Dreadnauts Takes Mothership's Panic Engine to the High Seas

What happens when you take the isolation, vulnerability, and mounting dread of space horror and replace the cold, endless void with the vast, uncharted expanse of the open sea?

That is the starting point for Dreadnauts: Maiden Voyage, a nautical horror tabletop RPG launched during Gen Con by Plus One Experience and created by Brazilian game designer Luiz Ricon.

In Dreadnauts, the sea is your main antagonist. Players take the roles of sailors aboard weathered ships, venturing into unknown waters and facing storms, dead calms, isolation, hunger, exhaustion, and all the horrors lurking beneath the waves. The game draws inspiration from nautical horror classics such as Moby-Dick and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, as well as more contemporary works such as The Lighthouse and The Terror.

A Mothership-inspired game in the Age of Sail

Dreadnauts is a third-party, independent game adapting the Panic Engine rules from the award-winning Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG, by Tuesday Knight Games.

Keeping with the fast resolution, percentile mechanics, deadly combat, and escalating pressure familiar to Mothership players but transporting them into a supernatural version of the Age of Sail.

Player characters belong to one of four Stations: The Brass, The Deckhand, The Gunner, The Highbrow, each with distinctive strengths and weaknesses. The ship is a character in its own right, with players choosing upgrades, assembling their crew, and facing the hazards and horrors of the open sea.

The Zero Edition

Dreadnauts: Maiden Voyage is the game's Zero Edition, a 48-page A5 zine designed to establish the game's core ideas while gathering feedback for its continued development. It includes the essential rules and tools for play, along with random tables for generating characters, backgrounds, sea chests, tattoos, lucky charms, ships, crews, and the hazards encountered at sea.

What began as a small experiment in translating the dread and isolation of Mothership into a completely different genre has begun to attract a growing following, with a warm reception from players in RPG communities on Facebook and Reddit.

Dreadnauts set sail at Gen Con 2026 and is now available in print and digital editions from Plus One Experience.

Get Dreadnauts: Maiden Voyage: https://plusoneexp.com/products/dreadnauts-maiden-voyage

Sign up for The Hold, the game's free repository of downloadable material, playtest content: http://ttrpg.link/jointhecrew

News, updates, development notes, rules discussion, and behind-the-scenes looks are available at the author's Substack: https://hexplorerpg.substack.com/

Credits

Written and developed by: Luiz Ricon (Hexplore RPG)
Art and visual design: Mike Rieman
Editing: Chris Airiau
Published by: Plus One Experience