Because sometimes, you just have to go full Metal on the title.
Welcome back to my #mothershipmonth project! Every week day for the month I’ll be putting up some source material for a sandbox location for your adventures. I’m working off two principles:
- Create a sandbox setting that fits with Mothership but has a unique tone.
- Use GM tools I’ve had success with before to get out of my own way.
And today we’re going to use one to build the basics of the other. When The Walls Fall is a superb series of dice driven prompts that combine physical elements with numerical prompts to give you a framework to hang a ruin off. It’s designed for fantasy games but I’ve used it before for SF and it works just as well. Crucially, it also externalises a lot of processes and puts ideas in front of you you wouldn’t normally consider. Crucially…er, it’s also designed to build failed places, places that have broken or died. And that feels like fun ground for both Mothership and my pathological inability to not try and make games a little chirpier.
One last thing; I’m not going into detail about how When The Walls Fall works. I don’t want to pull it’s teeth and it’s two bucks for a PDF and honestly I want to encourage people to buy it. Indie creators put everything on the line, I couldn’t do this project without it and I want you to go buy a copy because Mol’s great, it’s an absolute steal and it’s helped me immensely every time I’ve used it.
First Principles
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Jackson’s Star sequences in Alien: Romulus. The idea of a mining colony just nosing over into failure, but not quite there yet, is a really compelling one. Society slowly collapsing, staff going into business for themselves, the company closing its fist. All good Mothership-y stuff. Especially Col Price’s brilliant concept art.
I’m also thinking a lot about Caravan Sandwich which is both Mothership to its bones and absolutely drenched in sunlight and idyllic countryside. You play a kid who grew up on a corporate world that’s now been abandoned, coming back to find your sibling and discover the truth about the storm that drove the company away. It’s a great game (featuring the happiest little truck ever!) and very much the sort of aesthetic I want to capture. Here’s more from Charles Boury.
This resonates with me because I grew up somewhere very similar. The Isle of Man is a small island in the Irish Sea that’s variously been a filming location, a Victorian vacation hot spot and home to an insanely dangerous road-based motorbike race. It’s a very odd place, and it encourages you to make your own fun and it feels like a good foundation for something like this.
Tower
So my first prompt is a Wizard’s Tower. In Mothership terms my first thought was an artistic retreat or something similar but the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of it being a corporate resort. Maybe one that was established before the mining colony so there’s lots of grand, dilapidated buildings for people to explore and things to hide in. Aesthetically I’m thinking the video to Weapon of Choice by Fatboy Slim, that sense of being the last person in an enormous sleeping building.
Angels
My next prompt is that the foundations of the tower were built by angels. So what does that mean in terms of Mothership? Again, two instant responses:
- The resort was built by androids or the local population
- The resort was built by expert systems that are still sleeping in the basement.
I ended up doing a lot of stuff with ES’ in my last big project and I love them, but it’s time to try something else. So that leaves us androids or the local population. I don’t think I want it to be the locals, because I don’t want a dominant sentient species. I actually quite like the Avatar movies, and they’re WAY more tonally in line with Mothership than a lot of folks want to think, but they don’t fit here.
Androids then. But how to make that interesting?
Two instant cultural touchstones pop up: Alien: Romulus and Westworld. Westworld for its seething themes of artificial sentience and emancipation and all those chilling scenes of unwanted androids clustered in storage. Romulus for Andy, a career best turn from David Jonsson, a man whose career is made of career best turns at the moment. An end of line android, repurposed for construction and hospitality then. Efficient in a way that can hide so any sins.
Tricked a long forgotten deity
Oh this is TOUGH! Again, my brain goes straight to ‘Large angry AI in cave’. Do you want Vaal? Because this is how you get Vaal.
Instead, let’s get petty. The resort was funded by a group who really wanted the world to themselves, and lied to the company about the valuable resources that would end up being mined. Let’s go further and say they were planning to keep it for themselves. It didn’t go well, but it’s a plan with a built in insurance policy. If they were found out, they could always use the mineral resources on world to bargain their way out of prison.
It didn’t work. For most of them. But they had fun trying.
Disguised as something other than a city
This one we can use pretty much as is. The resort’s still standing. There’s still an airport, still pools, still hotel towers. Behind it though is a fifty mile wide canyon carved into the world. There’s your space gothic! Lightning striking the towers of the resort as something unspeakable begins to write itself into existence in the pit! Or maybe just a worker’s revolt? Or both! Both is good.
The leader squandered wealth
The last prompt is another where we can use it as is. The head of the group that annexxed the world blew a lot of the wealth they got from the resort and that led to the downfall of the resort, the people behind it and the secrets they were keeping.
Fallen Tower
One of the last elements of When The Walls Fall is a random system designed to give you some relics to play with. I got Fallen Tower, which feels a lot like the leader of the group blew their wealth on a massively ostentatious house that then collapsed.
A War of Ideas
The reason for the downfall. I’m thinking the group, when they were discovered, splintered. Some of them sold the others out, some tried to stay independent to protect the world and one or two tried to set up on their own. That gives us some fun factions to play with and questions to answer too.
There we are! Capitalism! Greed! Luxury! Open face mining! Betrayal! In Space! That’s a great foundation. Check in tomorrow and we’ll put some meat on it and take our first official trip to Callaway Reef.