Thoughts on Mothership: Player's Survival Guide

​I picked up Mothership moved entirely by the hype surrounding it.  I’m a big fan of the inspirational source material behind the game, and the entry cost is eminently reasonable, even for a printed copy of the zine-sized text.
 
But alas, the game is not for me.  As a game coming out of the OSR movement, it’s not badly designed.  The rules for skill checks, advantages and disadvantages, panicking and combat all appear to be serviceable.  At the same time, they don’t have anything particularly unique to say.  Combat has the standard elements: determining surprise, rolling for initiative, having limited actions you can make on your turn, making an opposed roll to hit.  It adds on stress and panic, like bringing Call of Cthulhu and D&D together, and the two features are yoked together pretty well, but that’s about the only part of the game that involves horror.  There is no particular vision about what horror in space is about, what it is in the larger genre that makes it compelling.  There is no reading or interpreting of the genre, just the standard game parts bolted onto one chassis.  To me, the most compelling part of the text is the art, which does a wonderful job of setting a tone and presenting a vision more unique than the mechanics of the game illustrate.
 
This version of the game is only half complete, I know that.  In fact, the full game is being Kickstarted even now.  But where the designer is comfortable leaving holes indicates what the designer feels can be handwaved without affecting the central concerns of the game.  If the elements were essential, they would be integrated with the rest of the design.  Take money, for example. We are told that “everything in Mothership from fuel to food to weapons and ammunition costs Credits.”  This makes it sound like Credits is a central driver and economy of the game.  But then the rest is handwaved.  You get a list of jobs you can do, adventure seeds, but nothing else is developed, presumably because the eternal hunt for more Credits is an excuse for getting the PCs into trouble and then making them return to trouble session after session.  The game borrows the aesthetics of truckers and blue-collar workers in space, but that’s as deep as it goes.  It’s window dressing.  It happens to be loveable and groovy window dressing, but window dressing all the same.
 
 Horror and Sci-Fi genres, individually, are each rich and roomy genres, with space to make observations and declarations about our world and our humanity. Mothership is a missed opportunity.