The New Flesh

Mothership is a game of sci-fi horror/survival. It has an old-school element in that it is a collection of rules with an implied background. That background is kind of like Aliens and Dead Space . The rules allow you to create crew members on a ship that is exploring a huge and dangerous universe. Core mechanics The main dice used are d10s are the main mechanism is a d% check as per so many Runequest-inspired games. The other elements such as saves and advantage and disadvantage will probably be familiar to most people through Dungeons and Dragons though. Skills The skills are maybe the most distinctive thing about the system as they are setup in a tree with three tiers where higher-tier skills have prerequisites. Higher-tier skills cost more to buy and offer a bigger percentage towards checks (which seems like a sensible way of dealing with percentile whiff). While a bit involved (and with the naturally debatable choices about whether given skills sit in the right tier...

I loved and was frustrated with Summerland in equal measure and when a second edition was Kickstarted I was excited and immediately backed it. To be honest I didn't read the prospectus too deeply as I would have been happy with any improvement over the original rules. However now in possession of the second edition I feel that the issues I had with the game are clearly not those the author did. The game is set after human civilisation has been wiped out virtual overnight by the strange appearance of a forest over most of the land mass of the globe. It's a situation that reminiscent of sci-fi such as the Southern Reach trilogy or Roadside Picnic. From computer games then we are very much in the territory explored by *The Last of Us*. The biggest issue I have with the game is its split game system. It has one game system for most things in the game, in this case a version of the Open d6 system. It then has a specialised sub-system for handling the thing that is the core o...