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The look of your scifi campaign


tkdguy

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One of the things I seem to have trouble conveying to my players is how things appear in my games. How do buildings and spacecraft look? What are people wearing? After all, Star Wars and Star Trek look quite different from each other. My game, being set in the near future, wouldn't resemble either one.

 

I was watching 2001: A Space Odyssey the other day and pretty much everything clicked. Clavius Station and the Discovery One would be perfect for my game, as would the space station and space plane.

 

Other visuals would include Babylon 5, as O'Neill Cylinders do exist in my game. The uniforms look good too. Military spacecraft look like the Cold Navy line of miniatures, and shipboard life would be much like the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series.

 

How do your SF games look like?

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My Fantasy: Gilded Age Traveller (as mentioned in another thread). It looks like traveling on the Titanic. Gleaming polished woodwork and brass and thick carpeting, and delicate china and silverware and crystal drinking glasses and plushly upholstered easy chairs and sofas in the lounge. With men in elaborate suits and hats, wearing muttonchops and other antique beard styles, and ceremonial (but probably still quite useful) swords and handguns that look like early pistols (easy to aim--and with lasers, you don't need a grip at near right-angles to the barrel to feed bullets or deal with recoil....). At least in First Class. The lower decks get more...utilitarian.

 

In practice: it would probably look a lot like Eclipse Phase. Ridiculously potent electronics/computers, genetic engineering, nanotech and whatnot inside habitats and spacecraft--but still using old-fashioned reaction drives for propulsion and spin gravity because FTL and artificial gravity are no more than wishful thinking.

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My games looked like Traveller and Star Frontiers because that's what we played. ;) But visually that would boil down to a sort of Art Deco, pulp space opera--kind of like the Star Wars prequels, though I hate to admit it. If I were to spin up an entirely original campaign, it would look like that, but with more cybernetics.

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I always liked the visuals for the new Battlestar Galactica and that is basically how I imagine it. I've also used screen grabs from X3: Reunion and X3: Terran Conflict for some of the space ships.

 

Of course, that is present society. I have (had) an ancient race that is a direct rip from the Starcraft Protoss and their ruins look like techno-Mayan structures. I also have another race that is based roughly on the alien grays (I used one of the races from Terran Empire but can't remember the name) who are infinitely curious but have little long-term commitment. They built some pretty amazing structures like cities that float on the outer atmosphere of a super sized rock planet. They also managed to "layer" the gases so that human breathable ones are on the same basic layer as the floating cities. The further down you go, the higher the atmospheric pressure and toxicity of the atmosphere. The cities themselves look like Manaan from Star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic.

 

I adapted the Vrusk from Star Frontiers into a distinct race. Their structures are elaborate, bio-mechanical hives. Even their ships are built that way. The best visual would be a mixture of the architecture from the video game Prey with some callbacks to Aliens.

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Well, my last SF campaign, "A Princess of Sard," was Planetary Romance with a strong Barsoom feel. Except the world of Sard was in a universe where I tried to work out somewhat internally consistent rubber science and technology. So... Sword and Blaster, but with background reasons for stuff. Not quite at the "Boris" level of visuals, but pretty close in spots.

 

Dean Shomshak

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  • 1 month later...

My setting is pretty extensive, so the look varies considerably depending on where the characters may find themselves.

 

Probablynthe closest analogy is it is a cross between Star Wars, Bab5, Cowboybeebop and Firefly in look, feel and technology with splashes of Jupiter Ascending, Gundam, Macross and BSG.

 

My setting includes lots of Aliens (not as many as Star Wars, there are about 100 in my setting) many varying technology levels coexisting with frontier areas that look like firefly, cowboy beebop, with core zones that look like Coruscant, and alien societies that look like Jupiter Ascending.

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Honestly when I start campaigns I look for what I consider a fixed point in the game and I build my images off of that.  Like in my steampunk adventure I had looked up steampunk flying machines and fond a great pic of an airplane with two coal exhaust stacks with black smoke billowing out of it as it flew through the sky.  It was the design piece that influenced all of my descriptions.  The web is a great assist in successfully navigating the descriptive of campaigns and individual scenes with simple pics of highlighted items it gets your descriptive juices flowing and your players tend in to see something more representative of what you are trying to convey.

post-5682-0-68572900-1453616035_thumb.jpg

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Many sci-fi universes are envisioned as the future of the present.  As such, they reflect the styles and the architecture of the present.  For instance, look at most 1970s sci-fi, and you'll see a lot of brutalist architecture.  Big, concrete buildings surrounded by windswept plazas.  

 

Daily-Decorum-Loves-Brutalist-Architectu

 

It looked new and futuristic when they were making the movies.  So "future cities" would be entirely composed of stuff like this, because it was new.  Then, in the real world, people got really sick of that ugly ass style and switched to other stuff.  Today, sci-fi futures usually have big, gleaming blue glass towers, because that's what architects are making today.

 

In the city of the future, everything looks like the newest thing we have today.

 

Obviously, you can get retro-futures, steampunk or art deco themed.  But usually it's as if current design trends lasted for 100+ years.

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It's scary that the photo of that building looks like my old school (really!). I'm not a fan of Brutalist architecture either.

 

However, I have been thinking of a couple of settings lately. One would be science fantasy with knights and maybe wizards. Weapons would be like Star Wars' lightsabers and bowcasters, although the knights would not be Force users. Other elements would include floating castles, flying ships (sailing ships, not dirigibles), and robotic horses, like the Galaxy Rangers cartoon. Not very original, but good for a session or two.

 

Another would be more like a sword and planet campaign, where the heroes fight with vibroblades and needler guns. The setting would be post-apocalyptic. It's something like Thundarr the Barbarian, although nowhere near as gonzo. 

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My Space Opera campaign, Dark Universe has a plethora of looks I associate with it. It consists of a large human dominated Federation which spans well over a hundred worlds spread mostly throughout the Orion arm of the galaxy.

 

It is set 400 years into the future, where humans have had interstellar travel for 350 years. The first 200 or so years consisted of massive human expansion and exploration of the stars nearest Sol. Several wars resulted due to humanity's bumbling and stumbling about. Because of said wars (especially the 1st Drak war) the fledgling Terran Federation lost contact with several of its eldest and most distant colonies for well over 2 centuries, thus many of the colonies survived and expanded despite the Terran government and many divergent cultures developed as a result.

 

However, contact has been made with many of the lost colonies within the past hundred years or so and more are being added to the Federation every year as well as new colonies being established.

 

The Terran Federation has rebranded itself as the Federation of Free Planets (FFP, though most simply referr to it as the Federation) because it includes a couple of dozen alien worlds who have joined with the Federation for mutual assistance and protection from the more hostile forces in the galaxy (such as the aforementioned Drak...aggressive alien humanoid reptilians)

 

The Federation itself is broken down into sectors....each about 20 by 20 by 20 Parsecs in volume, each sector holding several dozen inhabited worlds and systems which provide much needed resources.

 

There is the Terran Sector, where the Sol system and its nearest stellar neighbors reside. The Corporate sector, a very resource rich section of the galaxy into which many corporate entities set up during the earliest days of interstellar expansion. It is the most technologically advanced sector in the galaxy. The Phoenix Sector, which is Federation frontier, named for the Phoenix nebula, the most omnipresent feature in the sector. This sector bumps up against another human civilization which broke away during the initial stage of interstellar travel. The Phoenix Domain,

A totalitarian monarchy, they hold power over a dozen worlds in the region and command a large fleet of mighty ships. Attempts at diplomacy to persuade them to join the Federation have failed. (They dont want to give up slavery and their dominion over subject worlds)

The Saga sector sits next to the Phoenix Sector and is another frontier region on the edge of Federation controlled territory. This sector borders Drak Empire territory and is still subject to occasional raids.

The old Frontier sector sits on the opposite side of the Terran sector from the Phoenix and Saga sector (Coreward instead of Spinward) and holds a lot of stable developing colonies. Technology is not as developed here as it is in the core sectors but condistions are improving.

Perseus sector includes the first colonies established in the nearby (relaatively speaking) Perseus arm. Separated by a sparsely populated void known as the gunnigagap. Colonies were established by traveling the 6500 parsec distance via Stargate instead of the relatively slow Hyperspace travel of early interplanetary ships. Exploration of the Pereus arm is a bustling industry and many new alien cultures are encountered monthly, some of whom are eager to join the expanding Federation, and others who are content to be left to their own devicesthe_day.jpg

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The Corporate sector, being both one of the oldest human colonized regions and the most technologically advanced sector, is replete with planets sporting sprawling citiscapes with skyscrapers which touch the highest elevations, waterborne cities which drift with the tides and impressive floating cities in the upper atmospheres of less hostile gas giants and super earths.

 

Cityscape_by_kerembeyit.jpg

 

The sky in such cities is filled with vehicles, anti-grav cars with reactionless drive systems, the population always rushing about on some urgent business

 

77782.jpg

 

Even the upper atmosphere of a gas giant is fair game in this sector. No engineering feet is too great...or too expensive as long as it is suitably impressive to ones corporate rivals.

 

2f062953eec504a306a18bca1e99282b.jpg

 

But even though the wealth of the corporate worlds are obvious and palpable, the hand of poverty and squalor are felt, even here...

 

dystopia_by_jonasdero-d6xrvil.jpg

 

And the Police State is ever present, enforcing the dictates of the governing corporate entity with and iron fist (literally, considering most officers on corporate sponsered worlds are heavily cybered)

 

wallpaper-1779299.jpg

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  • 2 weeks later...

It's scary that the photo of that building looks like my old school (really!). I'm not a fan of Brutalist architecture either.

 

However, I have been thinking of a couple of settings lately. One would be science fantasy with knights and maybe wizards. Weapons would be like Star Wars' lightsabers and bowcasters, although the knights would not be Force users. Other elements would include floating castles, flying ships (sailing ships, not dirigibles), and robotic horses, like the Galaxy Rangers cartoon. Not very original, but good for a session or two.

 

Another would be more like a sword and planet campaign, where the heroes fight with vibroblades and needler guns. The setting would be post-apocalyptic. It's something like Thundarr the Barbarian, although nowhere near as gonzo. 

 

The science fantasy would include Eidolon from the Shadow World setting.

 

http://img01.deviantart.net/8108/i/2011/046/a/c/eidolon_sky_city_and_sky_ship_by_cj_productions-d39loeu.jpg

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The only SF campaign I ran, "A Princess of Sard," was very much a sword-and-blaster homage to Barsoom, Akers' "Scorpio" series, and other Planetary Romances. (Though it fit within a larger Space Opera setting, and I tried to keep the rubber science and rubber tech a bit more rigorous than usual for Planetary Romance.) As such, the visual style for the world of Sard was lush and fantastical with weird beasts, cities of glass towers, scantily clad heroes, Art Deco rayguns, the whole schmear. Michael Whelan's covers for the Barsoom novels would make a good reference.

 

Dean Shomshak

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The last (short-lived) SF game I ran was very much Aliens meets Starship Troopers, at least visually. I cribbed a lot of material from Hero's Alien Wars setting, but for ships we used miniatures from Full Thrust/Ground Zero Games, specifically the UNSC. (We didn't actually use minis for the game, just for the "this is what ships look like" visuals.

 

http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/37876-full-thrust-unsc-fleet/

 

Currently I'm playing in a Star Wars game. It looks a lot like Star Wars - go figure.

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