MoSh: Moonbase Blues Session 0 Report
Saturday, June 13th, I ran a session 0 for my upcoming Mothership playthrough of Moonbase Blues. During this session, we created characters, discussed how to deal with table safety, and planned in the next three sessions (after which I expect to have reached the end).
Overall
Three of the four players had already played a trifold adventure with me previously (The Haunting of Ypsilon 14). The last player, however, had not played Mothership before, which meant I did have to partially explain what the system was about. Overall, though, character creation went quite fast, and the players quickly organized themselves to spread out the roles amongst each other.
We ended up with the following four characters:
BeiBei (Teamster): STR 39, SPD 39, INT 42, COM 40; Skills: Mechanical Repair +15, Industrial Equipment +10, Zero-G +10, Jury Rigging +10; Patch “Eat the Rich”; Trinket Rejection Application (Colony Ship); Loadout Assorted Tools, Battery (High Power), Patch Kit, Toolbelt, Vaccsuit, Laser Cutter.
Karen Whiteford (Scientist): STR 37, SPD 31, INT 56, COM 33; Skills: Robotics +20, Hacking +15, Computers +10, Industrial Equipment +10; Patch “DRINK / FIGHT / FUCK”; Trinket Manual: Rich Captain, Poor Captain; Loadout Cybernetic Diagnostic Scanner, Portable Computer Terminal, Lab Coat.
Wheeler (Android): STR 36, SPD 41, INT 57, COM 31; Skills: Psychology +15, Linguistics +10, Computers +10, Mathematics +10; Patch “#1 Worker”; Trinket Key (Childhood Home); Loadout Ammo, Long-range Comms, Satchel, Vaccsuit, Revolver.
Canila “Wakeup Call” Garcia (Marine): STR 36, SPD 35, INT 37, COM 49; Skills: Explosives +15, Atheltics +10, Military Training +10; Patch “All Out Of Fucks To Give” (Astronaut with Turned Out Pockets); Trinket Sculpture of a Rat (Gold); Loadout Heads-Up Display (HUD), Advanced Battle Dress, General-Purposes Machine Gun.
What Went Well
Mothership 1e Compendium - PSG
I installed the FoundryVTT module Mothership PSG Compendium, and it was a lifesaver. In my previous attempt at running Mothership on FoundryVTT, character creation was a tricky manual affair, where I had to guide players through all individual rolls while we cross-referenced the manual. This time, they could just click a few buttons, and the character generator populated itself. Click save, enjoy character, all done.
Scheduling a Session 0 With Predefined Outcome
I specifically organized Session 0 to be just character creation and session planning. Previously, I’d not specified that, and we ended up making characters and then rushing through a bit of the game. Having spread those out made the session feel more cohesive and manageable to me.
Populating FoundryVTT
I spent some time in the weeks beforehand to set up the module on FoundryVTT carefully. As a result, I know the information forwards and backwards right now. I also set up some random tables to help me improvise when the game starts. Lastly, I saw that you can now upload PDFs to FoundryVTT, so I made sure to upload the PSG in its entirety.
Lessons Learned
I noticed while we were making characters that I remembered the gist of the system, but I was feeling foggy on the specifics. Before the next session, I’ll definitely have to reread the manual to be comfortable enough with it.