Temporal Tides: A Mothership RPG Adventure Zine

A “simple recovery job” leads to Sutki Station, a black-market salvage port where everything is already going wrong.

The missing freighter is here. So is its cargo: a strange artifact warping spacetime across the station. Workers are unionizing. Mercs are cracking down. And a half-lobotomized android is building kill bots for revenge.

Temporal Tides is a 44-page Mothership 1E adventure zine built around a living salvage station sandbox, four escalating clocks, and every terrible decision your crew throws at it. 

Sutki Station is tearing apart. While your crew explores the station, four situations advance towards catastrophe. The PCs can interfere, choose sides, make things worse, or attempt to ignore a problem completely. But it doesn't just go away if they look somewhere else.

The Time Bandit: A missing ship, an imprisoned crew, and stolen cargo. The freighter the PCs were hired to recover has been hidden, but its missing crew won't stay alive forever and neither will the evidence.

The Artifact: Risky experiments, temporal anomalies, and impending spacetime collapse. Something pulled out of deep space is responding to gamma radiation, and every experiment tears reality a little further apart.

The Revolt: Dead workers, union organizing, and a violent crackdown. The Roustabouts keep the station running, and the Zvezda Cossacks intend to keep them under control. But the balance of power is shifting.

The Kill Bots: A betrayed android, a private army, and deadly revenge. WLL-127 has spent months reassembling himself after his former crew tore him apart. Now his robot army is almost operational.

Get involved in one problem and another may advance without you. No two visits to Sutki Station end up the same.

There is no set path through Sutki Station. The PCs arrive with one job: recover the freighter the Time Bandit, its cargo, and any surviving crew. How they do that is their problem.

Search the station, make deals, break out prisoners, buy information, crawl through abandoned tunnels, steal the ship back, side with the workers, side with the mercenaries, sell them all out, and lose it all gambling in the Cantina while spacetime collapses. The choice is yours, and the clocks move forward regardless.

Sutki Station is an interconnected environment filled with competing goals rather than a scripted sequence of encounters. The PCs decide what to investigate, who to trust, and which problems to make their own.

Rumours, NPC motives, random encounters, cargo, salvage, factions, and escalating events bring the station alive and keep the game moving. Minimal prep required.

Temporal Tides can be run as a focused 3-4 session scenario, or become a permanent part of your sector map for reoccurring shore leave, sketchy repairs, overpriced jump fuel, and bad decisions.

Temporal Tides is a complete adventure location with enough moving parts to keep it useful after the original job is done.

Sutki Station: Explore 16 locations connected across a hollowed-out asteroid, including the Ship Dock, Breaking Bay, Bazaar, Prison Box, Support Systems, Engineering Lab, Salvage Yard, and abandoned mining tunnels. 

The missing freighter, the Time Bandit, is its own environment, slowly deteriorating from the lingering temporal distortions aboard.

Two Factions, Lots of Problems: The Zvezda Cossacks are former corporate mercenaries running Sutki Station as an illegal salvage yard. The Roustabouts are the shipbreakers, mechanics, and workers who keep the lights on and the O2 breathable, and they're sick of the arrangement.

Named NPCs on both sides have their own motivations, schemes, and grudges.

Warden Tools: Four escalating timelines, station rumours, random encounters, shipbreaking and salvage, stolen cargo, alien relics, gambling rules, repair services, black-market goods, and loads of ways for the PCs to make everything worse.

Temporal Horror: The Artifact is something humanity doesn't understand and probably shouldn't. Gamma radiation triggers increasingly intense spacetime anomalies. Rooms repeat themselves, the dead return to life, and you can catch glimpses of places and times from far beyond.

Sutki Station is built from an abandoned mining facility, welded-together ship hulls, and decades of corporate neglect.

Built for the table, locations put the important information first where the Warden needs it. People, equipment, opportunities, and danger connect each location to other parts of the station.

Each clock has a clear escalation path. Advance them between sessions or when the crew pushes them forward.

Use the spacetime anomaly table to introduce temporal horror throughout the station, or let the PCs deliberately trigger it when they discover The Artifact.

The Time Bandit is missing and worth a lot of money. But someone else already has plans for it.

Writing, editing, illustration, and layout for Temporal Tides are complete, and we have a physical test print in hand. This campaign funds the print run and fulfillment of the finished adventure.

The finished book is 44 pages in a US half-letter format.

• $15 CAD - PDF
  • The complete Temporal Tides adventure zine in digital format.
• $30 CAD - Print + PDF
  • The complete Temporal Tides adventure zine in print and digital.
• $55 CAD - Zine and Worms Box Set - Print + PDF
  • The Temporal Tides zine, plus the Worms! Worms! Worms! box set containing five wormy trifold one-shots, both in print and digital.
• $60 CAD - Digital Adventure Vault
  • Temporal Tides, plus the Terry Herc Games Mothership collection in digital format.
• $110 CAD - Print Adventure Vault
  • Temporal Tides, plus the Terry Herc Games Mothership collection in print and digital.

Already own some of our adventures? Miss a few along the way? Select products are available as add-ons during this campaign, but most of these are not planned for another print run. When the remaining copies are gone, they're gone.

Check the add-ons available for your pledge, including these special offers:

• What Was Left To Rot - $15 PDF or $30 Print + PDF
  • Sentenced to hard labour, your prison transport crashes and you awaken to a living nightmare.
• 1d100 Zine Bundle - $10 PDF or $25 Print + PDF
  • A pair of system neutral sci-fi zine for quests, encounters, and adventures.
• NEW - Mothership Pamphlet Bundle - $6 PDF or $10 Print + PDF
  • Available in print for the first time, get Hyperspace Hazards and My Body of Work!

Temporal Tides will be printed locally in Calgary and shipped by our Calgary fulfilment partner. Our back catalogue products are already printed and in inventory. Digital fulfilment will be through DriveThruRPG. 

Shipping

Shipping and applicable taxes are not included in the pledge prices and will be collected through Kickstarter's Pledge Manager.

Physical rewards are currently available to backers only in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Digital rewards are available worldwide.

We are evaluating options to add additional countries for physical rewards. We will announce any additional shipping destinations if they become available.

Current shipping estimates are approximately $15 CAD within Canada and $25 CAD for other supported countries, with +$5 CAD for orders containing Worms! Worms! Worms!. These are estimates, and final charges may vary based on carrier rates and the contents of your order.

International backers may also be responsible for duties, tariffs, brokerage, or other import fees assessed by their destination country.

Timeline

• October 2026: Campaign complete.
• November 2026: Pledge manager opens, addresses finalized, shipping costs collected.
• December 2026: Digital rewards are delivered through DriveThruRPG, physical rewards prepped for shipment.
• January 2027: Physical fulfillment begins.

Terry Herc is a writer, designer, and publisher behind Terry Herc Games. He has run and delivered multiple crowdfunding campaigns over the last 8 years including Worms! Worms! Worms!, What Was Left To Rot, Orbital Debris, and Stargazer Keep. 

Lone Archivist is a graphic designer and layout artist based in Southern California, responsible for bringing Temporal Tides' industrial blueprint aesthetic to life. His work includes writing and design for a handful of third-party Mothership modules including Primeval, What We Give To Alien Gods, In Other Waters: Tidebreak, and Hull Breach. 

Amy Lancaster is an editor based in Australia, who has worked on multiple projects for Terry Herc Games and Skinkworks Games.

Robert Patching is a fantasy and science fiction illustrator based in the UK, providing original artwork for Temporal Tides.

CONTENT WARNING: Temporal Tides contains themes including murder, exploitation of humans, imprisonment, mental distress, labour conflict, gambling, and drug usage.