Below is a shared review of a 2021 adventure released for Old School Essentials: Holy Mountain Shaker , written and illustrated by Luka Reje...

The first part in a comprehensive guide for designing and running your own hexcrawl campaign.

I wrote about this a little on twitter the other day, but we’re changing the way we do ship combat in Mothership. In Mothership, ship encounters are social encounters, not dog fights. The game assumes that the minutiae and logistics of conducting space warfare can largely be handled by the ship’s computer. What can’t be handled is the decision making: should we risk death to fight with this other ship. This means we’re placing a heavy emphasis on a ship’s innate capabilities over the talents of the individuals aboard the ship.1 This feels very on point for a horror game to me. You’re stuck inside the ship that might be your tomb, whether you decide to fight or flee may be one of your last decisions. Also, any aspect of the game that means players are going to talk more about the risks of a given scenario is a good one in my book.

This is a post I had hoped to write back at the start of July, and so by now the little conversation I hoped to contribute to is far from au...