This Ship Is No Mother

This Ship Is No Mother is a game about people in space, working jobs that are probably going to get them killed. It's 50+ pages, fully illustrated with art by Justin Nichol.

Inspired by movies like Alien and games like Mothership and Dread, this is for fans of tension, creepy-crawlies, and general horror. Mechanically, it's a card-based Forged in the Dark game, first in the series of games currently called the Cardsharp Sonata.

In this game, players start with a full deck of cards and as you play, that deck will run down. When the deck ends, there is a climactic moment of panic as one of the characters is going to do something stupid and get themselves (and maybe everyone else) killed.

This game requires a GM or MC and 2-4 other players. The MC will run the game, probably using a pre-written adventure. Other than that, you need a deck of cards and some character sheets. If you’re playing at a physical table, a physical deck and some index cards will do the trick. If you’re playing online, you can use the playingcards.io room template below and this spreadsheet for the characters.

This game is designed for one shot play with sessions of around 3 hours.

Why You Should Play It

My favourite games are mechanically innovative, politically progressive, and just great fun to play. This Ship Is No Mother is all three.

• Mechanically, it's a Forged in the Dark game that uses card instead of dice. This has many effects, including that the players hold cards in their hand which act as much more tactile substitutes for BitD's abstract stress metacurrency. 
• Politically, it's a game of scifi horror that is about working class people trying to survive against the depredations of megacorporations.
• And lastly, it delivers some of the most fun, high tension one-shot experiences I've ever seen. It's a joy to play, characters are evocative but easy to make, and you always, always end with a bang. Sometimes literally! 

Players draw cards from a deck of regular playing cards to resolve actions but the deck also acts as a time. Every action depletes the deck, bringing the players closer to an explosive ending. This makes every action full of tension as players see their inevitable doom edge closer, in an experience much like Epidiah Ravachol's Dread. It was originally designed to play Mothership modules in a much more storygame-y way but it has become much more than that.

This game is a winner of the Luminary Grant from Hit Point Press.