Also, man there are a lot of Mothsership adventures out there. How's one to choose? From what I've seen, people ask on reddit (or wherever), and get recommended the same few adventures, over and over. Good ones, mind you. Still, 90% of them gather virtual dust.

Never heard it described this way, but it fits!

Isn't the defining feature of an isekai the protagonist being genre- and mechanics-aware? Other than reincarnation by truck-kun, that is.
So any TTRPG is an isekai if the players are metagaming.
Which is a boring answer, I suppose, but not sure how much mileage you'd get from embracing it further.

If they try to back out of the one plan they settled on last game, I'll borrow a page from Blades and throw them straight into the compound, details be damned.

With no dice to throw at the problem, they're left to ponder the potential consequences of one plan after another, discarding them all. Consequences. In a Fate game. In an RPG!

Breathe. The whole reason I picked Fate was to get this group to stop fearing consequences. All part of the process.

Still with me? If these adventures sound like fun to you, or if you're looking for another adventure to review (one can dream), but just don't have the money right now, do let me know.

At the end of the day, I'd rather stuff I wrote was read and played.

Again, I wrote a few words about how the adventure is structured and what we were trying to do with it on my blog: ponderingsongames.com/2023/09/14/t...

My favorite part of the adventure is the hyperspace weirdness you encounter under specific conditions, scene-to-session in length, like this one:

How do you keep track of a sandbox campaign and which path of many the party took? With a flowchart. Naturally.

Then there's Terror Signal, our sandbox mystery campaign for Mothership. Haunted hyperspace! Cross-dimensional mystery! Dive into it as the main event, or go about other MoSH adventures and let terror signal come to you, one hyperjump at a time.

There're custom character sheets for no better reason than no one was there to stop me, a map made of hand-drawn lettering (same reason), and a terrible macaque. It's fun!
I wrote a bit more on it here: ponderingsongames.com/2025/07/09/s...

Ship of Fools is a one-shot Mothership adventure. Something has gone terribly wrong on a luxury space cruise ship Leviathanic, and you, the passengers, are its last hope. It's a bit unusual for MoSH, a black comedy rather than straight horror, hence all the colours, not the traditional monochrome.

If rules demand you define relationships among party members, that'll become an important part of the game. Can you have relationships without rules, or be sneaky? Sure. But rules push you to play a certain way. Tell certain stories. About heroes challenging dragons, or dying in a ditch.

Rules and procedures are not neutral, nor "true". They were written to get you to play a certain way. If the rules make combat deadly and swingy, you will tell stories about avoiding combat. If the rules pay attention to encumbrance, you'll care about your backpack.

At worst, splashy layout feels like it's trying to distract me from the boring text. Somehow, actual books hold our attention with just text - why do we not trust rulebooks to be able to communicate ideas with it?

I suspect the main reason is because they can't afford a lot of art, so they turn layout into art, another channel for communicating ideas. I've certainly done that in Terror Signal.