Most big science fiction properties today err on the side of science fantasy. Star Wars is basically swords and sorcery in space, and Star Trek’s post-scarcity antimatter economy is built to support its storylines, not the laws of physics. In the tabletop RPG world, though, there are a few options for somewhat harder space sci-fi, especially if your definition of hard sci-fi includes horrors man wasn’t meant to know as well as the strong possibility of explosive decompression or straight up getting sucked out an airlock.

Today we’re going to look at two gritty space horror games which, through relatively light rules and strong emphasis on random outcomes, are easy for players but very tough on characters. Death in Space is created by Christian Plogfors and Carl Niblaeus, members of the Stockholm Kartell alongside the creators of Mork Borg and CY_Borg. Mothership is created by Sean McCoy and distributed and developed by Tuesday Knight Games, who are in the process of bringing the new Mothership box set into distribution as of this writing. Both games are about freelancers trying to survive deep in space, and quite often failing to survive deep in space. Despite similar rules and character survivability, each game has a degree of nuance with how it approaches the gameplay loop.

The Games

An ideal setup for a System Split, Death in Space and Mothership are, on a purely mechanical basis, very close. Each has four stats; an average stat in Mothership gives you a 36% chance of success while an average stat in Death in Space gives you a 40% chance of success. Both are built around a naval or semi-realistic space combat conceit; no starfighter dogfights or space wings appear in either of these games. It is easy to see why similarities between the two were brought up, often derisively, during the Death in Space Kickstarter. After the random stats, though, the two games do diverge. Mothership aims to give more mechanical detail, while Death in Space leans on giving characters more plot hooks and space for emergent narrative. In Death in Space, stats and inventory are then complemented by Origin, which goes hard for weird capabilities. The Velocity Cursed is one of my favorites, with the ability to state they’ve been through this timeline once before and ask the GM for guidance. Backgrounds, Traits, and Drives similarly intend to give each character a few bits of narrative which will direct their time in space.

Mothership has few of these sorts of things. There are trinkets and patches (Death in Space also has trinkets), which give little bits of color to characters, but they aren’t the sort of overarching personality framework that Background, Trait, and Drive are. Instead of all that, Mothership goes for another layer of mechanics. There are four classes, which give some stat bonuses and different sets of skills that you can learn. There are 42 skills which, at about one per page of the player’s guide, is way more than I would have expected. That said, each skill is a tag; you either have it or you don’t. Beyond skills each character also gets three saves, sanity fear and body. There’s also a two-tier damage system, and of course stress, as this is a game roughly based on Call of Cthulhu. Mothership has easily twice the mechanics of Death in Space at a character level, but since you aren’t rolling any of those plot hooks, character creation is equally quick in both. Assuming you don’t have to pass the book around, you’ll be done in 15 minutes.

This trend continues throughout both games; Mothership has more mechanical detail than Death in Space. The ship creation system in the Mothership Shipbreaker’s Toolkit is much more detailed than the equivalent in Death in Space, giving ships stats and a deckplan in addition to hull rating and fuel capacity, which both systems have in some form. Once again, though, Death in Space aims to make your ship weird; you can find out that your ship was an illegal drug lab, was welded together out of parts of old colony ships, or even that it actually showed up from the future after a jump drive malfunction.

What’s interesting is that after you get down to playing, the games actually start to diverge more significantly. Mothership is out and out horror; you’re fighting against your own stress track as well as interplanetary terrors, and bad situations quickly get worse. One particularly morbid element of the Mothership character is the high score, the number of sessions the character has survived (it’s stated a typical average is 4). Death in Space is also grim and gritty, but the focus is on survival. You’re tracking food, you’re tracking oxygen in your spacesuits. Much like Free League peer Twilight:2000, you need to keep track of the Condition of all your equipment and make sure you have the components necessary to make repairs. The rear matter on the Death in Space rulebook calls it a “grimy blue-collar future of a dying universe”, and that does kind of highlight a different emphasis than Mothership. Death is also likely in Death in Space (hence the name), but there are no mechanics to induce a downward spiral and advancement is so much nicer and quicker than Mothership that if you do actually make the mistake of growing attached to a character, you’ll only need to white-knuckle through a few sessions until you can juice up their survivability in a material way. 

Death in Space and Mothership aren’t the same game, but they are very similar games. Mothership is clearly taking the Call of Cthulhu approach while Death in Space is taking the old-school D&D approach, and even down to Mothership’s larger body of mechanics this analogy holds up pretty well. Trying to say one game is better than the other is largely a matter of taste, and I have GMed both of them and seen how similar they want to run. When it comes to document design, though, there is a winner.

The Documents

Let me be clear, when I say Mothership is the better game document of the two it’s not because Death in Space is bad. While Death in Space has a lot of Stockholm Kartell vibes it is significantly more workmanlike than the better known Mork Borg or Cy_Borg. Printing the whole thing on black paper certainly was a choice, but at least all fonts are white so that it doesn’t hurt your eyes (dark mode fans may even like it, especially in PDF). There’s a cheat sheet in the back, clear headings and thumb listings, and almost every rules concept is contained to either one sheet or one spread. Death in Space is a good document.

Mothership, though, is an excellent document. The rules are broken into four distinct books (pamphlets?), and for the most part players only need to reference one, the Player’s Survival Guide, which has 44 pages and all of the player-facing rules that aren’t about spaceships. The text in Mothership actually isn’t contained quite as well as the text in Death in Space (some headings flow over into the next spread), but when your document is a quarter of the size it doesn’t really matter. The character sheet is excellent, and basically allows a player to create a character with no reading barring the random tables used for loadout, trinket and patch. The details in the Mothership rules also mean there are fewer on-the-fly rules determinations; things like healing and surprise attacks are much clearer in Mothership than they are in Death in Space, and while neither game really needs more rules than it has, knowing what to do instead of having to decide if you need to make a determination is really helpful.

There’s another thing about Mothership which doesn’t really fit into an assessment of the game as a document, but fits here better than in discussion of mechanics. The Warden’s Operation Manual is one of if not the best GM’s guides I have ever read. Sure, it has narrative guidance for horror scenarios and seeds for starting adventures, as well as puzzle guidance and NPC creation. It also tells you how to draw a useful map? I think the only other game I’ve seen go into detail about how to make and map a gameable adventure site is Torchbearer, and Mothership’s advice is better. It tells you how to write a session summary? Like, this is exactly the sort of low-level stuff Dungeons and Dragons utterly fails to convey, and seeing it written here makes me want to run Mothership more just because my prep cycle is going to be clear and intuitive. Speaking of things D&D fails at, the Warden’s Operation Manual has a flow chart summarizing the mere ‘conversation’ of the gaming table. This sort of summary exists in some games, like Apocalypse World, but not as clear and concise as it is here. What this ultimately means is that broken out across the Mothership pamphlets is a uniquely accessible game, that truly gives every player, GM or not, all that they need to have fun at the table. Death in Space is a good book that compares very well to most other game books out there, but it couldn’t jump as high as Mothership did.

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Here’s the thing about comparing these games. I, a multi-decade RPG veteran, effective improviser, forever GM and autodidact, could go with either. I mildly prefer Death in Space because I like the weirdness and the more overt “NASA-punk” elements of the art and setting. I can take either game and run them well for my group.

Virtually any other gamer out there is going to be better served by Mothership. The rules are clearer, the GMing advice is better, the third party material is stacked deep (While I have not run enough of the Hull Breach anthology to review it alone, the parts I have used so far have been very good), and the Players’ Survival Guide is even available for free so you can send it to the rest of your group right now before choosing to buy anything. While I really do like Death in Space, in its current form the comparisons to Mothership only hurt it. You know what would have actually been really good? If Death in Space went full Stockholm Kartell, leaving accessibility to Mothership, following Mork Borg, and going full art book. Even more weirdness, some snippets of old NASA technical manuals and more art could have made the game really stand on its own.

In their current forms, though, if you could only buy one I’d have to say buy Mothership. Death in Space is pretty solid, and I like the art direction and the implied setting. Mothership, though, in addition to being not very different at all in setting assumptions and gameplay assumptions, ends up being an easier, more usable, and more enjoyable game overall, not just in comparison to Death in Space but honestly in comparison to most RPGs of its rules density out there. It’s honestly ironic that a game so fiendish and unfair towards its characters is so welcoming, accessible, and understandable for its players. Still, from what I can tell the hype is deserved, and that’s something to consider as the new Mothership boxed set becomes available.

Death in Space is available at DriveThruRPG. The Mothership Player’s Survival Guide is available at DriveThruRPG, and the box set is available for pre-order.

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