One of my background projects for the last few months has been picking away at what I’m calling a “total conversion mod” for Mothership - something akin to Cloud Empress in that it’s Mothership compatible but also so steeped in a particular setting and style as to be functionally its own game, like the total conversion mods of PC gaming yore.

My working title is Stranger Stars and the basic premise is:

99 years after a wormhole gate leads humanity (and its largest corporations) to a new, resource-rich galaxy far across the observable universe, the gate collapses. In the Collapse, all ties with Earth and Milky Way are instantly and entirely severed. A century of chaos, corporate war, religious reawakening, and bitter survival followed.
Some cybernetically-enhanced humans are old enough to remember the original worlds of mankind, even Earth, but their numbers dwindle every day. Thousands more androids of that era, known now as Pregalactics, remain in operation either in their corporeal forms or as cores operating entirely within digital systems. They are the scholars of the Old Worlds.

Beyond this, the setting includes five major factions: the United Planetary Front, the Church of the Navigator, Dextro-Singleton Spacial Solutions, and two more megacorps (still in development). There will be about a dozen or so minor factions as well.

Right now, I’m picking away at the classes - which I wanted to expand a bit from base Mothership and tie more explicitly into the unique aspects of the setting.

Classes:

Soldier
Labourer
Researcher
Clergy
Pregalactic
Neosynth

The biggest changes are adding an explicitly religion-focused class with the Clergy and splitting Androids into Pregalactics (similar to Cloud Empress’s Bodyhoppers in some ways) and Neosynths, which are much more specialized, have been built without Earth in mind, and are more or less post-human in design. Mechanically, Neosynths are sort of a construct-your-own class where you choose an array of your starting bonuses and skills due to your tailor-made nature.

I’m also looking to shift Mothership’s Trauma Responses into more meta-level or even story game-like abilities. I did a bit of this with the perks in ULTIMATE BADASS, letting players shape the world and get quantum information or items out of thin air where appropriate. I’m hoping to double down on that here a bit more. I’m not sure if these classes will have an ability like this AND a more traditional Mothership trauma response or if these will just replace that aspect of the system.

Here’s an example (from the current version of the Pregalactic):

Memories of the Forgotten Stars: Up to 3 times per adventure, you may ask the GM what you know about an item, person, place, or threat that no one else here knows. The GM may tell you an added feature of the item, a detail you missed about a person, useful information about a location’s past, an enemy’s weakness, etc. as it fits the situation.

Other concepts that are really just ideas in their most baby-like forms right now are possibly having unique Panic tables (which I may rename Composure, taking after The Panic Table’s shift in naming there) for each class as well as adding an explicit and mechanical language layer into the setting which the Clergy class leverages to control the flow of information (much like Middle Ages clergy did with latin/language learning in general).

As I mentioned earlier, this is a backburner project for sure - but it’s one I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of over the years with Mothership. As much as I love the anti-canon approach, I know there are folks out here who love to buy into a setting alongside a game and having different flavors of sci-fi universes that fit within the broad spectrum of Mothership so you can still leverage lots of goodies from an array of modules while not having to totally homebrew more setting-explicit elements yourself for campaign play seems like something a lot of folks would be interested in.