Mothership: Warden's Operations Manual

Mothership

by Sean McCoy

The Warden's Operations Manual takes you from prepping your first session, to running it, to prepping the rest of your campaign in a simple, easy-to-read format. It's chock full of simple advice to improve your horror game, as well as basic procedures for preparing great scenarios for your players.

- Custom fit the game for your table
- Generate random horror scenarios
- Grow your one-shot to an ongoing campaign

Mothership is a sci-fi horror roleplaying game where you and your crew try to survive in the most inhospitable environment in the universe: outer space! You'll excavate dangerous derelict spacecraft, explore strange unknown worlds, exterminate hostile alien life, and examine the horrors that encroach upon your every move.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Science Fiction, Horror, Gaming

60 pages, Paperback

First published June 11, 2024

About the author

Sean is a board game designer living in Dallas, Texas with his girlfriend and their two dogs. Most recently, his work was featured in "The Year's Best Body Horror Anthology," (2017).

Reviews

[Penultimately · Rating 5 out of 5]

On opening this book, I only got three pages in before I started to write my own adventure.

This is the best gamemaster's guide I have ever read, right alongside Mike Shea's Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. Everyone who wants to run an RPG should read this, even if they have no interest in Mothership. Its approach gets you started in an extremely practical way that puts aside the stress of unnecessary details and lays out an adventure in an immediate, usable way. It takes the excellent approach of Matt Colville's video "Prep can be literally easy and actually fun" and shows you the process step by step. It is aimed at running an episodic scifi horror mystery adventure, but with imagination this approach can be applied to any type and length of game.

[Petra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genuinely one of the best GMs guides I've ever read? I feel like I could run a whole Mothership campaign thanks to the clear and helpful advice this zine gave me.

Glad Mothership zines count as books on this site because I was worried I wasn't going to make my reading goal lol

[Nate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent advice on running a game regardless of the system you're using. Definitely recommended for any starting Warden, GM, DM, etc. and even experienced ones can learn a thing or two.

[Yancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic advice for running any TTRPG. Concise yet dense with ideas. Excellent suggestions for organizing session and campaign materials.