Playing science fiction is hard. When playing a TTRPG set in a sci-fi setting, there is a tendency towards the fictional surface of its genres, its interface, so to say: traveling with spaceships, handling futuristic guns, interacting with new technology, exploring strange worlds and combating hostile aliens. This is all great and fun, and because it's so much fun, it leaves little time to explore the deeper, let's say more challenging, themes of science fiction. I won't go into much detail as to why sci-fi plays out like this at most tables, but will rather approach the issue with a little experiment. So the question is: How can we explore the central themes of science fiction that lie beyond its setting's surface?
“What makes us human?”
That's a big one. It's one of the central themes in classic and modern science fiction by writers like Philip K. Dick, Daniel Keyes or Ursula K. Le Guin. This philosophical question has been haunting sub-genres like android fiction, cyberpunk, transhumanism, anthropological science fiction and dystopian science fiction since the beginning. What is the meaning of our biological origin? Can we simulate moral agency and empathy? What are authenticity and individuality if we can copy memories and artificially produce consciousness? There have been many great answers to these questions, and they are more pressing than ever. Bringing them to the table and unleashing the powers of roleplaying games on them seems like a no-brainer.
But it seems rather hard to do in an OSR-style game, right? Why is that? It seems reasonable to suggest that these questions about artificial individuality and simulating empathy lean more toward story games and (neo) trad systems. Here, the table can explore said themes in granular plot points and other narrative structures that mirror the works of science fiction, reconstructing their fictional ethos in already established frameworks. Players can slip into the identities of artificial life or be opposed to it in roleplay. Most OSR games, on the other hand are less focused on the biographical layers of the PCs, they don´t encourage extensive and philosophical interactions within groups and are more focused on exploring the setting itself.
So my experiment will draw on what OSR games do best: give players the agency to explore these themes through emergent play, focus on interesting choices, and challenges with no obvious solution.
Mothership will be the obvious system of choice here, as its android class and psychological procedures provide a built-in interface for the task, and its setting is fairly rooted in the works of philosophical science fiction. While classic Traveller might also work, its adventurous space-trucker tone, focus on economic simulation, and the logistics of space travel seem to hinder rather than enable the project.
So here´s the plan…
- Our open table is run by two referees. I’ll run my system cluster, while the other referee runs theirs. This means two separate campaigns, each using a different system, will unfold simultaneously.
- We’ll inform the players that the two campaigns are connected; how they connect will be established together through emergent play between the players and referees.
- Players will create characters through step 7, stopping before 8 (“Roll for your equipment loadout, trinket & patch”). This is where the interesting choices begin. They’ll be asked to copy their character sheet and told that they’ll play the same PC in different versions, one in each campaign. There are no restrictions on how they approach this: they can give the characters completely different backgrounds or the same one. They can make them very different or portray them as identical twins who mirror each other’s mannerisms and appearance. In short, everything after step 7 of character creation is up to the players; everything up to that point is fixed and can only be altered later through gameplay.
- This simple setup already poses all the right questions needed for a deeper exploration of science fiction themes without using story game or trad tools. Are they clones? What kind of clones? Copied-memory clones? Replacement bodies? Backup clones? Which one is the original? Are they both clones? Are they artificially engineered clones? Are they android duplicates or infiltrator androids sent by Monarch (see Gradient Descent)? Which one is the original and which one is artificial? Is alien mimicry or shapeshifting involved? Is one campaign a simulation? Have the minds of one group been uploaded into some sort of matrix? Are both groups part of a simulation that tests human behaviour? Are we dealing with alternative realities? Are they playing out different versions of themselves? Are they parallel-universe doubles? Is time travel involved?
- Let players explore these questions without a narrative framework. As they will play PC #1 in campaign #1 one week and PC #2 in campaign #2 the next, similarities and differences will arise automatically, provoking some sort of emergent connective tissue that will fill the space between them with the pseudo-flesh of philosophical questions. Obviously the campaigns themselves should profit from this too, as the setup is prompting exciting ideas and choices for the players to explore.
Next, I will try to manage the many technical and procedural questions that come with this experiment. But for now, this is enough food for daydreaming.
Tobias Heidemann 17.10.2026.
The following paragraphs provide the first example of a completed LMFC hex (see LMFC 03). The description focuses on the drowned settlement of Knocka.
011 Knocka
A small port at the estuary of the river Ems. A few simple dwellings, including a tavern on a small warft. A handful of fishermen and seal hunters operate from here. Ferry boats cross the river from Knocka to Oterdum on the western river banks once or twice a day, often carrying lifestock which is to be sold on the market of the city of Cruoninga to the West (outside of the map).
Locales
011-1: De Speckaal, an unwelcoming and dreary tavern run by a woman named Teda (strong, bad-tempered, against better judgement full of affection for Eberold) with the help of her lover Eberold (originally from Coellen, a former highwayman who evaded the law and made off to the north, charming and selfish).
011-2: Bettewehr, a nearby hamlet. They have a priest (Father Benno).
Who is in Charge?
Eventually Teda. Everyone listens to her.
Secrets
It should have been you!
Habbo and Tjark were brothers who had despised each other for as long as anyone could remember. Their bitter rivalry reached its peak when Tjark married Ebba, the woman Habbo had secretly loved. The brothers lived on opposite sides of the warft, rarely exchanging more than a glare or a muttered word. Two weeks ago, Tjark broke his right leg, leaving him unable to work. Desperate, Ebba begged Habbo to help her uncle sail out to hunt seals on the sandbanks of the island Bant. Begrudgingly, Habbo agreed.
But fate had other plans. A sudden storm caught them off guard, and Habbo was swept overboard, vanishing into the churning waters. For two weeks, he was thought lost to the sea. Now, Habbo has returned as an undead Wiedergänger. Bloated and pale, his corpse crawling with crabs. Somehow what is left of Habbo made its way back home through the mudflats and tidal creeks.
From this night forward, there is a 3-in-6 chance that Habbo will enter Tjark’s house. His bloated form will lurch toward his brother, dragging him toward the Wadden Sea, hissing: “It should have been you!” Once Tjark is taken, Habbo will come for Ebba, rasping: “You should be mine!”. Habbo’s vengeance will not cease until he has claimed both Tjark and Ebba, or until he is destroyed.
A jar full of silver and a love about to be betrayed
While toiling in the fields behind the tavern, Eberold unearthed an old jar buried deep in the soil of the warft. Inside, he found 800 small silver coins, unlike any he had ever seen. One side bore the image of a stylized face; the other, an animal biting its own tail. These are Sceattas, early medieval silver coins, but to Eberold’s mind, the face resembled none other than the devil himself. He took it as a dark offering from Lucifer – a temptation which he gladly accepted. Eberold hid the jar beneath the hull of an old, rotting boat down by the mooring. Sometime, at night, he slips away to the boat, running the coins through his fingers. He has decided to stay the winter, feigning affection for Teda, who remains oblivious to his newfound wealth. Come spring, he will leave her behind, heading of for Bremen to start anew. This will break Teda’s heart.
Something happens
The man from the mudflats
Five evenings ago, as twilight descended over the village, children playing near the tidal flats spotted a mud-smeared man trudging through the muck. He seemed to be moving toward the village. When their parents went to investigate, the man had vanished. Since that night, the figure has been seen again and again, always near nightfall. Each time, he appears a little closer. Meanwhile, strange occurrences have unsettled the village. Animals refuse to be loaded onto the ferry. A herd of cows broke free, stampeding wildly through the fields. Two pigs, panicked, threw themselves into the river and drowned. Fear has taken root in the hearts of Knocka’s residents. Whispers spread through the community that the man is a Wiedergänger, a restless revenant. The villagers believe it is Habbo, a local seal hunter who drowned at sea two weeks ago (see Secrets). Desperate, the villagers called for Father Benno, a priest from the nearby hamlet of Bettewehr. However, the priest, after glimpsing the Wiedergänger from a distance, has proven utterly useless. Terrified beyond reason, he has barricaded himself in the tavern, alternating between sobbing, drinking, and praying.
We found something!
Two children, Eltje and Ada, no older than five or six, come racing toward a group of adults, their faces alight with excitement. Ada clutches a small silver coin, holding it aloft as though it were a royal treasure. “We found something. A treasure! Down by the boats! Gold!”
I started developing a hexmap for the LMFC by working with a map published on Wikipedia.* It shows the East Frisian peninsula during the 14th century and includes a reconstructed coastline that has changed significantly over the past centuries due to flooding and land reclamation. The map also features the historical territories of East Frisia as well as some major settlements.
I decided to focus on the western part of the peninsula, simply because it is where I grew up. This is the area I know best, and I find it comparatively easy to navigate, for example when dealing with place names that have changed quite a lot over time. The area encompasses the historical territories of Norderland, the western parts of Brokmerland, Moormerland, and Overledingerland, as well as Emsigerland and Federgoerland.
Next, I put a grid of 5-km hexes (c. 3.1 miles) over the map as a basis for the campaign map. I found that a 5-km hex is something I can easily conceptualize when pulling information from other maps into my hexmap without accidentally starting a GIS-powered side project. It is precise enough to populate the map with a reasonable degree of geographical accuracy while still providing enough wiggle room for the inevitable compromises of the project.
Crowded Hexes
The LMFC features a densely populated rural milieu, especially when compared to the vastness of a D&D-style wilderness, where you might cross several empty six-mile hexes to get from one settlement to another.
There are, of course, stretches of sparsely populated land in the LMFC, particularly saltmarshes, swamps, and moors. But PCs traversing the map will not be in much danger of getting lost. The land is flat as a plate and, especially towards the coast, dotted with villages, many of them built atop artificial earthen mounds (Warften). Many villages cluster around large brick churches that serve as landmarks visible from a considerable distance.
While drafting the first hexes based on historical information, I noticed that some 5-km hexes would contain two or three settlements, as well as several more-or-less contemporary castles under the control of different chiefly families. These, in turn, constitute potential LMFC factions.
This makes for a very different kind of hexcrawl environment from the classic model of the party venturing into an unknown wilderness.
Hex Design
In contrast to many classic hexcrawls, the LMFC is not about exploring and mapping a dangerous wilderness. Instead, the hexmap features spatially interconnected communities, encounters, and adventure locations. One might therefore argue that the LMFC resembles a point-crawl more than a conventional hexcrawl. I nevertheless decided to stick with hexes because the setting implicates a whole range of small-scale conflicts between competing factions. Running the LMFC may create a need to track the movements of warbands, retainers, pirates, or other NPCs. Here, a hexmap might come in handy.
Each hex will provide an adventure location with several adventure seeds. For this approach, I draw heavily on Seann McAnally’s hexcrawl Times That Fry Men’s Soul (2017) as a source of inspiration. Times is a “weird history campaign” set in the late 18th century during the American revolutionary wars.
When writing up the hexes, my aim is not to include every settlement that might have existed around 1400 (no way!). Instead, I want to focus on one or a couple of sites and a handful of localized encounters. The referee can add additional locales to the map as they see fit.
PCs traversing the map will not necessarily have to interact with the content of every hex. Rather, each hex provides gameable material for the referee to draw upon when the players decide to look around, ask questions, or otherwise engage with their surroundings. Every hex can potentially serve as a starting point for an LMFC adventure.
As presented, the content of each hex is usually based on a combination of historical data, bits of folklore from across northern Germany, and shit I made up to underline the tone and themes of the LMFC.
Hex Structure
The description of each hex is usually centered on a single settlement or localized encounter, which is introduced in the first paragraph or paragraphs of the entry. This is followed by the sections Locales, Who’s in Charge?, Secrets, and Something Happens.
Locales: This section describes important locations within the hex, such as castles, churches, villages, and other built structures.
Who’s in Charge?: This section examines the local balance of power and highlights existing and potential conflicts. The description operates on several levels of analysis. Often, the focus is on the immediate local situation; at other times, it points towards the interplay between local and regional factors, such as competing chiefly families.
Secrets: This is often the longest section of an entry. It presents one or several secrets that can serve as adventure seeds. These secrets will mostly be related either to folklore and the supernatural or to the realm of intrigue, rivalries, and petty feuds.
Something Happens: This section presents one or more encounters tied to the Secrets or Who’s in Charge? sections. It is intended as a fire accelerant, as tool for the referee to draw (not to force!) the players into the content of the hex.
* Page “Ostfriesische Häuptlinge.” In: Wikipedia – Die freie Enzyklopädie. Bearbeitungsstand: 28. August 2026, 15:13 UTC.
There is going to be a lot of loud thinking about Cairn and Liminal Horror on this blog. These systems haunt me, and I’m going to either exorcise this spectre or catch it in one of those silly Ghostbusters traps, so I can analyse it´s ectoplasm. But first...the proton beam!
After I came into contact with Liminal Horror, I ran a couple of sessions that felt very inspiring and got great feedback. Being a huge horror nerd, I connected immediately with the core ethos of the system and had no problem evoking the highly specific (sub) genre tropes that fuel it´s setting and adversaries. So no issues there.
My concerns were more with the “missing” elements of the thin rule system. It is presented as a very light OSR (or -adjacent) set, but it definitely has some story game DNA in there as well. So compared directly to a classic old-school system, the creators made some strong choices that look like a decisive departure away from old school adventuring into modern world settings, while keeping things fast and streamlined on the procedural side of things.
Much to my surprise, Liminal Horror ran very close to a classic dungeon crawl. This, of course, is due to the fact that early iterations of D&D can feel a lot like survival horror themselves. There are truly horrific monsters lurking in the dark, resources are scarce, and on lower levels players feel vulnerable and weak. Exploration is thrilling and dangerous, and inventory management is key. So losing the statistical safety of roll-to-hit mechanics and adding stress and fallout to Liminal Horror’s investigators - who, by the way, are just regular Janes - really pushed the crawl into a very exciting experience full of high stakes and permanent consequences.
This got me thinking. A lot!
About the things that I felt were missing or lacking in Liminal Horror. Or, to be more precise, about whether I could enjoy this ruleset without them - and if not, how one would go about hacking them into the system without breaking it. These things are...
- Level progression
- Tactical combat
- Overland travel procedures for a modern setting
- Some issues I have with doomclocks in LH adventures
- Exploration and space in LH adventure design
I will write about the ideas for overland travel procedures in a modern world setting first, as this seems to be the easier part due to the modular, complementary character of travel stuff.
Thinking about Liminal Horror and hex crawls had the creative side effect of a little setting called “The Signals” that - except for some basic notes - only exists in my head at this point. It involves concepts of dimensional invasion, VHS, cosmic and possession horror, and some changing time period shenanigans.
Here’s the cover, which, oddly enough, was the first thing that came into existence.
Tobias Heidemann
I find it interesting how some designs seem to call for a specific system. This massive rodent camouflages itself as a patch of land, rock, or vegetation in wetlands and swamps. Step on it, and the thick musculature beneath its hard shell contracts, sending sharp quills exploding outward. It’s definitely nocturnal. The design is so mean and devious that it immediately made me think of Mörk Borg stats.
We definitely need to telegraph some danger here - so maybe the Nail-Rat hunts at night at waterholes, fords, and wetlands that offer tempting shortcuts, but sleeps and eats in sheltered, dark, warm hideouts close by. That would always leave its tracks around its decoys.
Nail-Rat
- HP 6
- Morale 7
- Shell -d2
- Bite d4
- Special: Ambusher. Stepping on it triggers exploding quills. 50% chance of being impaled for d6 damage. DR12 to escape.
Tobias Heidemann
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
In other words, available for free use, as long as you remember to cite me as the artist.
The LMFC needs faction play. Fortunately, the political landscape of late 14th-century Frisia has us covered and provides plenty of material for it.
Until only a few generations earlier, the rural communes of the East Frisian peninsula and neighboring Frisian territories had largely governed themselves through local assemblies, effectively preventing the emergence of a feudal order. Over the course of the turbulent 14th century, however, this political order began to unravel. Failed harvests, the Black Death, and a series of devastating storm floods - including the Grote Mandrenke (“Great Drowning of Men”) - created conditions in which power gradually shifted into the hands of established and increasingly influential families. These families assumed leadership over many rural communities, transforming them into what were, in effect, quasi-domains.
The emerging ruling elite styled themselves hovetlinge (chieftains) or capitanei. They surrounded themselves with armed retainers and constructed fortified houses and small castles from which to consolidate and project their power. By the late 14th century, the Frisian chieftains were locked in a web of political conflicts: forging shifting alliances, pursuing feuds, raiding their rivals, and engaging in piracy to finance their ambitions.
As these struggles increasingly developed into a contest for supremacy over the peninsula, some chiefly families established connections with the Victual Brothers, pirates driven out of the Baltic and North Sea who were organized, at least in part, along guild-like lines. Their presence and alliances in Frisia, in turn, attracted the attention of the powerful merchant cities of the Hanseatic League.
Even this brief overview suggests a political landscape crowded with competing interests, and therefore a wealth of potential factions for the campaign:
- The great chiefly families, for example the tom Brok, Cirksena, and Ukena.
- Lesser chiefly families, local Dorfhäuptlinge whose influence may extend only across a handful of villages or a small territory.
- Pirates and mercenary bands, ranging from local raiders and private warbands to the more organized forces associated with the Victual Brothers.
- Hanseatic cities, above all Hamburg, eager to protect trade routes.
- Rural communes and village communities, protective of their traditional rights and autonomy, and far from passive players in the political struggles around them.
- Aristocratic powers from within the Holy Roman Empire pursuing their own political, economic, and dynastic interests on the peninsula.
For quite some time now, I have been working on a project that I intend to publish bit by bit on this blog as the writing progresses: The Late Medieval Fantastic Campaign (LMFC / Frisia Orientalis), a dense hexcrawl set in late 14th-century CE East Frisia, a coastal region located in what is today northwestern Germany.
Inspiration and Anachronism
As a source of inspiration, the LMFC draws on historical information about medieval Frisia, North German folklore, and a generous helping of (folk) horror tropes. I do not shy away from appropriating historical source material to populate the hexes: databases of castles, academic treatises, archaeological field reports, you name it. Yet the resulting brew will inevitably amount to historical anachronism. Shiploads of historical anachronism. Two-d6 Hanseatic cogs at least, filled to the brim.
What I am striving for is the creation of a historically informed milieu for OSR-style adventure gaming that embraces the fantastical, rather than one that claims to offer “historical authenticity.” Not only do claims of “historical authenticity” in fantasy adventure gaming necessarily fall flat; they are also prone to conveying oversimplified, and sometimes outright problematic, views of history.
A great deal of the anachronism in this setting, beyond the inclusion of explicitly fantastic elements, will derive from incorporating local folklore. In the German-speaking world, as in many other parts of Europe, folktales were frequently collected, edited, and sometimes even invented wholesale during the 19th century by individuals ignited by patriotism and Romanticism.
Some of these tales may certainly echo stories once told around late medieval hearths. By and large, however, they are deeply rooted in the conceptual world of the (early) modern period and often contain unmistakably early modern elements: place names, institutions, objects, and social realities that simply do not belong to the late Middle Ages.
One might therefore ask: why not simply cherry-pick themes and elements from history — as is often a good idea, given that real-world history provides the most dramatic set pieces and WTF?! moments — and throw them into a kitchen-sink D&D setting?
My answer is simple.
I hope that this approach will result in an adventure-gaming milieu that communicates a very specific sense of time and place, while allowing historical and folkloric themes to be explored through the powerful lens of tabletop gaming. Ideally, it will also spark interest and curiosity about the history of medieval East Frisia.
The LMFC is therefore not an attempt to reconstruct the late 14th century. It is an attempt to create a low fantasy setting that feels rooted in a particular historical landscape - one where history, folklore, horror, and the fantastical do collide.
I’m too tired to come up with good lore, but Bernie Wrightson made me draw a claw that begged for a bull-man. Then I thought: I don’t want to get charged and spun into cohesive protein fibre. And there he was: the Minorach.
I’m thinking…
AC6 [13] chitinmail, HD6 (26hp), ATK…hmmm
He can definitely charge, so double movement rate for that, but instead of double damage he starts spinning you in if he connetcs. Yeah, don’t like that, perfect.
I can also see him wielding two handaxes. So…ATK 2x axe (1d6) +5 or 1x bite 1d6
Movement: 120, ML 12, AL Chaotic, D11 W10 P12 B13 S14
Spinning Charge. Moves in a straight line at double speed and pins the victim with its horns. STR save or paralysed next round. Next ATK (bite 1d6) auto-hits.
Tobias Heidemann
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
In other words, available for free use, as long as you remember to cite me as the artist.
In my experience, a surprisingly large number of published adventures include maps that...aren’t as good as they could be. The reasons vary, but it seems that sometimes map designers seem to be unsure about what the map is actually meant to achieve on the table. If the text does not elaborate on the map's purpose and lacks notes on how and when it should be used by the players and the referee, the readers are left to figure it out for themselves. In this space of uncertainty maps can become an incoherent mixture of contradictory intentions, which can even render them useless. Which is regrettable, because it´s very easy to fix.
Purpose
Best way to approach designing a map is to ask questions first. Is the map a realstic representation or a vibing abstraction of the location? Is it player-facing or does it only adress the referee? Is it a tool for route planing or does it provide a fast and accessible overview on locations? How important are the relationship between the map's features? Is its main purpose just to communicate setting or does it structure warfare. Will it be mainly a tool for handling the travel through wilderness? Is it a narrative artifact and part of the fiction? Does it contain secrets and hidden locations that are meant to be discovered through procedural exploration? How much information do players have when starting the game? Do the players start with an empty hex map and are supposed to explore uncharted territory?
These are only some of the many relevant questions that need answers before designing a map. I know this because I left many of these questions unanswered myself when I started making (bad) maps. Answering them will imporve your maps.
Grids
Beyond these functional issues, many maps have an insufficient - or sometimes entirely missing - connection to the rules system they were designed for. While most maps at least account for random encounters, a surprising number seem to ignore the implications of overland travel rules completely. Although a missing compass rose or scale bar can be fixed quickly at the table, the lack of a distance grid can be a death blow to the map's potential.
As measuring tools, grids allow players and referee not only to assess travel ranges and travel speed precisely, but also to enter a new layer of strategic and tactical decision-making. Grids (or comparable layout elements for measuring distances) are essential for applying basic movement rules, and designing a map without them can also reduce the PCs’ ability to make informed choices and plan ahead. If you want your players to engage with the regional geography and think about the actual space - while also considering time and speed - this is the way. And if you fear a grid might break the players’ “immersion,” just think of it as an additional layer that draws player deeper into the spatial reality of the fiction. So when in doubt, put a grid on your map please.
Case in point
Yesterday’s session reminded me of this. I run a heavily homebrewed version of “The Horrendous Hounds of Hendeburgh” that got plucked into our Dolmenwood campaign. Without getting to much into detail, the group had to deal with many angry, mounted highwaymen that were assaulting fleeing villagers and setting shit on fire, while four horrendous hounds attacked villagers on three different locations and an important NPCs was running through the streets. It was utter chaos and consequences were severe - enemy and player movement was absolutely crucial, and strict time records had to be kept.
All this would have been an absolute mess without the translucent battle map I bought a while ago and then completely forgot about. I laid it over the adventure´s okay-ish map of the settlement, et voila! A new layer of strategic and tactical decision-making appeared out of thin polymers. Players were talking about how much time they had before enemies arrived at their position. Decisions were made based on movement rates, bows lost and gained accuracy, spells were put on hold, and things got extremely close and very exciting - all because I put that stupid thing on there. I am certain this enhanced the session big time and probably saved me from making unfair decisions based on rough estimates. People were torn apart, set on fire and beheaded at exactly the right time and in exactly the right place because the movement rules were applied correctly. Feels good.
THeidemann 29.09.2026
