Why we did Mothership Month

December 10, 2024

Boy, what a month.

If you haven’t heard, for the past thirty days we’ve been experimenting with a new event. We call it Mothership Month, and we hope this is the first of many.

TL;DR Mothership Month ends Tuesday, December 10 at 12 PM CST (or whenever the backer train ends), so if you haven’t checked it out, do it now!

What is Mothership Month? It’s essentially a month long pep rally for Mothership players and wardens. Here’s some highlights:

• We launched Wages of Sin, a brand new hardcover Mothership book all about bounty hunting, crime, and punishment in space.
• 19 third party creators also launched Mothership books, and one intrepid creator launched a Mothership deck of cards. We had some fan favorite third party publishers return with hits like Interloper, Await the Burning Gods, and PK49. But we also had some relative (or complete) newcomers on the scene also blowing up, with amazing books like: Operation Golden Cut, Devil’s Due, Orgy of the Blood Leeches, Not Enough Scoundrels and Dog Eat Dog. There’s some hidden gems as well like: What Was Left to Rot, Death Pays All Debts, Johnson2, and OMENDROME. And there’s more where all of that came from, seriously browse the collection, it’s phenomenal.
• We released a Virtual Tabletop for the Mothership Companion App, with a custom map-maker, and crossplay between iOS, MacOS, and Android. Wardens have been making their own maps and running games in it all month and the consensus so far is that it’s amazing.
• Dozens of players and Wardens wrote blog posts about their experiences and hacks for Mothership spearheaded by Dan D of Throne of Salt. Some of my favorites are this hack on the High Score stat in Mothership, this haunting scenario called Happy Birthday Jonathan which isn’t your normal sort of Mothership adventure, but is much more intimate and harrowing for it, this amazing UFO Cargo Cult, and these legendary ghost ships. Finally, Ian Yusem, of Hull Breach wrote a great piece on what Mothership Month means to the community.
• The Artists Tavern ran a game jam on itch.io with 17 amazing submissions: https://itch.io/jam/tavern-game-jam-mothership-month
• Phenomenal actual players from Nobody Wake the Bugbear and the Panic Table. The Panic Table ran Q&A’s with pretty much (?) evey creator in Mothership Month. Some amazing interviews with great questions. Highly recommended.
• Start Playing ran a host of Mothership games (and still has a lot available for sign up), so if you want to play with professionals, now is the time.

In short, it’s been a ton of fun.

So why did we do it? Why are we going to do it again? In short, the game ultimately lives and dies based on the third party community. I’ve said it before many times, but D&D would not have survived (and cannot survive) without its third party community. The OGL disaster was fundamentally a miscalculation about who “officially” carries the D&D torch from one generation to the next.

For most of our creators, their Mothership Month project is the largest crowdfunding event they’ve ever participated in. For many of them, it’s also their first. This was an untested, crazy idea, that didn’t have a lot of time to develop. We’re used to that. Dead Planet was created start to finish in the six weeks between Origins and Gen Con. We’re getting good at striking when the iron is hot. But the fact that so many third party publishers came along for the ride is insanely humbling, and it shows why this kind of thing, to highlight them and their work is so important.

Even from a purely financial perspective, Mothership Month collectively has raised almost a million dollars. That’s not nothing. And half of that is third party creators. This past year, I’ve talked to 3PPs who have moved out, or put a downpayment down on a house, or quit their job, because the money from their Mothership book gave them enough financial wiggle room to make that happen. That’s insane to me.

Anyways, the pep rally will be winding down soon, and we’ll be working on shipping this book out and working on the next. As always thank you for joining us, and we hope you’ll come along for the next ride.

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