Mothership is Red Dwarf

With that title out of the way, let’s rush through the basic bitch stuff. Red Dwarf, the long running BBC sci-fi comedy, is my ultimate comfort watch. Throughout it’s 10+ seasons, it often strays into horror. Hell, without jokes the entire concept of the show is pretty horrific - one man stranded millions of years in the future, everyone he ever knew dead; with only a neurotic hologram, a narcissistic cat mutant, an OCD android, and a senile AI for company.

Then there’s Mothership; a sci-fi horror TTRPG that often strays into comedy (as all TTRPGs do). The Red Dwarf crew even comfortably slot into the classes of Mothership. Lister and Rimmer are obviously teamsters, Kryten is an android, Kochanski is a scientist and Holly is the GM exposition character. The only one that doesn’t fit is the Cat, but lets just assume Rob Grant and Doug Naylor let him use a homebrew class. It fits like a glove.

My point here is we can definitely mine the episodes of Red Dwarf for some great Mothership scenarios, so let’s do just that.

Polymorph

Kryten: It was an attempt to create the ultimate warrior. A mutant that could change shape to suit its terrain and deceive its enemies.

Cat: So what went wrong?

Kryten: It’s insane!

This episode is a great twist on The Thing. A shapeshifter finds its way onto Red Dwarf, and it is there to suck up the crews emotions. By the third act everyone is running around missing a major emotion. Lister loses his fear, becoming cartoonishly aggressive. Kryten loses his guilt, allowing him to be rude and flippant. The Cat loses his pride, becoming a complete slob. Rimmer loses his anger, becoming a total dork. Imagine a trifold adventure with a special wound table, where taking a wound from the Polymorph also takes away an emotion, at least until the beast is dead. Nothing revolutionary, but a fun twist on a classic.

Better than life

Rimmer: My brain’s rebelled. It just won’t accept nice things happening to me. It just keeps fantasising horribleness.

The small rouge one’s reverse course has finally let the mail pod catch up. In the mail is the VR game Better Than Life, providing them a break from the boredom of life on ship as the game caters to all their dreams. That is until Rimmer’s neuroses cause the simulation to turn on them. Imagine the possibility of putting your players in dangerous simulation polluted by one person’s mental issues. It could make for a truly personal module.

The Inquisitor

Kryten: Sir! Sir, you don’t have to be a great philanthropist, or a missionary worker, you simply have to seize the gift of life!

Rimmer: Oh, God.

Kryten: Make a contribution.

Rimmer: Oh, God.

Kryten: No matter how small.

Rimmer: Oh, God.

Kryten: You simply have to have lead a life that wasn’t totally egocentric, vain and self-serving.

Rimmer: You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you?

Kryten: I’m just trying to make you feel better, sir.

Rimmer: Well, shut up then!

An android from the end of time travels back to judge all beings to see if they have lived a worthy life, and if they haven’t he replaces them with an alternate version of themselves that was denied the gift of life. This episode would make a great campaign starter, as the Inquisitor judges people by assuming their identity, judging them by their own standards. Now you can get players to think about their characters on a deeper level, by asking them if they have lived a worthy life by their own standards. Then after they have to fight a time travelling murder-bot. Win-win.

Back to Reality

Engineer: Hang on a minute - are you seriously telling me you were playing the prat version of Rimmer for four years!

The crew’s life is a lie; this whole time Red Dwarf has been a video game that their real selves have escaped to for years, and they haven’t even been particularly good at said game. This season 5 finale is great because they have their cake and eat it too. It’s a big “it was all a dream” twist where the cast finds out that they are actually the kind of people they would despise, only for the actual big reveal to be that the twist was all a dream. It was really a hallucination caused by a genetically modified squid’s ink to make them kill themselves. The application at the table might be a little difficult without just forcing panic on them until they either see through the illusion or roll a 20. So perhaps the better option is…

Back to Earth

In this 3 part special after a long time off air, the crew manages to construct a portal that brings them back to Earth circa 2009 where they discover they are actually characters on a sci-fi sitcom set to come back for a 3 part special. This takes them on a journey of self discovery where they kill their creator and take their destiny into their own hands. But it’s a lie, to keep them happy and sedated while in reality they are dying thanks to the female version of the “despair squid” from Back to Reality. I think it would be a pretty great break in a Mothership campaign to give the PCs everything they could’ve wanted, only for them to slowly discover they have to go back to their dismal reality or die.

---

Obviously this is not an exhaustive list of Red Dwarf episodes that would make for good Mothership adventures (those last 2 especially would require a lot of work), but it’s something dammit. Maybe I will revisit this when my mental health make me come back to my ultimate comfort show. Either way there is nothing that could convince me this is not a match made in heaven the mind of a lunatic.