MOTHERSHIP is a lot of fun. The rules are light and intuitive, and the system definitely does what the designer wants it to do while being malleable enough that you can easily make it your own. I've been playing it very happily, running the Pound of Flesh module.
It's in Space.
When you run a game of say, Olde Tyme D&D there's this sort of mental reserve we all have (assuming I have an audience that's all absorbed plenty of European/North American sorts of media, anyway) . It's a saf assumption that everyone at the table probably has well established aesthetic reference points and known visual tropes for "the vaguely medieval world", so you don't ever need to describe what a Town With A Castle looks like, basically.
Space isn't exactly like that, as a genre. Think of the immaculate jumpsuit world of Star Trek, then the steamy Giger'd corridors of Alien. The Winnebago-punk styling of A New Hope, contrasted with the grim meathook tomorrows of Event Horizon and Dead Space. The interior design of Blade Runner compared with the look of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
When there's non-detail-descriptive language ("you're in a spaceship") and assumed familiarity ("you're in a city"), people jump to an aesthetic reference point to fill in the gap. If I tell you "you're in a city" you know there's buildings and cars and business in it, I really don't have to tell you that. In Space, when you lean on that, what do people imagine? With 3 players and 1 Warden you could have 4 entirely different looks going on.
I'm not building up to say this is bad or anything either, it's sort of the only reason literary fiction works. Imagine having to give a complete phenomenological account of everything in a world when you wrote a book, every time. You can build off of and play with assumptions, and you can set them up.
So, Mothership: A Pound of Flesh. There's a Space City, a city inside a space station. What does it look like inside? That's not spelled out for you. 8 million people live there, you're given that much, and you pay a daily Oxygen Tax.
I imagined a place that always smelled like an airplane, with an occasional hint of sweat and garbage, the whole of it like a super-massive shopping mall. That's why you have to spend 10 credits a day, you just don't have O2 like that in a place this dense without paying for quality you can smell. I can use pictures of dead malls to set the scene.
Here's a few other ones.
6 SPACE CITIES
1. GARDEN
Oxygen is provided by an abundant living, thriving ecosystem. Whole biomes. There is grass, there are trees, there are fields. All of it bio-engineered, home-grown. Live animals just walking around, wandering, shitting where they please.
It's not perfect. There's no "sky", of course, only screens and glass under the outer defensive layers of whatever station this is in. Humidity and light are mechanically controlled. There's a non-insignificant chance of suffering merciless allergies the whole time, a non-zero chance of a full-bore anaphylactic event. You might get attacked by chimps, even.
But, it delights the soul to be in a place like this. You lose something from being in suits, in ships and on lifeless, hostile rocks for months on end. This kind of place brings that missing thing back, at least a little.
COST: The kind of expensive where you do not ask. This is more expensive than money. It is a gift for you be here, or more precisely, it has been a loan.
BENEFITS: Significant Stress relief, outside of worrying what you owe this place.
RISKS: As mentioned, this is a petri dish and a nature preserve. You might be allergic, it might be allergic to you, and the fauna may predatory. This includes the owners.
2. MODULAR
Immense warehouse-like sectors subdivided into quadrants, segments, units using movable partitions, scaffolding, and shipping container-sized units. Visualize an immense big box store space filled with sheds, additional floors created to hold more sheds. Communal bathroom and kitchen areas with large water/sewage tanks. Large bands on floor designated for traffic. Smaller warehouses built inside of larger warehouses. A world of IKEA showrooms, luxurious spa gymnasiums, and Kowloon Walled City. Each main "warehouse" has individual 02 production facilities and zoning, leading to stark difference between each sector. One can hold thousands, dozens and hundreds joined create a city-world. Imagine if the rich part of town really could close its' doors to the poor, and had its' own atmosphere.
COST: Varies wildly from Section to Section.
BENEFITS: Options. Endless, ceaseless options. Change is easy, constant, relentless. Essential independence of each discrete sector means citywide Doomsday scenarios are unlikely.
RISKS: Options. Endless, ceaseless options. Change is easy, constant, relentless. Essential independence of each discrete sector means sectorwide Doomsday scenarios are frequent.
3. REPLICA
The artificial sky is high enough for skyscrapers. The artificial sky can remain a stately black, use inbuilt lighting systems to simulate a day/night cycle, or be some kind of endless Fremont Street Experience hellscape. Constant buzz of delivery drones overhead, buzz of electric vehicles on roads like on some kind of actual earth. An urban environment close enough to a "real one" that you can easily forget what you're inside of. Cities like this are built on grids, every inch of real estate is leased and sold in horizontal and vertical units. Typically the whole affair is a kind of Company World, everything built on borrowed ground.
COST: Expensive. This may be the least efficient way to oxygenate a city.
BENEFITS: This is also one of the more popular forms of Exocity, or at least more enjoyed, because it hits the sweet spot between cold efficiency and actually existing psychology. It's an urban environment. It acts like something you've seen before, and can be understood like it. Making a fake atmosphere to scale and just growing a city in it works.
RISKS: The rent is high and life is cheap. Everything you didn't like about planetary cities, but with a chance to fall into O2 debt on top of it. No corrupt, ineffectual government to keep corporate entities in check either.
4. DEAD
When a population is 95%+ Android there is no "02 Infrastructure". Vast mining outposts, research facilities, zero-g fabrication complexes, and other places where humans are in a supervisory role. Any residue of organic humanity in a place like this is either in a vacuum suit, an oxygenated ward that might be the size of an apartment building, or on a ship with a working life support system that's about to leave. Interiors are functional, ugly, and uncomfortable. At best, it's like living on an oil derrick, McMurdo Station, a submarine, or a space station now, and wearing a sealed suit almost the whole time. Amenities are minimal. Recreation is nil.
COST: Incredibly cheap, at least in terms of money. You might even be working there.
BENEFITS: If you can trust the Androids you have almost nothing to worry about, and it's just like a small town when you're one of the only few thousand real-humans.
RISKS: You can't reduce Stress, unease is constant. The environment is so close to being inhospitable to human life it takes almost nothing to make it completely inhospitable. It's just like a small town, of people who've been around too many Androids for too long. There aren't many things here, unless the Androids have secret recreational cycles.
5. MICRO
Micro-apartments, capsule hotels, plazas, and loading docks. All hallways and corridors, lobby waiting areas, generic interiors re-purposed regularly. Hundreds of floors. No sky, no windows. Shopping Malls, Airports, Convention Centers, Storage Units. An absolutely thriving VR scene.
COST: Affordable! The very modest alternative to the Replica concept.
BENEFITS: You can probably find it here, for sale, for rent, to own. Affordable!
RISKS: Easy to get lost in. One wrong turn and you end up in some dim chamber, abandoned, leaky with low 02, no security systems. No way out, you are surrounded, wake up later in a dark room. It gets worse from there. They never find you, remains thrown down disposal chute.
It's cheap because it's easy to build, it's easier to replace it than fix it , it's easier to forget about a lost sections, even if someone plugs the wholes and opens a grey market organ farm.
6. IMMERSIVE
6. IMMERSIVE
The very non-optional VR overlay creates a unique civic experience. Informational videos on plain wall-panels, or a complete Synaesthetic Immersion Experience. It varies. If you let yourself get lost in the more ambitious ones for a bit this is the best there is, was, or could be. It's at least memorable, like a dream. If you aren't comfortable with haptic fedback, having your eyes influenced a bit, your ears whispered into, getting your nerves tickled, don't bother going past the Welcome Center.
COST: Not as much as you'd think, not as cheap as you'd like.
BENEFITS: Particularly efficient Stress relief, numerous Optional Cosmetic Upgrades.
COST: Not as much as you'd think, not as cheap as you'd like.
BENEFITS: Particularly efficient Stress relief, numerous Optional Cosmetic Upgrades.
RISKS: If you're worried about them keeping you in some vat while you just think you're walking around, them duping your synapses and carving off parts of you for resale while they drain your accounts, there are probably ways to take precaution. You wouldn't want to see how fast a place with full Immersion could descend into savagery if the Main Processor went down. Being sold things that aren't real.
