Our second Microgame is The Progeny. We have shared this game before, but we needed to work out some Mothership licensing issues, and it has gone through an entire round of editing and visual redesign by D.N. Wilkie (Anxiety Wizard). It comes with standalone rules, letting you play a freeform, rules light version of a solo or co-op dungeoncrawler boardgame, but you can also use it as a *Mothership* pamphlet adventure that includes a map and counters.
We actually call The Progeny a Programmed Adventure Game because it is most directly modeled after the MicroQuests that Metagaming published for The Fantasy Trip. These were called programmed adventures because they were designed to played solo and had an adventure that had been “programmed” for the player. In current nomenclature, we would call this game a non-authoring solo game. You are playing through a problem-solving scenario, you are not creating the material or journaling (unless you want to). Providing compatibility with stock Mothership also comes out of the idea of MicroQuests because you could also adapt those programmed adventures to use with The Fantasy Trip with a GM and a group of players.
If you’re not into the custom Mothership hack as written in the rules, the boxed version will still make a wonderful starter kit for Mothership with some dice (including 2d3, 2d3-1 can be used to simulate a d5 way easier than doing division), dry erase markers, dry erase player trackers with a custom fold over Panic Table, an adventure, and a box that will hold zines. We’ll be holding a Crowd Sale for the boxed version starting September 12 this is just an announcement for the game and the free PDF rules for download. Paid subscribers can get the print & play version with the map, counters, and player trackers included as well. This print & play version is also available on DriveThruRPG.
I will continue to make posts leading up to and throughout the Crowd Sale period. These will be outlining the different design decisions I made to bring this boardgame/wargame/ttrpg hybrid to life. I can’t give everything away right now.
A Roger Corman Inspired Queer Game
This game is also my first explicitly, politically Queer game. I was inspired by The Brood as a trans woman because it involved someone growing an external womb. Giving birth is something I would like to do more than anything, and I can’t unless there’s a medical breakthrough in the next couple years (I’m almost 40 and raising another baby is not something I want to do at that age). I also thought of how a baby born from a trans woman with an implanted womb would be treated by our current crop of reactionary conservatives. The way that they treat trans women who want to feed their babies using a lactation protocol tells me that they would have an utter conniption about a trans woman birthing a baby. So, in the brief narrative for the module, a man disappears for essentially decade and comes back with a feminine non-binary gender. She is able to birth her babies through an external womb, but the people around her look at her as a monster along with her babies, so they lock her up, and then try to kill her children. Of course, you don’t fuck with mama bear, and that’s when things go pear shaped for the facility in the game. It’s playing with the Cronenbergian idea of beauty in the grotesque, but it is still designed to be fun, the message is not to overwhelm the fun of the game, but it is there. This attitude of fun first, message second comes from the indie film master himself, Roger Corman.
I will not hesitate to delete comments or shut down the comment section if it is overwhelmed by transphobes. TERFs can fuck off!