Tired Dad Mole

Deeper Sci-Fi: Ideas for a Mothership Campaign

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…

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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?
5. 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.