Getting Started
Welcome to the world of Mothership! All you really need to get started is to have a set of d100 dice, a pencil, and an eraser. Everything else, such as character sheets or handouts, will be brought by me. That being said, it's a good idea to bring blank line paper for taking notes, or even graph paper for mapping dungeons. Bringing snacks for everybody is appreciated, too.
The Mothership First Edition rules are pretty simple, and everything you need to know can be handled through a cheat sheet. If you are curious about some of the rules and want to have a handy reference, you can buy the Player's Survival Guide for free/pay-what-you-want on Drive Thru RPG. The Mothership Companion App can be downloaded from the Google Play Store, too, if you would rather have a digital copy of your character sheet.
A Basic Summary as of 2131
In 1964, a now-dead alien race known as the Centaurians (as their first evidence came from Alpha Centauri) sent out "gift probes" for humanity, with the key to FTL travel, lots of facts about themselves, and basically a bunch of other stuff that was similar to the golden plate aboard the
Voyager 1 probe humanity sent. Then, once humanity properly expanded to the stars, we realized we were very late to a galactic space race. In fact, we were so late to the party that everyone was already dead.
Now, humanity is mostly just trying to scrape by, whether that's selling weapons of war to the highest bidder, salvaging derelict spacecraft (ironically enough, some of those destroyed ships are built with the purpose of raiding derelicts), and trying to expand and colonize while constantly having bad luck with finding habitable worlds. That's not to mention the fact that the Centaurians left absolutely no trace as to how they disappeared, and humanity may be next on the chopping block.
Humanity is not an overarching interstellar empire. Instead, it is a mostly unrelated mess of ICGs (Interplanetary/Interstellar Corporate Governments) that are just as likely to kill their employees and citizens as rival company representatives. Some of these "corporate governments" aren't even corporate in any way, instead being loose organizations with a unified cause that simply evolved into companies. The main sci-fi subgenres for this setting are cassette futurism, cyberpunk, and NASApunk. The last two fit especially well, as space tourism is quite popular (for those that can afford it), and hyper-capitalist governments rule over a dystopian galaxy.
There's a lot more to it, of course, but that's for you to discover while playing. That's all!
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