NSR:
Any new details on Father Fog?
Sean:
Alan’s working hard on it! Summers are best for him because he’s a teacher. He’s got the core rules pretty well established and he’s working on the first adventure called “THE BIG BAD ADVENTURE.” The game has a really cool aesthetic and deals with themes like hope and despair, all wrapped in a kitchen-sink fairytale horror setting where all fairytales sort of exist at the same time. I’m really hopeful for it, I think it could be really cool.
NSR:
Were there any design tensions you had to balance when making Mothership so open to 3rd party creators while still being accessible to new players? Or when designing it to accommodate oneshots and longer adventures?
Really glad I found the MoSh community, it’s changed how I teach and how I run games for students. Cheers!
Sean:
Thanks so much for the kind words, I’m glad you connected with Mothership!
Design tension is what it’s all about. The tension between one shots and campaigns is a real thing! The first thing we did there was try to redefine what we called a “campaign.” Just to quote from the WOM:
A game of Mothership takes place over one or more sessions and is called a campaign. Many campaigns are only a single session of a few hours (called a “One Shot”). Most campaigns are 5-7 sessions, and a few long Campaigns can last years of real time, or continue indefinitely.
This sort of cracked things open for us. All “games” are “campaigns.” Some just cover different lengths. The next thing we noticed was that campaigns orbit around a persistent element. In fantasy games this is usually a party of characters, a TPK ends the campaign because the pcs are the persistent element. As you open things up the persistent element may be a megadungeon or a hexcrawl/setting. So like in an open table game the persistent element is the world – or to take it even further: “Jane’s Thursday Night Game” might be the persistent element.
So in a horror game we started going – okay what’s the persistent element in say, Alien? It’s the xenomorph or weyland yutani. Even Ripley isn’t the persistent element, just a PC who survives multiple adventures (or campaigns??).
Once we went down this path things opened up to us. We talked about sequel campaigns, open tables, stretching time out between campaigns. We sort of had to kill the platonic ideal campaign as like “an infinite open world game that takes players from level 1-20+” in order to find this other design space. If I was to say “Okay we’re going to play a campaign over 7 sessions,” it’s a lot easier to commit to than say “let’s start playing dnd and … see how long that goes?” We wanted to combat that kinda DM fatigue where you just don’t see an offramp. In Mothership the offramp is early. But that doesn’t mean you can’t revisit the world over and over.
So resolving that tension – that one shots and campaigns were the “same” in a lot of ways, helped a lot. We used to be plagued with accusations that Mothership wasn’t good for campaign play (because players were weak, because it was punishing, because it didn’t have levels, etc.). We’ve been fighting back by just releasing more and more books that show what our version of a campaign is like. Yes, Mothership is bad at running D&D campaigns where combat is a default expectation on a session to session basis. But we think the idea of the campaign still has a LOT of unexplored territory. We intend to explore that.
NSR:
Hello Sean - when’s null.hack coming out? XD
Sean:
I’ve been working on it a lot recently! We don’t have a release date yet. It’ll likely be after fatherfog, werewolf in the dark, and another 2-3 mothership books. But we have big plans for it. We have an amazing city builder in the works. We’ve had a great experience with the team that built the Mothership Companion App, and we think we can make a really cool one for Null.hack as well. I’m hoping to put out a null.hack playtest kit sometime this next year. This was my first RPG and I hit a wall early one then pivoted to Mothership and Heist. Cyberpunk was too big for me to tackle. I couldn’t see what it needed to have and what it could avoid. Publishing Mothership and putting Null.hack into the Mothership world has made it a lot clearer what I want it to be. I’m super excited now because the game involves a lot of interaction with your contacts, friends, and family. Getting to know your neighbordhood, your block, and building a network/community. The domain game is with you from the very beginning basically. Can’t wait to share more about this.
NSR:
Thank you for answering the question (which I now realise was a repeat of one many ranks above)!
If you have time for an optional second question: there are lots of cool little procedures/minigames in your games (thinking of the ship combat minigame, the hacking pamphlet…). How do you design those and what do you think makes a good minigame?
Sean:
A lot of times I ask like “who is this for” and “how often is this going to come up?”
Like ship combat we think will come up once per campaign, if ever. So we were okay with it being a mini game you needed to sort look up in the book as long as you could run it from the book.
With hacking we thought okay this might become part of someone’s prep (and I wanted to design it for null.hack now so we had it done when we got there, much like we did with cybermods in APOF).
It’s best to imagine yourself as the warden who is going to have to use this. Are you going to remember? Is it going to solve problems for you?
Like I really like the war machine rules in the dnd RC. But like — they could’ve included that info in the monster manual or released a book of armies to make that really easy for me. They didn’t! They didn’t consider what it would take for me to use that mini game at the table. So a really good system just gets lost because it’s so prep intensive.
I don’t think refs mind prep as long as once it’s done it’s done for a little while. So let’s say your adventure has some interesting survival mini game. As long as the ref can learn it once and go I think you’re good. But having like a separate mini game for every little thing just sounds like death. That being said — If they’re good they’re good! Hard to argue with that.
NSR:
I did run a full hacking cyberpunk game once, and the hacking became a negotiated roll rather than a minigame because as you say, what’s cool as a one and done novelty becomes a chore if you keep referring back to it.
Sean:
100% agreed yeah.
NSR:
[Question deleted before I could archive it]
Second NSR member:
FWIW the new Wounds table and Death Cup (lol) were great at my table. Taking a wound means something, including a small but significant chance of death, and reminding folks that their “friend” may already be dead but they won’t know until they check… brilliant
in at least one case, waiting for the death cup gave the player time to roll up a full new character, even before anyone had checked on him
Sean:
Whoa that’s amazing! I hadn’t considered that that might happen. I stole the death cup from a modern crime game I’m working on called HEIST. In that game you might be running away from a botched robbery, so it’s really important whether you decide to check on someone who may be dead or run away (and getting away from the cops). But I don’t believe in saving your good ideas for later, so I figured if I get HEIST made, then I’ll just use the death cup again. It’s a lot of fun!
Sean:
Okay gang I think I’ve answered everything! Thank you all so much for your kind words and for your insightful questions. If anyone has anything else or missed out due to time zones, I’ll check back in through the evening and followup on anything I missed tomorrow.
If you want to follow our upcoming game Werewolf in the Dark, you can do that here.
If you want to subscribe to my newsletter, I do more deep dives on publishing and design. I had two articles featured in the Glatissant this month, which was nice! You can check it out here.
The AMA ends there. The rest of the thread is exchanging thank yous and me asking Sean for permission to post the AMA here.
