Void Spores
Monster of the Week: The Void Spore (Mothership RPG)
This week, we jump into the cosmic nastiness of Mothership. When reading through one of the 3rd party modules we purchased, the Void Spore popped out at us. The Void Spore is a organism that thrives and lives in the vacuum of space. What we liked about it is that Instead of using brute strength, it presents a psychological and environmental challenge, forcing players to navigate its spread across confined spaces while battling infection and potentially the loss of control of the character. It’s a great pick for a survival-horror atmosphere, and the use of psychological horror makes the Void Spore flexible and potentially memorable addition to any Mothership campaign. I ended up using a slightly adapted version of the Void Spore this in a short homebrew game based on Love Death and Robot’s “Into the Aquila Rift” episode.
Stat Block Overview
Void Spores are fungal organisms that drift through space, infecting ships, stations, or colonies they come into contact with. Before they become ‘active’, Void Spores resemble harmless fungal dust motes until they attach to a person or ship. Once this is done, they activate and begin a rapid and aggressive spread.
The Void Spore doesn’t have a standard stat block or combat stats, but instead the real threat is within the infection mechanics, spreading patterns, and environmental manipulation.
For hip points – the spores themselves players will need to deal with infected surfaces or hosts (NPCs, fellow players etc). Infected areas or individuals often start with a modest HP pool (5-10 HP), but they spread and grow quickly. To fully eradicate the infection, these spores need to be dealt with though by whatever mean the GM deems necessary.
IN terms of armour – Void Spores have no none but the infection can adapt to its environment over time. Use GMs discretion here, but some examples are the spores can survive in the vacum of space due to the time the spores have been in there. You could use this to add any additional immunities the creature could have.
For the infection – Void Spore full infection happens on a turn-based timer. At the start of each round, the infection spreads to nearby surfaces or systems, making it critical for the crew to react quickly to avoid containment failure. Infection will spell death for PCs! Very in line with other Mothership creatures.
Why GMs Should Use the Void Spore
The Void Spore presents a nice change from the ‘standard’ moster you might come up against in Mothership. You can leverage it’s more unique mechanics to focus on atmosphere, tension, and paranoia than brute combat. The main reasons I’d recommend the Void Spores would be that it works very well for psychological horror. Like the Thing, players will never really know who is a threat until its too dangerous. This will keep you’re players on their toes until they have to fight for their lives. In addition, if you want to go more extreme, Void Spores can be a great way to leap into body horror. Infections can manifest in gross bodily mutilation and/ or can also add more psychological horror elements like hallucinations. I think one of the strongest thing about time based creatures like this is that they are great for setting the pace for the remainder of the game. Plenty horror games use this effectively, and the Void Spores allow you a lot of flexibility with the type of horror game you are running (body horror, psychological horror, something akin to The Thing) and can help you accelerate the pacing on your game until it’s grand finale.
Running a game with the Void Spore Encounter
If you’re planning to drop this nightmare into your game, some of the things I thought about when adapting this creature were:
- The Void Spore don’t need to be a huge physcial threat. It’s greatest tools to cause fear for players is in how fast it spreads and how deeply it affects the crew – similar to how the Chariot of the Gods fungus works. Keep the players on edge by forcing them to make hard choices, limiting their time, reducing the resources they have over time etc.
- Decide how you want the spores spread? You can do it through the air, touch etc. I recommend starting with this as it will help you design your encounter. I also recommend using environmental story telling or give players clues of how it spreads. An example from our game was I had infected people dead outside of a barricaded area – inside the crew were also still infected and looked like they fought with each other, suggesting that though the door was barricaded it wasn’t air tight – resulting in infection still spreading. Make sure players at least work this out before you turn a PC against another. Or better yet, use an NPC for this.
- Make players PARANOID! This really helped as I used a similar mechnical tool to the Alien RPG to enhance this. I gave players physical notes throughout the session, and they all began turning on each other throughout the session. In-game ways to do this could be giving players an unexplained cough – is it the dry, stale air in the ship or something more insidious? ;^)
Wrapping Up
Thanks for reading this folks! Hope you took something away from this and have a blast with your Void Spores 🙂