Nementia (5/22/2026)

GM: Sean Nittner
Players: David Brubeck, Jerry McCoy, Tim Callender, Sveta Bodapati, Matthew Laycock
System: Mothership (Gradient Descent)

Nementia. The post-distraction effort to recall the reason you’re feeling particularly anxious or angry or excited, trying to retrace your sequence of thoughts like a kid gathering the string of a downed kite. – Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by by John Koenig

The sound of a thousand screaming, damaged voices over a colossal mountain of twitching, broken bodies. These are your first experiences aboard the CLOUDBANK Synthetics Production Facility, AKA “The Deep.”

This is the third time I’ve run this Mothership game (with a few variations each time) and it continues to be an absolute delight. I decided to add another player to the game and I’m so glad I did. Sveta and both of her Nancy Storrs were incredible.

• Obed Ferreri, the engineer (David)
• Doll Hinzman, a teamster looking out themself (Matthew)
• Colt Hinzman, a military advisor (Tim)
• Eden Bird, an AI developer (Jerry)
• Nancy Storrs, a stern mechanic (Sveta)

Things we leaned in play a the last survivors of Humanity 1.0 struggled with their past traumas:

• Obed wanted to be a doctor when he arrived at Cloudbank because his sister Dela died of Huntington’s and he wanted to find a cure so no one else would suffer from him. The Chief Medical Officer Walters denied him him the post.
• Doll told Obed when he first got here “in order for the cream to rise to the top, something has to sink.”
• Eden arrived at the station with her brother Guntharius, who everyone called Gunther, but she called Gunny. The last thing she said to him was “Keep your head down. If they shoot me, who will look after you?”
• Nancy never felt like she belongs on Cloudbank because she didn’t want to climb the corporate ladder, but instead wanted to be a starship pilot. The one person who believed in her was her team lead Renee.
• Colt, who was caught by his father when was masturbating as a young child…and somehow MONARCH knew.

Some wonderful moments:

• Doll stepping on someone to get out, only to realize it was another Doll trying to pull them down.
• The moment when Renee begged Nancy to kill her and Nancy complied without hesitation.
• Eden’s first interface with MONA, now MONARCH, revealing all her past indiscretions.
• Playing a forgotten android with a synthetic voice that just wanted to help and get free.
• Playing a forgotten android with a melted face that told Eden to keep her head down, which froze her in place.
• The first Nancy Storrs being pulled apart by the disassembly claws, an the second Nancy Storrs settling for nothing but destroying MONARCH, but nobody trusted her. “Your Nancy is probably dead.”
• The philosophical debates between Doll who didn’t care if he was a synthetic entity or not, he wanted to be free, and Nancy who wasn’t sure if she was human or not, but feared that any one escaping would only serve MONARCH’s will.
• Colt creating a path through final testing by firing a pulse rifle he recovered from Nancy to destroy the Security Androids…or at least buy some time as they tore him apart.