Mothership, the tough as nails indie RPG, is back with a broadside of new projects on Backerkit
Tuesday Knight Games’ award-winning Mothership is a hit. The science fiction horror role-playing game is one of the few independently produced tabletop RPGs to go from online sensation to a real physical product available on store shelves. Co-creator Sean McCoy tells Polygon that part of that success is thanks to a dedicated community, including a Discord server with more than 10,000 fans in it. Now the tiny publisher is trying to inspire that community in a new way through a first of its kind funding effort hosted on Backerkit. It’s called “collab-funding,” and here’s how it works.
Since its initial publication in 2018, Tuesday Knight has encouraged all kinds of creators to publish work that is compatible with Mothership. Sometimes published in itch.io, at DriveThruRPG, or on individual creators’ websites, these aligned creations include quests, campaigns, characters, monsters, and more. Starting Nov. 12 and running through Dec. 11, Tuesday Knight and 20 of those creators will all launch campaigns for more Mothership content on Backerkit. The goal with the collab-funding campaign is to bring more attention – and more funding – to them all.
The marquee project leading the charge is from Tuesday Knight’s lead writer Luke Gearing – the same author who penned popular Mothership modules such as Gradient Descent and Another Bug Hunt. It’s titled Wages of Sin, and it brings bounty hunting to the game for the first time.
“He’s written this 200-page toolkit of rules,” McCoy said in a recent interview with Polygon. “[But] the core of it is [a collection of] 100 bounties — a hundred fleshed-out people that you can go after that [each] have a different funding level and […] a different backstory.”
Of course, as with most things in the world of Mothership, things are not always as they seem. Some of those bounties will be for hardened criminals, murderers, or worse. Others will be for innocent folks who have merely run afoul of the galaxy’s largest corporations. That could mean they’ve stolen something valuable, or that they’ve merely tried to organize a labor union on a distant moon. It’s up to players and game masters to make sense of the situation — and to deal with the consequences. That includes grisly scenarios, McCoy said, with “a healthy dose of horror.”
As with any good TTRPG, it’s all about what players decide to do while inhabiting their roles at the table.
“You don’t have to just interact with them as a bounty hunter,” McCoy added. “We didn’t want it to just be a cops and robbers game. These could just be people you run into, and they have their own goals and life going on. And so it’s a way to sort of populate your universe in a way that evolves and changes.”
While the final list of participants was still up in the air when we spoke earlier in October, McCoy did have a few highlights to focus on as the larger collab-funding efforts kicks off.
PK49 – A Psychokinetic Adventure for the Mothership
An experimental Military-grade pharmaceutical known as PK49 has leaked onto the black market. It is rumored to unlock powerful psychokinetic abilities fueling a race against the clock as street gangs and military factions fight to control the supply.
Interloper: Mystery Module for Mothership RPG
A neon noir murder mystery on a rogue planet, drifting into the dark between the stars. Intrigue, danger, and conspiracy lurk among the tarnished dreams of Interloper.
Awaiting the Burning Gods: a Module for Mothership RPG
Indiana Jones meets Stargate in this desert delve to uncover ancient alien secrets before they’re lost forever beneath shifting sands. Includes a smuggler’s toolkit for continued adventures in the desert and across the Outer Rim.
