Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

Othership is a single page, 2-sided game by Christopher John Eggett, where 1 side is the rules for a game of space horror, and the other side is a module called Belly of the Beast.

Let’s start with layout, because you can tell it’s intended to be important: This is designed to double-hotdog fold into a tiny, 8 page zine which includes the character sheet. It manages to be bold and evocative while still being minimalist as it must be. I like it, you can fit it into your pocket.

This is explicitly a minimalist take on Mothership, and hence features many similar concepts: Professions, stress, etc., just in 2% of the word count. That word count brings problems: You’re gonna have to add your own rules, as it implies when it mentions androids. That said, it’s (very) broadly compatible with Mothership, so if you think Mothership is too much, and you have an improvisational style, this will suit your style.

Belly of the Beast is an 9 area space hulk to explore. It riffs on Alien directly, and otherwise would be right at home in Mothership. It’s not highly interactive, but it’s meant to set scenes for being chased by the alien that pursues you. I like it alot — I’ve said before I’m a massive fan of a predator-centric random encounter table, I did something similar in Hell on Rev-X in fact.

This is a pocket-sized game to keep in your bag to play whenever you want. It won’t take long, it’s designed for 2 players, and it is truly familiar to fans of the genre. Othership is genuinely great for the specific use case of “meet someone who wants to play a space horror game with whatever I have to hand”. Honestly, this belongs in a series of other classic trope based modules so you can have a little deck of pamphlets to play based on a random acquaintances preference. You could definitely play other Mothership modules with it, but I think its strength is its form factor.

If you find yourself in a position where running a game spontaneously with a single other player is likely, this is the game for you. If you’re looking for simpler Mothership this might be for you as well, but it depends on your angle — this is unabashedly OSR in its minimalism, but Into the Blind which I reviewed last year is a competitor in the space that takes a more narrative approach, so I’d check that out as well, as they’re both pretty cool in different ways. Othership is precisely what it says on the label, and I’d love to see more capsules that adopt the same form factor, or try to tackle the same use case in a similar micro-capsule-game kind of way.

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