New Mothership AP "Proxy Error" Tackles AI as a Villain
This season of Roll For Distraction might actually have a moral to the story.
Roll for Distraction has just started their new actual play season, Proxy Error, which will be a campaign of the sci-fi horror system Mothership! Mothership is a narrative-focused horror system about the dangers of capitalism in space, with inspiration from classic stories such as Alien, The Thing, and Event Horizon. The gang is playing as a hastily-assembled party of prisoners under the boot of an evil megacorporation, fighting to wipe away their debts and criminal records. They'll be exploring an abandoned research station, and contending with an AI that's a bit different than the kind you're probably used to from movies like Terminator. Without getting into spoilers, this AI is coming for much more than just the jobs of the people on the Lethe Research Base...
You can watch the first episode here: YouTube | Spotify
Something different we're trying this season is that once we are done playing this campaign, you’ll be able to buy it as a module through Tuesday Knight Games' third party publishing program! Shoutout to Daniel from Tuesday Knight Games for helping us get that set up. It will be a roughly 50-page zine, filled with art not generated by an AI, containing all you need to replicate the adventure for your friends. If you’re reading from the distant future, check the YouTube video's description for a link. If you came here after buying it, hey, thanks for the money, I hope your campaign goes well. If you’re reading while the show is still new, stay subscribed to Spellbook Gaming; we’ll have info on where to get it sometime around the season finale.
Roll for Distraction features six IRL friends who decided to start documenting their escapades during the pandemic, when they were forced to play remotely. While their adventures began with Dungeons & Dragons, the show was completely reformatted after the OGL fiasco. Rather than continuing their D&D games, the group shifted its focus to be about discovering what else is out there, with short campaigns highlighting less well known systems.
They started with a Cyberpunk RED campaign titled The Family Jewels, which followed a family planning a heist against their greedy corpo grandfather. Then they played a Lancer campaign titled The Lost Colony, which was a runaway success that got their YouTube channel from under 300 subscribers to over 1000 in about a month. Next they played a game of Monster of the Week titled The Devil You Know, which followed college students in New Jersey hunting (and being hunted by) the Jersey Devil. After that, they a played of game Salvage Union called Starfall, where they played as post-apocalyptic mech pilots scouring a wasteland for a mythical city. Most recently, they played a game of Honor + Intrigue called The Last Hope, which followed a crew of Caribbean pirates in the twilight of their golden age.
Seasons run for around 10 episodes, and each episode is edited to be about 1 hour in length, so the time investment is comparable to a season of a typical streaming show. Episodes come out every other Friday at 10:00 AM EST, on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Podbean. YouTube members can watch new episodes 24 hours early. The show’s guiding mantra is “unprofessional gameplay, presented professionally”, meaning that while we keep all the puns, jokes, and titular distractions in the edit, we still make sure to create a pleasant audio-visual experience and tell a good story.
