Design Sequences

Mothership doesn't feature traditional character . Since character advancement is not about "numbers go up" or getting all of the Skills, long-term characters are going to advance via equipment, drugs, conditions, and mutations.

This chapter contains design sequences to help Wardens, players, and designers develop their own custom AI, cybermods, robotics, slickware, and drugs, as well as examples of items created using this framework. Custom projects like these work especially well when used with the Streamlined Downtime and Debt rules in this book.

These design sequences are heuristics, not procedures for generating items. They give you some guidelines and structure to help you think about designing items, but they are ultimately freeform.

Projects

Projects are the mechanism used by players to develop custom items. Projects are split into Trained, Expert, and Master tiers, in the same way as Skills. Working on a Project works the same as training a Skill, and it takes the same amount of time to build a Project as it would to train a Skill of the same tier.

When using custom projects with Mothership 1e as written, the Warden is in charge of when a project is completed in the same way they determine skill training. If you use the provided Character Sheet that brings back the "progress dots" from Mothership 0.5e, this process can be entirely player . However, Wardens may also use these design sequences to create items to be discovered or purchased by players, it does not have to be entirely player driven.