Mothership RPG Terminal Setup Guide

Why Diegetic Terminals for Mothership?

Mothership is a game about dread, stress, and the slow erosion of hope aboard a ship that is almost certainly going to kill you. The Warden's job is to make that ship feel real. A live ship terminal (one that displays hull breach warnings, locks airlocks, and plays emergency klaxons in real time) does more for that feeling than any description can.

Diegetic Terminals syncs every button press and state change to all players instantly. When the Warden triggers a critical atmosphere effect, every player at the table sees it simultaneously, without the Warden narrating "the screen flickers." The screen just flickers.

Step 1: Choose the Spaceship Theme

From Terminal Settings (the palette icon in the terminal header), select Spaceship . This preset applies:

• › Blue-white cold lighting on a dark background: the look of a working ship's computer
• ›Monospace terminal font with a clinical, utilitarian feel
• ›Spaceship sound theme for button interactions and door events
• ›Door buttons styled as blast-door hatches

For a more degraded, derelict aesthetic, enable Signal Degradation and bump the CRT intensity. This works especially well for hulks, stations, or any ship that has been out of contact too long.

Step 2: Button Layout for Mothership

Mothership's core tension runs through systems and stress. A terminal layout organized around ship systems gives the Warden a control panel that mirrors the fiction:

Rename everything to match your module. Running The Haunting of Ypsilon 14? Your airlock is Ypsilon 14 Bay Door. Running A Pound of Flesh? Chrysalis Medical Station systems fill Column A. The labels are yours.

Step 3: Warden Access Controls

In Mothership, the Warden controls what crew members have access to. Set this up so the fiction maps directly to terminal permissions:

• 1. Add each player as an Operator. They sign in from their own device, whether phone, laptop, or tablet, and see the terminal update in real time.
• 2. Set crew members to Can Operate so they can trigger buttons. Use Password Protected buttons for restricted systems that require an access code. Give players the code through play, not before the session.
• 3. Use the Door button type for airlocks and blast doors. The Warden controls whether they can be opened; players can attempt to interact but the Warden has final say from the host interface.
• 4. Enable Lock on Owner Disconnect . If the Warden closes the terminal, everything goes dark, which is either a useful safety net or a moment of planned drama.

Step 4: Stress Escalation with the Atmosphere Panel

Mothership runs on stress and panic. The Atmosphere panel lets the Warden push the dread dial without saying a word:

• › Switch to Warning Mode when a threat is detected. Every player's screen shifts to amber warning colors simultaneously, no narration needed.
• ›Critical Mode escalates to red for immediate danger: hull breach, creature contact, reactor failure.
• ›Glitch effects simulate corrupted data, compromised systems, or an intelligence that has taken over the ship's computer.
• › Save stress escalation sequences as Macros . For example, "Hull Breach" triggers critical mode, a hull alarm audio button, and locks the airlock door buttons in one click.

Countdown Timer: Emergency Decompression

Mothership runs on countdowns. Oxygen depleting. Reactor overloading. The monster is three rounds away. Diegetic Terminals' built-in countdown timer syncs to every player's screen in real time.

Open it from the stopwatch icon, set a duration, and choose your expiry action: Shutdown for a system power-down, Break for catastrophic failure, or Explode for a reactor overload. Each plays a synchronized audio-visual effect that every player sees at the same moment.

Save countdowns as macros. The "Decompression" macro could start a 3-minute countdown with the Break ending, while simultaneously triggering critical atmosphere and locking the airlock, all in one button press.

A Sample Scene: The Signal from Cargo Bay 4

Picture this at the table: the ship's AI reports a hull breach in Cargo Bay 4, and nobody wants to go check. The Warden fires the "Hull Breach" macro: Critical Mode floods every screen red, the Hull Breach Alert audio button starts blaring, and the Emergency Bulkhead door button locks itself shut. The crew is now sealed out of Cargo Bay 4 with something moving around inside it, and the terminal told them so without a word from the Warden.

When a character finally overrides the bulkhead from the terminal (a Hull Engineering roll, maybe), the Warden starts a 2-minute countdown with a Break expiry. The door unseals right as the timer hits zero, and whatever stress the panic-check math already piled onto the table gets one more twist as the bulkhead groans open on cue.

Online vs. In-Person for Mothership