, it's going to be Josh Manske, and it's
going to be still like Andre. We are doing some stuff from
Silver Arm, so we're going to enjoy that.
So you'll see a preview of an add on to a project that you'll
be able to back this month and watch us for the rest of the
month to see more space game reviews and to see yet another
AP later in the month and to spotlight some mothership
projects in addition to the primary Mothership bundle coming
out. And if you're listening and
you're a creator and you have a mothership project coming out
this month, hit our link tree and shoot us an e-mail and let
us know and we will try to get your project on the show.
That is our show. Fantastic game.
Again, as I said in the beginning, I'm a pedantic
fucking asshole. I, it's true.
I think I am right though, obviously.
But this is a really, really great game.
I'm very excited. I'm very glad I got the deluxe
edition and I am happy to play this more.
I think the most important point is shout out Ozo, you know?
Yeah, bye.