MD 405 – H.O.M.E.: Sly Motherships w/ Jarrett Crader (Space Penguin Ink)

MD 405 – H.O.M.E.: Sly Motherships w/ Jarrett Crader

On the top of a frozen mountaintop is H.O.M.E., the current nesting grounds of sentient spaceships called motherships. Each mothership lies hidden under the snow where it has burrowed a nest to incubate their kinderships in the cold. Nesting grounds can be found in any planet’s arctic conditions during their nesting season.

Each metallic black mothership is the size of a city, and has a birthing canal that slingshots out 1d4 kinderships at the conclusion of the birthing season. They launch out of this tube at rocket speed, flying into space before returning to their mothership.

The motherships defend themselves with a psychedelic avalanche of kaleidoscopic snow. When hit, you go on a psychedelic trip for 1d4 days. People use this as a recreational drug called S.N.O.W. 

Snow Angels are a thrill-seeking hobbyist group that follows the motherships to their birthing grounds to have a big gay dance party surrounding the birthing event. They sell mag-boots specifically designed to traverse a mothership’s exterior and subdue the effects of psychedelic avalanches to recreational levels.

Kinderships are one-of-a-kind smaller sentient spaceships that can fit a crew of 2-10 people, depending on the ship’s proportions. They grow very slowly, over hundreds of years, to eventually become a mothership. They will stay with their parental mothership until they find a crew that’s worthy of them.

Here are 1d6 kinderships… and there are so many more.

1. Caretaker: This symbiotic ship attaches to the mothership and feeds on her fuel lines. It travels to places where the mothership needs repairs, and sends out KNDR, plump humanoid robots with flesh, blood, curly hair and shoeless hairy mag-feet that maintain the mothership.

2. Maggot Brain: It’s a weird, funky, gross maggot of a ship. If you board the ship, it will try to infest you with burrowing cyber maggots that will give you a psychedelic freakout. If you survive, you have “the funk,” making you a distinct funktified individual who fights the status quo.

3. Nightmare: If you board this haunted liminal horror ship, it will try to take your soul, skin and blood (in that order).

4. Sleep Banana: Visitors can board this ship, which looks like a semi-peeled banana, to sleep. While you sleep, you can commune with the mothership. It’s a family affair.

5. Disco Discovery: This space party bus is shaped like a merkin-covered jock strap with thrusters, whose spherical hulls are covered in shards of mirror.

6. S.S. Frontier Psychiatry: A place to clear your mind and get right with your god, particularly after taking a dose of psychedelic avalanche.

Art: Tiger Wizard  Words: Steve Albertson

Story by: Andrew Bellury, Steve Albertson, Jarrett Crader

Appendix N: The Avalanches album Since I Left You, Sly and the Family Stone, Parliament Funkadelic, The High Crusade by Poul Anderson, James Bond title sequences, Dragonlance fantasy race kender, Battlestar Galactica, Dragonlance, Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs (Melsonian Arts Council), turtles nesting season, Event Horizon, Men in Black.