The Other OSR: Warden’s Operation Guide

It is curious to note that since its original publication in 2018, the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG from Tuesday Knight Games has been reliant upon the single rulebook, the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG – Player’s Survival Guide. First as a ‘Zero Edition’ and then as an actual ‘First Edition’. Curious, because despite the horror roleplaying rules detailing no alien threats and giving no advice for the Warden—as the Game Master is known in Mothership—the has proved to be success, with numerous authors writing and publishing scenarios of their own as well as titles from the publisher. What the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG offered was a stripped down, fast playing Science Fiction system that supported a number of sub-genres. Most obviously Blue Collar Science Fiction with horror and Military Science Science Fiction, the most obvious inspirations being the films Alien and Aliens, as well as Outland, Dark Star, Silent Running, and Event Horizon. Yet the authors of third-party content for the roleplaying game have also offered sandboxes such as Desert Moon of Karth and Cosmic Horror like What We Give To Alien Gods, showing how the simplicity of Mothership could be adjusted to handle other types of Science Fiction. This combination of flexibility and simplicity has made it attractive to the Old School Renaissance segment of the hobby, despite Mothership not actually sharing roots with the family of Old School Renaissance roleplaying games derived from the different editions of Dungeons & Dragons. It is thus, at best, Old School Renaissance adjacent.

With the publication of the Mothership Core Box and the Mothership Deluxe Box following a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2024, the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG has a complete set of rules for what is its first edition. The includes rules the construction and option of spaceships with Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, monstrous threats with Unconfirmed Contact Reports, and a guide for refereeing the roleplaying game in the form of the Warden’s Operations Manual.

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The Warden’s Operations Manual is the other of the core rulebooks after the Player’s Survival Guide for the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG. It is the guidebook for the Warden—as the Game Master is known in the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG—and it takes the Warden, neophyte or not, from the first steps of making the initial preparations for a campaign all the way up to running a campaign. Not just advice, but also suggestions, prompts, and more. In the process, it talks about creating and portraying horror, creating compelling mysteries and investigations, how to be a Warden—and a good at that, how to support player agency, interpreting the rules and making good rulings, handling different aspects of the rules, introducing house rules, and more. And in just sixty pages. It packs a lot into those pages.

The Warden’s Operations Manual is at its heart a book of questions and answers, asking and answering such questions as how do I get started? What should I run? Where do I find the horror in my scenario? What challenges do I give my Player Characters? There are effectively ten questions that it poses and gives answers to in explaining the step-by-step process. More experienced Wardens might want to miss or two, and in the long run, the Warden omit some too as she gets used to the process. It starts with simplest of things. Buying a notebook to serve as the Warden’s ‘Mothership Campaign Notebook’, inviting friends to play, and reading the Player’s Survival Guide, before choosing a scenario and asking what is the horror going to be? As it expands here, it suggests options, such as ‘Explore the Unknown’, ‘Salvage a Derelict Spaceship’, and ‘Survive a Colossal Disaster’, and to find the horror it gives the ‘TOMBS Cycle’, which stands for ‘Transgression, Omens, Manifestation, Banishment, Slumber’ Cycle. This is neat little summary of how a horror scenario typically plays. So, in ‘Transgression’, something has disturbed the Horror and caused it to activate or awaken; signs hinting of its activities or effect are found in ‘Omens’; its ‘Manifestation’ means that the Horror moves into the open and everyone can see what it is, and will now be hunted by it; ‘Banishment’ sees the Player Characters race to find a way to destroy or stop the Horror; and lastly, in ‘Slumber’, the Horror is banished or subdued, at least temporarily, until someone else triggers the ‘TOMBS Cycle’ once again. It is both a superbly succinct summary of just about any horror film—and very obviously of the key film which inspires the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG—and a framework that the Warden can return to again and again to construct further scenarios.

Once the horror is in place, the Warden adds obstacles for the Player Characters to be overcome, which the Warden’s Operations Manual categorises as ‘Survive, Solve, or Save’. These are then broken down, offering choices. For example, for ‘Solve’ it offers questions or mysteries, puzzles or obstacles, and answers or secrets, and further expands upon them. The most common questions are ‘What happened here?’, ‘Who did it?’, and ‘Where are they?’ and some ideas are given as what they could be. For ‘Solve’, there is a really good table for defining NPCs along two axes—‘Helpful versus Unhelpful’ and ‘Powerful versus Powerless’. A helpful, but powerless NPC is a drinking buddy, whereas a powerful, unhelpful NPC is a gatekeeper. Lastly. The supplement takes the Warden through the process of drawing her scenario onto a map and then in tying it all together, providing something for each of the four roles in the roleplaying. Violence for Marines, something that Humans cannot do, but Androids can, some science or research for the Scientist, and something to build, repair, or pilot for the Teamster.

With the writing and the design out of the way, the middle part of the Warden’s Operations Manual is dedicated to advice on actually running the game. Here we are on more familiar territory, good for running almost any other roleplaying game, but very much focused on the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG. There is direct and more immediate advice for the prospective Warden not to worry about the rules, to use common sense, to build up the horror slowly, to treat every violent encounter as if it could be last, and more. The advice on teaching the game is good for a Warden’s first game as much as it is the players as well as if the Warden runs the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG at conventions, and there is advice on that as well for setting the tone and safety limits for strangers (at conventions) in addition to that for friends.

It breaks down the cycle of play, examining each of the stages in turn, from the Warden describing the situation and answering the players’ questions through waiting for them to decide what they want their characters to do, the Warden setting the stakes for any conflict and explaining the consequences, and again waiting for the players to commit, to resolving the action. This is such a usual deconstruction of the game flow from minute to minute and what is so useful is that like a lot of the advice in the Warden’s Operations Manual, it applies to a lot of other roleplaying games and not just the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG. And as with the earlier ‘TOMBS Cycle’ and ‘Survive, Solve, or Save’, it examines these aspects of play in further detail, noting how to handle time and tension, what to do about technology (lots of good options here such as offloading the explanation as to how a device or technology works onto the players and having futuristic technology work as badly as our own, alongside simply keeping track of it to make it part of the campaign background and focusing upon what it does rather than how it works), when to not roll dice and when to roll dice as well as resolving the action and the consequences of failure.

The suggestions for social situations are interesting in that NPCs should be obvious in their manner so that the Player Characters have a greater understanding of who they are and be in a better place to decide how to interact with them and what to do with the information they learn about or from them. The Warden is also told that she should tell players when an NPC is lying. Similarly, the Player Characters can lie to the NPCs. And all this without resort to dice rolls, although the Player Characters will suffer the consequences if found out and knowing that an NPC is lying leads to further investigation (or confrontation) as the Player Characters try to confirm it.

The advice on investigations is kept surprisingly short, boiling down to giving the players clues rather than making them roll for them, except when their characters are in a hurry or when time is short. Monsters and horrors are to be kept that, as ‘boss’ monsters that the Player Characters cannot readily defeat until they have more information about them. When it comes to combat and death, the Warden’s Operations Manual reiterates that the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG is a roleplaying game about people in the worst and most stressful situation possible and that this, in addition to the possibility that their characters might die, should always be made clear to the players.

The latter third of the Warden’s Operations Manual focuses upon building campaigns. Here it talks about style and types of campaign frames, such as space truckers, dogs of war, bounty hunters, and mining and salvage, creating factions, handling money and debt, and more. There is a bibliography too and some advice on telling a good story, like the fact that the game is about what the players do, that story happens in retrospect, and for the Warden to use her best ideas first rather than build up to them, and how to end a campaign. All of which is supported by tables of prompts and ideas that the Warden can pick from or roll on.

Physically, the Warden’s Operations Manual is well produced and very nicely illustrated, with many illustrations actually serving as examples of elements of the game, such as the illustration for tactical considerations or the ‘TOMBS Cycle’. The book is very readable. 

The Warden’s Operations Manual is a very good book of advice, help, and suggestions for the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG, but there is room for expansion in places. For example, the individual parts of ‘Survive, Solve, or Save’ get more attention than those of the ‘TOMBS Cycle’ and the campaign frames amount to no more than elevator pitches rather than actual frameworks. Despite this, the Warden’s Operations Manual is useful not just for the first time Warden, but worth reading and dipping into for the experienced one too. In going back to basics before giving sound advice that will give the prospective Warden a very good start in setting up and running her first game of the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG, the Warden’s Operations Manual is an exceptionally good book.