100 Ship System Failures & Dilemmas
On Quisicosas since 20 February 2026
Featured in the newsletter of
20 February 2026 (on Substack)
What it is about
100 Ship System Failures & Dilemmas
For Space Horror RPGs (Alien RPG, Mothership, and similar games)
Stop Killing Your Players with "Fix It or Die" Scenarios
Your ship is dying. The reactor's failing. The crew has two options: repair it or suffocate.
That's not a dilemma. That's just a timer.
Real tension comes from cascading technical problems that force impossible choices:
Do you vent the contaminated air and lose your oxygen reserves, or breathe the toxins and risk hallucinations during the crisis?
Do you seal the bulkhead and trap three crew members with the fire, or open it and risk the flames spreading shipwide?
Do you trust the malfunctioning AI that's "helping" by welding doors shut, or shut it down and lose your only navigation system?
This book gives you 100 ship malfunctions designed to create moral dilemmas, not death sentences.
Each entry presents a technical crisis where:
✓ Both choices have serious consequences
✓ Problems cascade into new complications
✓ Players must weigh survival against resources, ethics, and sanity
✓ There is no "correct" answer—only hard trade-offs
No prep needed. Roll or choose. Watch your players squirm.
Examples from the Book
@Chromium Whisper Syndrome | The recycler's catalytic filter degraded, releasing trace chromium particles into the air supply. Crew members experience vivid auditory phenomena: whispers of dead colleagues, phantom distress calls, machinery speaking in human voices. Oxygen levels remain normal. The filter requires twelve hours to replace while working in contaminated atmosphere. Paranoia spreads as crew question whether sounds are real or hallucinations.
@Cryopod Cascade Failure | Cryogenic systems malfunction, gradually warming twenty sleeper pods. Passengers will wake over the next forty-eight hours. Ship carries provisions for current crew only, insufficient oxygen recycling capacity for additional people. Crew must decide whether to manually terminate some pods before revival, attempt re-freezing despite system instability, or ration everything while hoping reinforcements arrive before starvation.
Compatible with any space horror RPG. No setting-specific content. Public domain scenarios.
Turn ship malfunctions into unforgettable moral nightmares.
If you liked this volume, you might be interested in the other books:
In the space opera series
