Mothership encompasses and encourages many different visual vocabularies and yet, despite 3rd-party Mothership products looking wildly different from each other, they mostly have an often unmistakable something that still encodes them as Mothership to my eye. Hull Breach (2023) is a hardcover anthology of scenarios, locations, tools, hacks and rules tweaks by gang of notable 3rd-party Mothership zine makers, and it’s a great example of this sort of…consistent variance.

The book sure looks like Mothership, but the contents, both thematically and visually, are remarkably varied (despite a certain cohesive framing provided by the layout, though even then, I count three separate hands at work). There are rules for playing as human-hunting aliens. There’s a retail chain with a series of back rooms that never end. There is a teleporter in need of testing, heh. I think my favorite is the funnel scenario, “Residue Processing,” which casts players as unwilling participants in a series of dangerous scientific experiments in a corpo lab. Everything is so well done and so different from each other that reading through the book is really like unearthing one delightfully horrible trinket after another; I got pulled along by the promise of ever-new ways to terrify and murder my players.

Lots of great art throughout (LF OSR, Sajan Rai, Joshua Clark and Daniel Vega). I’m particularly keen on Nikolai Fletcher, who contributed the front cover and some interiors. He’s got a very precise style that makes for believable sci fi environments, but then either through composition or color, manages to get this intense brooding feel. I love how dangerous the cover looks without breaking the stillness of the scene (the hole itself is slightly debossed, too, which is a nice, subtle design touch).

I’ll always love the myriad of Mothership products, but Hull Breach sets a high bar for the rest of the 3rd party. I’m keen to see other creators work to meet it.