Playing By Post... In Spaaaace!

Running a PbP Mothership Game

Jan 26, 2025

I own a lot of TTRPGs. A lot. I’ve maybe played about a third of them. Last year I bought at least a dozen different RPG systems that I wanted to try and managed to run all of two of them. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t have the time. I’m currently running a D&D5e campaign that’s nearing it’s finale and a hexcrawl campaign that’s a frankenstein mix of D&D5e/Shadowdark/Into the Wyrd & Wild.

Between organising schedules for those, running them, writing projects and the demands of a job and my life, I found it difficult to squeeze in other games.

In the year of our Lord 2025 I resolved this wasn’t going to happen again. I still plan on picking up new RPGs but I want to get through a serious amount of new systems. I came across an article by Yochai Gal (he of Cairn fame) that presented a solution.

In the article, he describes how he runs a fantasy Cairn game via the medium of play by post on Discord and the time commitment is very, very low. Asynchronous play means you don’t need to do more than post once a day and there’s no scheduling needed! Ideal for someone like me.

Top of my pile of games to run was Mothership. A scifi game about stress, panic and horror with blue collar spacers facing horrors in deep space. About as far from Cairn as you could get. Could I make it work? One way to find out.

Yochai had kindly provided a template for running his discord game and it looked like I could use that with almost no changes.

I added a dice roller and happy with the result, I looked through my Mothership stack of adventures for something to run. What would work as an adventure with a pace that would lend itself to daily posts?

Paydirt.

Joel Hines module seemed ideal for this format. Exploration, lots of decisions for players to discuss, a spot of horror in a few locations so I could kick the tyres of what Mothership is about.

I polled some prospective players if they’d be interested and soon had four volunteers. I let them loose on the Mothership character creation mobile app and was pleased with the results:

The animated portrait .gifs are used by the players when they post speech by the characters, shamelessly stealing the look of the Metal Gear Solid game.

I put together a briefing handout, giving the players a few open ended objectives and a crew manifest. I added some drone style “Working Joe” androids (stolen from Alien Isolation) for Islay to manage and to add extra bodies to mangle to telegraph threat without killing a player.

Then I let them loose on the equipment list with a limited pooled budget.That alone made for great discussion as they tried to predict what they might need. After some debate, they came up with a wish list of requisitions which I (in the role of The Company) reviewed and approved.

Finally, I went through a brief overview of rules, tools and content.

That done we were ready to go! I had each player introduce their characters and we were off to the races!

I penned the first post and decided I’d get them to Karth by kicking the game off with a cinematic crisis and began the game in media res.

No slow, languid swim back to consciousness. No drifting back into wakefulness from the dreaming depths of hypersleep.
No.
Not this time.
You are rudely slammed awake, fully alert and being thrown from side to side within your hypersleep pods. As awareness dawns a fresh jolt sends you flying upward to slam against the clear, curved lid. You drop back down, your face bruised and bloody from the impact. First scrambled thoughts are that you might have suffered a concussion. Dazed, training takes over in the absence of coherent thought.
Your fingers, still half numb from the after-effects of hypersleep, claw at your pod’s internal keypad. Frosted plexi-glass is replaced by the cool white rigidity of the Doppler Effect’s sleep bay, its hard surfaces and intense illumination not visible through the canopy and now stabbing at your eyes. Woozy from months spent in hypersleep, as well as from the abrupt awakening, you struggle to make sense of your surroundings. Of reality.
Some of the other pods are already open. A couple are empty, but the majority still hold their occupants - your team. Like you, your colleagues are struggling for mental and physical equilibrium. All of you are suffering from some of the stronger side effects of hasty revivification. Much cursing echoes through the bay accompanied a wide assortment of puking, sweating, and shaking.
Fire!
Ideally, emergency revival from hypersleep isn’t supposed to produce those kinds of consequences. But then, you tell yourselves, emergency revival isn’t supposed to happen, period.
Lights flash around you and from several wall-mounted panels, sparks erupting in frantic electronic celebration. There is also smoke. Smoke in a spaceship is a bad sign indeed. At the moment, the scrubbers in the circulation system are barely keeping up with it and the air is hazy. Alarms assail your ears.
It wasn’t how you were supposed to arise from hypersleep. There should have been coffee. There should have been food. To make matters worse, you can hear the shrill whistle of venting atmosphere.
You stare wide-eyed at the rest of team Methuselah Beta and their stares match yours, confused, startled and struggling to focus.
What do you do?

The players were delighted. They’ve all begun writing really thoughtful, measured posts. They’re asking lots of questions and the game has started with a bang. I plan to try and review how it progresses a few times a month and run it through a few areas - the initial crisis, arrival on Karth, some social interactions, some exploration, some faction play and a horror set piece or two.

I plan to try and get through the beats I want to explore, then move to another game. I hope to get through a few systems using the same method - I think it could work well for Cy_Borg and Black Sword Hack, so those are on my PbP drawing board.

If this interests you, check back for updates and if you’ve comments or suggestions, let me know!