Bang, bang, he shot me down,
bang, bang, I hit the ground,
bang, bang, that awful sound,
bang, bang, my baby shot me down.
—Cher

HUNDREDS, my book of random tables for Mothership and other sci-fi RPGs, has a new major table: d100 Ranged Weapons, with illustrations by me! As always, this is a free update for everyone who already owns the book, and bumps the price up by $1 for those who don't yet. It's available now, weighing in at 60 pages, for $7 on itch.io and DriveThruRPG.

Some thoughts on combat

As with many RPGs, Mothership has more rules for combat than social interactions, but this doesn't mean it's a combat-focused game. In some of the best Mothership sessions I've run, not only was there no combat, but nobody even touched the dice.

The combat rules are there because combat needs to feel fair and unambiguous. Talking to, say, a religious zealot in a prison colony, or a micro-managing corporate handler, doesn't. Probably shouldn't. That's what puts the role-play in RPG, right?

Conversely, combat has this clarity because it is the main source of immediate danger to player characters: whether it's a corpo hit squad sent to "liquidate bad assets," or a mind-bending monster hunting them down, the combat rules will likely be the means by which they ultimately perish. You can't argue your way out of a bullet (or claw) to the brain, and the rules reflect that. People who play old-school RPGs say that if you're rolling the dice, you've already lost. The combat rules tell you why.

The table

This new d100 table brings a lot more dangerous equipment into the game world. And as with any weapons, they make the spaces they're introduced to more dangerous for everyone. While some players may cackle with power-fantasy glee at finding a MAG6050 "Shunt" Personnel Railgun (#76), it means that hostile forces may come equipped with the same...or worse.

You can roll d100 to roll on the whole table, or you can roll on the 10 sub-tables, which organize the weapons into Non-Lethal Weapons, Utility Guns, Cryptic Guns, Improvised Guns, Handguns, Mid-Length Guns, Long Guns, Heavy Weapons, Energy Weapons, and Weird Weapons. There's also a bonus d10 table of accessories.

Up next

The next table coming to HUNDREDS is a companion piece to this one: d100 Melee Weapons. Companion members already have it, and it'll be going public in a few weeks!

Members gallery

As a little something extra for members, here are high-resolution illustrations from the table. All were made in HEAVYPAINT for iPad.