Characters are the window through which most players view the world of roleplaying games, and they are often where I start when designing a game or writing adventures.

For Stranger Stars, I’ve been building the character classes as a starting point to see what changes I’d like to make to Mothership’s core mechanics and how much of the setting I can hardcode into characters without limiting them in scope or diversity. Let’s dig into where I’m currently at with the 6 character classes and why I’m doing what I’m doing.

some notes on changes to the Mothership standard rules

For Stranger Stars, I am planning to keep Mothership’s core stats (Strength, Speed, Intellect, and Combat).

I am planning on keeping the core Saves but am renaming Sanity to Reality (much like Cloud Empress). This is partially to sidestep issues with real-life mental health stuff (which I’ve certainly suffered my fair share of) but mostly to put it more in line with the actual use case of the Save - it’s less about if you are sane or not and more about if you are able to restructure your concept of reality to include the new things you are experiencing. If you fail, you are not able to reshape your reality - you ignore the threat, freeze, blame it on yourself or others, etc., and if things are bad enough, you panic.

I am also tweaking Skills to a single list of 20 skills. If you are trained in the skill, you roll with advantage on a check relevant to that skill (also like Cloud Empress). This is mostly because I just don’t find 10-20% bonuses all that exciting, and I think it’s rarely worth the time and effort in base Mothership required to boost that training (and it’s not something the majority of tables ever even see). Plus, the advantage angle is a bit larger of a boost statistically so it means being skilled is more helpful, and it shifts things more towards the heroic over the horrific (which is where the setting is hopefully going to shift things a bit across the board).

SOLDIER
Stats: +20 Combat
Saves: +10 Body, +20 Fear
Wounds: 3
Trauma Response: When you Panic, all Nearby allies must Fear Save or Panic too.
Ability: Army of One - Up to 3 times per adventure, you can choose to ignore an ally’s Trauma Response.
Skills: Firearms, Hand-to-Hand Combat, any 2 other skills

The Soldier is maybe the most 1:1 class with core Mothership. A boost to Combat in line with their training. Improvement to Body and Fear saves in line with their daily work and past combat experiences. An additional Wound to show their hardiness. The Trauma Response here is the same as well - but calls explicitly for Panic on failure of the Fear Save. The Marine’s Trauma Response in core Mothership is the one that I’ve found is both the most flavorful but is also the most commonly remembered/used in my experience so it’s the basis off which I’m standardizing the other Trauma Responses for Stranger Stars.

Every class in Stranger Stars has an Ability. This is a new mechanic on top of core Mothership, taken from my ULTIMATE BADASS action movie ruleset pamphlet - though the abilities here have largely been reworked to keep in line with the more grounded setting I’m hoping to build with this project. The Soldier’s ability allows them to ignore having to make a check or save or any other action due to another player’s Trauma Response triggering.

The term “adventure” here will feed into the larger structure/cycle of campaign play, but it’s intended to be a nebulous term that encapsulates anything that isn’t downtime. In typical Mothership, this could be playing a pamphlet adventure (whether or not that takes you 1 session or 3) or it could be doing an entire run of the Bloodfields. You could even be in downtime, only to have an event pop off and suddenly find yourself in your next “adventure.” Table and GM discretion, but it feels pretty natural to me when “adventures” would start and end in play. There will be boxes to track this on each class's character sheet.

For Skills, all Soldiers are trained in combat - ranged and melee - and then can shape their specific role beyond that. Maybe, one Soldier takes Piloting and Mechanical Repair while another takes Medicine and Religion.

LABOURER
Stats: +10 to All Stats
Saves: +10 to All Saves
Wounds: 2
Trauma Response: When you Panic, Nearby allies take 1d5 Stress.
Ability: Well Prepared - Up to 3 times per adventure, you may produce one standard item (<1kcr value) not listed in your Equipment.
Skills: Athletics, Culture, any 2 other skills

Labourer is Stranger Star’s replacement for Teamsters, partially because Unions are in a much worse (and rarer) place overall within the setting and to give a bit wider view of what this catch-all class can be (which is much how Teamster is already treated at many Mothership tables).

Stats and Saves help Labourer’s be good all-arounders. They’ve seen and experienced much and have often led very hard lives working a variety of dangerous jobs - but they don’t benefit from as much training and support and often aren’t the types who could not have found easier paths through life in the security forces so they have a standard 2 Wound maximum.

When they Panic, all allies nearby (using Mothership’s standard range band definitions) take Stress. Labourers are the salt-of-the-galaxy everypersons and seeing them panic adds to the general sense of impending failure - Soldiers are meant to protect Labourers, Clergy are meant to put Labourers at ease, Researchers are meant to have an answer to every Labourers problems, etc. A Labourer panicking means all the other Classes have failed to fulfill their end of the social bargain in some way and that builds Stress across the team.

The Labourer ability, Well-Prepared, is pulled almost exactly from ULTIMATE BADASS and adds a quantum inventory mechanic to this class specifically, allowing them to have something seemingly unexpected in their toolbelt because they’ve been in a situation like this before (or know another Labourer who was killed or maimed by not being prepared). Many of the abilities are bent towards bringing in more typically storygame-y mechanics in a way that fits the type of play I enjoy most where we get to keep the grounded, player-driven experiences in the world while also bending and shifting the universe and stories around the table during play in a way only really roleplaying games allow for. Yes, I’m a sicko that likes something about almost all kinds of roleplaying games, and you’ll see some of that in this project.

Culture is a Stat intended to replace Mothership’s Rimwise and will act as a blend of a traditional DnD Knowledge check and something like Call of Cthulhu’s Credit Rating. Being trained in Culture means you know the drinking game in the space station bar and that you’ve heard of the political faction rising in power on this side of the galaxy. While it will occasionally grant advantage for checks, this skill is more often than not going to be something that let’s the GM know to feed you additional info about the world (whereas a Researcher stuck in their lab over the decades may be blind to many of this aspects of postgalactic life).

RESEARCHER
Stats: +20 to Intellect
Saves: +30 to Reality
Wounds: 2
Trauma Response: When you Panic, Nearby allies Reality Save at Disadvantage for the rest of the scene or encounter.
Ability: Interdisciplinarian - Up to 3 times per adventure, you may ask the GM for a solution to an immediate problem or clue to a pressing mystery, inspired by your breadth of knowledge.
Skills: Any 4 skills

Researcher is Stranger Star’s take on Scientist, and there’s a lot of similarities here. They get a boost to Intellect in line with their background and education and a boost to Reality, not because they are inherently more mentally sound but because they are more likely to have an explanation for the things they may encounter - even if that explanation is totally wrong. Science (and Religion, more on that later though) can be wonderful balms to the troubled mind as you can explain away almost anything in a moment if you are convinced you know (or believe) enough.

Their Ability treads a bit outside of Mothership’s usual focus on player skill = character skill when it comes to solutions, but I want to create more opportunities for a researcher’s unique knowledge set that the player would often not have to come out in play. This is a means to create those moments. “I don’t know of a way out of the immediate situation I’m in, but my physicist would.”

And then to allow for a big number of Researcher types, skills are totally open. You can be a Doctor of Medicine or a folklore researcher trained in Culture and Old Worlds (similar to Culture but for everything before the Collapse). You can be a Biologist and a Botanist or a martial arts expert trained in Hand-to-Hand Combat, Athletics, and more. I want to keep things open to all the various types of experts and academics out there while still keeping the class focused on knowledge over just being totally a create-a-class option (there is one of those, coming later).

CLERGY
Stats: +20 to Intellect
Saves: +15 to Reality, +15 to Fear
Wounds: 2
Trauma Response: When you Panic, Nearby religious allies Panic Check at Disadvantage for the rest of the scene or encounter.
Ability: Divine Inspiration - Up to 3 times per adventure, you may inspire a religious ally (or yourself) with an inspiring prayer, granting them (or yourself) advantage on their next roll. If they would already take advantage because of a skill, they automatically succeed.
Skills: Language, Religion, any 2 other skills

Clergy are another learned class alongside Researchers. Here, they have a boost to Reality and Fear saves - in line with the Researcher’s ability to explain away new and strange things but here it is tied to their belief in the supernatural, divine, etc. This is also why they have a boost to Fear Saves - death, for most clergy, is not as concerning to them as it is to a nonbeliever.

The Clergy’s Trauma Response plays into another aspect of Stranger Stars character creation which is picking (or not) a religion for your character to be a part of. In the darkest years after the Collapse, religion saw a resurgence across the New Worlds, and it’s now an important aspect of most postgalactic cultures, moreso than in core Mothership. While there are many nonbelievers (as there are today), most characters find themselves at least culturally aligned with one of several religions (the largest and most powerful being the Church of the Navigator - a massive holy fleet of ship’s following a stellar titan’s strange journey across the galaxy). For religious characters, seeing a member of the clergy - even one you do not believe in - panic in the face of strange or dangerous circumstances has an effect on you in a way it may not on a nonbeliever. That said, this is still an aspect in early development and I could shift it to be less mechanically relevant here (and have this be a broad disadvantage on Panic checks to all characters).

For the Clergy’s Ability, I love moments in stories where - even as a nonbeliever - you aren’t sure whether or not you are seeing something miraculous happen (like a chaplain crossing a battlefield under intense gunfire unscathed to give last rites to the dead and dying). Divine Inspiration creates those moments - does the advantage come from the character’s belief in themselves/their religion similar to a placebo, is something supernatural at work, or is it simply a coincidence or a stroke of luck? Either way, it works - but its uses are limited.

PREGALACTIC
Every day the number of operational Pregalactics dwindles whether it be from wear and tear without suitable replacement parts, death in combat, or from Spiraling, a chaotic logic core collapse every Pregalactic is increasingly prone to suffering the more they operate beyond their original “shelf life.”
Stats: +40 Intellect, -20 to 1 Stat
Saves: +60 Fear Save, -10 Body Save
Wounds: 3
Trauma Response: When you Panic, Nearby allies must Fear Save or believe you are finally Spiraling until the end of the current scene or encounter.
Ability: 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.
Skills: Computers, Old Worlds, any 2 other skills

Pregalactics are heavily inspired by Cloud Empress’s Bodyhoppers and the Sleepers from Citizen Sleeper. These are your standard Mothership-style Androids but aged up several hundred years. They are often running off of poor replacement parts far beyond their original expected operational periods and - most importantly - are some of the only beings still alive able to remember life among the Old Worlds including Earth. These are the wizened sages of Stranger Stars - a dying breed of knowledge keepers.

Pregalactics are similar to standard Androids and, being nonhuman, do not share some human concerns of and reactions to Fear (hence the big bonus). Their Trauma Response introduces a setting-specific concept of Spiraling - something extremely old synthetics, even those hooked to networks living entirely digitally, all eventually fall victim to, despite researchers working for decades since the Collapse to fix it. Spiraling is a quick and chaotic breakdown of their logic cores, often resulting in dangerous behavior, loss of self-control, and - soon after - death. When Pregalactics panic, this is the first thought that comes into nearby humans’ minds as they’ve all seen countless news stories of horrific, tragic events at the hands of spiraling Pregalactics.

Their Ability leans into their role as knowledge keepers - but in a deeper-reaching and more nebulous way than the Researcher. While Researchers use their Ability to find solutions, Pregalactics use theirs to add context, to uncover otherwise lost truths with old origins, etc. A line of Earthling code still hidden among a security systems database, the true meaning of project name, etc.

NEOSYNTH
Stats: +40 to Any Stat, -20 to Any Stat
Saves: +40 to Any Save, -20 to Any Save
Wounds: 3 or 2 and take another +10 to Any Save/Stat
Trauma Response: When you Panic, Nearby allies lose Advantage they would gain from Skills you are trained in until the end of the scene or encounter.
Ability: Fit for Purpose - Up to 3 times per adventure, you may turn any success (by you or a Nearby ally) related to your original manufacturer’s purpose into a critical success.
Skills: Industrial Equipment, any 3 other skills

Lastly, we have the Neosynths, the newest and weirdest class within the setting of Stranger Stars. Neosynths are androids built in recent decades, long after the Collapse. Their manufacturers have forgotten Earthling design, concerns with constant gravity, and generally needing synths to be humanoid in form and appearance (something that’s been more and more unsettling to the postgalactic population with the increase of Spiraling). Neosynths are full synthetic beings but in totally new forms often created with very specific functions. Mechanically, they are very much the create-a-class of Stranger Stars, with some obvious drawbacks and bonuses stemming from their specific manufacturing origins. Want to be a six-limbed spiderbot intended for working entirely on the exterior of an orbital solar array? This is the class for you.

You choose what Stat is boosted and what is lowered, same with Saves. Do you take 3 Wounds or only 2 and further boost a Stat or Save? What was your origin? Use that as inspiration to guide your choices (or find a suitable origin inspired by the numbers on your sheet).

Because your allies see you as someone made specifically to be extremely good at the exact thing you were made for, when you panic those around you trained in your same skills lose confidence in themselves - because if you can’t do the thing you were built entirely for, then why would they be any better?

On the positive side, the Ability lets Neosynths boost the successes of things related to its original purpose. So you get plenty of good with the bad as well. This is the class I’m most interested to see player’s deploy - and it may end up being the one with the most design considerations behind it.

That’s all for now! I still need to crunch the numbers on all the Stats and Save bonuses here and then obviously playtest further down the line as well. I’ll report back next time I get to put a few hours into this project. I’m getting more and more attached to it as I go as I think it has a chance to be a cool, gritty blend between the deadly horror of standard Mothership and something more heroic like Starfinder or Scum and Villainy.

Have some ideas of your own for how I could take things? Drop them in the comments below!