Why is Mothership, well, Mothership? Put another way, why isn’t it Basic Roleplaying, or Call of Cthulhu? The core mechanics are all very similar; basically everything in Mothership that isn’t specifically about starships is adapted from Call of Cthulhu in one way or another. And that little starship aside does point to the answer: The reason Mothership is Mothership, Call of Cthulhu is Call of Cthulhu, and neither of them are BRP has to do with the specificity of their missions. Both Call of Cthulhu and Mothership frame their ideal game experience as horror, which lends itself to specific mechanics in the designers’ eyes. Mothership more specifically is science fiction horror, so the designer adds rules about spaceships and space travel. Specificity isn’t limited to genre, though. Mothership is also intended to be light on mechanics; famously the game has no mechanics for things like stealth which means that the adjudication of things like hiding and following are circumstantial and entirely in the lap of the GM. Whether you agree with this mechanical decision or not, it is deliberate and it is specific.

While specificity of game outcomes is produced by having more and more concrete rules (Mothership’s take on stealth is completely non-specific, while a game with one or more stealth skills and a laundry list of modifiers would be much more specific), specificity of game design is much more interesting, especially as there’s an entire class of games that deliberately avoids it. When I looked at QuestWorlds, I saw a game designed to try and do everything, at the expense of doing anything in a particularly interesting or engaging way. It’s hardly the only generic game, and one could make the same complaint and direct it at Fate, or GURPS, or Savage Worlds.

But hold on. If we go back and look at Mothership again we have, broadly, a fairly non-specific game. Yes, it’s about space horror, and the character options are tuned to space horror. The GMing advice is very good. The layout is very good. The game, though? It’s, outside of the space horror part, stripped down Call of Cthulhu. So where does that Mothership ‘vibe’ come through besides the design ethos? A good part of it is the modules (hardly a controversial opinion), but I think a specific and interesting point is that the modules bring with them hyper-specific mechanics. While GURPS has mechanics meant to be at the level of physics and D&D has mechanics which reinforce genre, Mothership has a good chunk of its mechanics corpus supporting specific stories, designed for and included in the pages of modules like Gradient Descent and Another Bug Hunt. And this is kind of important: While Mothership clearly takes inspiration from the DIY and hack-and-borrow ethos of the OSR, it’s presented a bit differently. The modules, in addition to providing the setting and conflict and everything else for a solid few sessions of adventure, also provide the hacked/modified rules to make that adventure feel different or play different than the base game. It does make me think, though: If you’re hacking the rules (or using the designer’s hacks) for every module, how truly different is that from using a generic game? Put another way, what really makes Mothership different from BRP, really? It’s not rules, after all.

The curious case of PbtA

I find that when discussing specificity, PbtA makes for a great example because of what the rules don’t do. While even what defines Powered by the Apocalypse is ambiguous (essentially just games that are inspired by Apocalypse World), what the designers and the community largely agree upon is that the properties of a PbtA game themselves do not make a minimum viable game. The vast majority of rules systems have within them a minimum viable game; when there wasn’t a specific product made from that design by the original designer, often someone else did it (such as the case of True20 when it came to the 3.5/d20 ecosystem). PbtA does not, because core elements of the game (Moves and Playbooks) must be written and tuned to the specific experience of the game being designed. In this way, PbtA, whether intentionally or not, puts a stake in the ground regarding which elements of a game should be specific to that game (mechanics for core actions, rules for character creation) and which can be generalized to a system (core resolution mechanics, structure of the mechanics themselves).

What most generic games do that PbtA does not is defer from showing the amount of specificity which works best in the game. Fate’s two main rulebook products, Core and Accelerated, show minimum viable games which are designed to be broad, to allow a player to pick up the book and immediately start playing with the rules as shown. There are reasons for this, of course; as I’ve been talking about recently, Cortex Prime saw less takeup because there wasn’t this sort of minimum viable game. In a broader context, though, I don’t think that’s so much because the examples of play weren’t general enough. Cortex Prime’s worked examples are just that, they aren’t underlying assumptions which are baked into the game’s text, like in Fate Core. They are more like Fate Worlds, products that, though I think they’re great, would be a very poor introduction to playing Fate if provided without a core rulebook.

Apocalypse World isn’t an example or a set of assumptions, it’s a damn game, written to be played like Apocalypse World, and not with any specific considerations that it’s going to be hacked and rewritten a hundred times (at least not beyond the expectations many indie designers had in the early 2010s). Apocalypse World was written to be a game, to be played, and in that it succeeded; that success created all of the offshoots much more than any specific guidance or mechanics directed at the would-be game designer. And that’s where I come back to Mothership.

Why Mothership isn’t BRP

Mothership is a very specific game by virtue of its style, GM and player guidance, ex-core content (both first and third party modules and supplements) and yeah, a little bit by virtue of its rules. While the core rules are quite related to Call of Cthulhu and BRP, most of the OSR is quite related to D&D and I think that at least one of the reasons for those two separate choices are the same: These are well-understood and relatively easy chassis to hang additional rules specificity off of. Gradient Descent, for example, has an entire mechanic that is explicitly designed towards the premise of that specific module, and while I don’t want to spoil it, I will say it makes playing Gradient Descent an incredibly distinct experience even within the realm of specifically playing Mothership. This isn’t necessarily unique to Mothership, I find many OSR modules will pick up bits of rules tech and bring them along, assuming your underlying system is close enough to Basic D&D (or perhaps outright simple enough) that you can click it in. This is a very different view of expansive mechanics than you’d see in, say, a generic system, where rules portability tends to stay either in the supplement library or in fan spaces rather than being attached to or elevated within the confines of a single module or setting.

And this brings us back to BRP. Chaosium is marketing BRP, specifically the new edition the ‘Universal Game Engine’, towards game designers as much as they are to system hackers and generic game fans. In a way, I think they’ve seen the writing on the wall. Selling RPGs has always been about selling the experience at the table, whether actual or perceived. To sell an experience other than D&D, you need to sell an experience other than D&D. That means a game with an interesting setting intended for telling interesting stories. It doesn’t mean selling a bell curve, or a point economy, or an advancement mechanic. Here’s the cool setting, with the cool stories, and the cool things you specifically can do (i.e. character options). Ironically, this means that the games which can and do market on mechanics are the D&D-adjacent systems. Since everyone knows there will be a fighter, a mage, a cleric and a thief, since everyone presupposes elves and dwarves and halflings, games like Draw Steel and Daggerheart can talk about dice mechanics and combat system minutia and all of those things that generic systems often mistakenly bring to the fore.

But yes, BRP. Chaosium isn’t marketing BRP to game designers in order to sell more copies of BRP. They’re marketing BRP to game designers to sell more copies of RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu, and also to find those designers who will come in to continue making games like RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu (as I mentioned in my review). Chaosium has, in my mind, seen what games like Mothership have done, and they’re trying their own approach to building a community of designers around their BRP/d100 foundation just like Mothership built one around theirs. I don’t know if it’s going to work, but the basic concept did very well in the past in the form of the first OGL. Whether or not this particular push is successful, I still think it goes to show that even in generic games, specific beats general.

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I was a big GURPS player for a long time, but I’ve since tended towards more specific experiences myself. When thinking about it from a player perspective, though, the difference between a system like GURPS or Fate is not how specific your game is going to be, but rather who is doing the work to set up that specificity. Games like Mothership which have their tech strewn through modules have the advantage of providing new mechanics along with a worked example inside of a product you were going to use anyway. It also helps that, by virtue of being specific, all these bits of tech are easy to take in and out, the only downside being that they are narrower and you may need more adaptation if you want a lot of mechanics to play with. In that way, a lot of the lessons learned by playing in Mothership’s ecosystem can be applied to games like GURPS or Fate. The underlying structure is fairly robust, but to make the game specific, to make it truly germane to the setting and stories you want, you’ll have to do a bit of work. Even a game already as targeted as Mothership benefits from some thought and reading to make its game at your gaming table truly specific to what you want to do.

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