The text in Mothership actually isn’t contained quite as well as the text in Death in Space (some headings flow over into the next spread), but when your document is a quarter of the size it doesn’t really matter.

Investigation revealed that a piece of foam insulation had fallen off the external tank and hit the shuttle during launch, damaging the reinforced carbon-carbon leading edge of the left wing and allowing the extreme heat of reentry to cause structural failure. This single-book-sized TTRPG doesn’t contain a lot of actual modules to run, but they do give you a starting story to work with.These three are, as of 2024, the only human fatalities in space (above 100 kilometers (330,000 ft)). Void points can be spent to gain advantage on an ability check or attack roll, or to activate a Cosmic Mutation. I love being able to envision a future where the world is full of wonder and advancements for the betterment of all.

Near the top of the column on each side is the engraved image of the face of a crew member set into a stylized triangle.

The spacecraft went into wild gyrations at the beginning of reentry, before the wires burned through and the reentry module settled into the proper reentry attitude. Cremation isn’t desirable; it requires too much energy that the surviving crew needs for other purposes.

First make sure your players have no problems with claustrophobic atmospheres or with a sense of dejection in front of something too much bigger than them. Everything is done very professionally with this company and always lets you know every step of the process.For anyone not familiar with the terminology, different circumstances allow players to roll two d20s, and either take the better or worse of the two rolls. Louis, Missouri, in bad weather, and crashed into the adjacent McDonnell Aircraft factory, where they were going for simulator training for their Gemini 9 flight. Perhaps the most notorious incident was a fire on the launch pad of the Apollo 1 mission in January 1967.

Initiative is “popcorn initiative” (check out where we talked about this in the Surprise and Initiative episode, feel free to ctrl+f the page for popcorn for a quick explanation) but with a goofy twist: whoever goes last in a turn gets to choose who goes first in the next turn. An official game soundtrack is also available at major streaming services that contains 90 minutes of moody atmospheric music. These rules are a great example of how to present an evocative setting, and how to use the rules to reinforce expected gameplay. The Challenger disaster remains perhaps the most notorious in the history of spaceflight, owing to the number of people, many of them schoolchildren, who saw it live on TV.

If you’re willing to do that yourself, it can be a new setting for you to put your space RPG in, but it competes with several established systems that already have a good amount of support. Every aspect of the character can be rolled randomly if they don’t want to pick it all out separately. Roll a d20, add your Body for melee or Tech for ranged and compare to their defense which is 12+dex for an unarmored human (armor increases it and other things may have higher defense ratings). Beginning characters do get to select a set of starting gear, which are mostly thematic, and none include weapons or armor.