Dark Galactic Champions

[GamePhil]

Anyone likely to play in the game, don't read this thread. You know who you are, and so do I, and there will be penalties

 

You Have Been Warned.

 

I have been toying with the idea of running a Dark Champions game (or several, though probably not a full campaign) in the Galactic Champions time period. The characters would be built on DC guidelines or a little tougher, and deal with the criminal element in the 31st Century.

 

This means that we might have a DC group with disintegrators.

 

However, much as I might like to run it, I am completely at a loss for plot seeds. Please assist me in this. The type of game I'm leaning toward is a 31st Century techno-thriller, somewhat like Larry Niven's Gil Hamilton stories, perhaps.

[Metaphysician]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

Me, if I were to do this, I'd up the point total to 300-350, mostly to help make a bigger difference compared with ordinary mooks bearing advanced tech. Then again, I like superskills, and any opportunity to stock up on them.

 

As for adventure ideas: one possible source for ideas is the earlier Lensmen stories ( the ones focused on opposing the pirate gangs and zwilniks ).

[Chuckg]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

DC's old pre-crisis WANDERERS title, set in the future of the Legion, was something like this. Well, except for Quantum Queen, who totally blew the DC power curve...

[OddHat]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

The Sten books. Have them fight petty crooks and criminals, then tougher criminals, then political criminals who accuse them of serving a corrupt empire and an insane emperor. Then let them realize that, as twisted as they were, the political criminals had a point. Last set of story arcs involve trying to peacefully force a transition to a constitutional monarchy.

[assault]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

The old DC L.E.G.I.O.N. 89/90/whatever series would be a good source, too. It covered every power level you could mention, from non-powered normals right up to Lar Gand and Lobo.

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

Use the same plot seeds you would for a regular DC game, just up the technology.

 

Instead of gangs dealing crack, you have gangs dealing in Denebian Lolo Leaf. Instead of smugglers carrying in Stingers and AK-47s, you have smugglers carrying in phased plasma rifles in the 40 watt range. Instead of corrupt city officials, you have corrupt orbital station officials.

 

Stories are really all the same once you get past the window dressing.

[Koshka]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

As for adventure ideas: one possible source for ideas is the earlier Lensmen stories ( the ones focused on opposing the pirate gangs and zwilniks ).

 

The Ship Who Searched is only average IMHO, but has some nice bits on artifact smuggling you could probably use -- and it's both paperback and several years old, so getting it cheap at the used book store is likely. The suggestion that one group might be smuggling drugs disguised as pieces of ceramics from an archaological dig is a wonderful fit for a DC game.

[Savinien]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

Use the same plot seeds you would for a regular DC game, just up the technology.

 

Instead of gangs dealing crack, you have gangs dealing in Denebian Lolo Leaf. Instead of smugglers carrying in Stingers and AK-47s, you have smugglers carrying in phased plasma rifles in the 40 watt range. Instead of corrupt city officials, you have corrupt orbital station officials.

 

Stories are really all the same once you get past the window dressing.

 

This goes right along with what I thought when first reading this thread. I would assume that any mercantile businesses in this setting would have advanced security systems that would lead to advanced methods of breaking the systems. The stories are all pretty much the same, it's only the trappings that make them different.

 

Don't get me wrong, though. I like the idea of playing a relative normal in the Galactic Champions setting. The gap between normal and meta is all the more evidenced, though the technology bridges it simarily as it does in modern DC.

[pinecone]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

Yea human nature is going to be the same in the future, so most DC adventures are going to work, just with differant gizmos. So instead of pimps hanging out in bus stations to latch onto runaways, you've got illicit sex-slave bioroids.......

[Trencher]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

Use ordinary sci fi plots just throw in a lot of drug use, child abuse, corruption, dirt, grime and malfunctioning maintenances robots.

[GamePhil]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

I shall attempt to be more clear:

 

I am looking for plot seeds that involve the technology of the 31st Century, not merely as window dressing, but as key to solving the crime. So, while I would certainly have the drug smugglers carrying some alien plant or high-tech synthetic, it's how they successfully smuggle it past all the advanced sensor systems and such that makes the difference between this game and a regular DC game with different trappings. That's what the heroes have to figure out and counter.

 

Of course, once they figure that out, countering it may simply be a matter of gunning down the smugglers. So it goes.

 

As examples, I mentioned the Gil Hamilton short stories by Larry Niven. Another example is a mystery episode on Deep Space 9, a locked door mystery where the doctor scanned the room and found only genetic material from the victim. As it turned out, the victim was a clone of a man who was attempting to fake his own death.

 

Also, when I say Dark Champions, I'm talking about the action/adventure that is the heart of that supplement. It will still be the Galactic Champions era, and although the heroes will be dealing with the seemier side of that time period, the seemier side is not so overt or common as it would be in a galaxy-wide Hudson City campaign (which is not without interest, but isn't what I'm shooting for at the moment).

 

Thanks for all the feedback!

[Steve Long]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

Hmmm. Let's see. How about:

 

--psionic smuggling of information by telepathically planting it in the heads of unknowing travelers

 

--using replicator tech to "transform" contraband into innocuous items in such a way that the item can be transferred back with another properly wired and programmed replicator

 

--murder by reprogramming a replicator to produce minor variations in a food that aren't apparent to taste, but render the food poisonous (or at least fatal disease-causing) to a particular alien species

 

--white slavery via the smuggling of genetic material that can then be quickly "regrown" into a full, exploitable, human being

 

--borrowing an idea from the excellent comic EVANGELINE, the illegal growing of the clones of an idiot-savant who is an expert hyper-navigator

 

Hope those help!

[GamePhil]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

--borrowing an idea from the excellent comic EVANGELINE, the illegal growing of the clones of an idiot-savant who is an expert hyper-navigator

 

And here I thought I was the only one that ever read that comic...

[Trencher]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

What goes on in the deep dark corners of space?

In a remote solar system an evil corporation has built up an illegal clone lab. It produces clones who are brainwashed into working without pay. The clones are trained to make more clone labs and in general to colonize the planets, harvesting all the resources in the solar system. The project's progress is a little slow at first but when it takes off it takes off! After fifty years or so the corp. has a whole planet to do their bidding. There is only one problem some clones beats the brainwashing and tries to escape the Orwellian world. The corporation’s hit squad tracks the runaway clones so to keep the projects existence secret.

[Steve Long]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

And here I thought I was the only one that ever read that comic...

 

Well, I imagine you and I were two of the few. It wasn't perfect, but as Chuck Dixon's earliest work that I know of (he was still signing his name "Charles Dixon," IIRC), it definitely shows his promise.

[fbdaury]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

As a comic reference, you might want to check out old Star Slammers and Alien Legion issues, the slammers I don't know enough to talk about but the Legion was a sort of future french foreign legion type of set-up where they would have to take on suicide missions- like the future's Dirty Dozen.

[Supreme Serpent]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

Wanton property destruction that is actually theft - criminal has rigged a teleporter beam that looks like/leaves effect similar to a disintegrator. Or, has a "disintegration/reintegration" gun that can later reassemble whatever it blasted.

 

Illicit terraforming of a world to make it uninhabitable by the current residents, so the perpetrators can move in themselves, get unrestricted access to resource X, etc.

 

Improved genetic scanners make it possible for serial killers to be VERY selective of choice of targets.

 

Old Judge Dredd stuff could be useful too. Future-shock - people who can't fit in to the super-high-tech society and go nuts. People turning to crime simply from boredom - everything provided, no reason to do anything. Crazy trends (not necessarily crimes, but background stuff) like the "Ugly Clinics" where people go to get surgery/treatments to become truely grotesque in order to stand out more.

 

Crimes against aliens that are sentient, but not recognized as such by the authorities and therefore have few if any rights/protection.

[Koshka]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

--using replicator tech to "transform" contraband into innocuous items in such a way that the item can be transferred back with another properly wired and programmed replicator

 

Two assumptions coming up:

1) Replicators need to be "told" somehow what they're making.

2) Governments are taking advantage of assumption 1 to keep unauthorized people from whipping up dangerous items in their home replicators.

 

Given those assumptions, why bother smuggling items when you can stroll through customs with a perfectly legal MP3(000) player that has instructions coded into Track 7 to make a kitchen replicator pump out ultramethamphetamine?

[RDU Neil]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

And here I thought I was the only one that ever read that comic...

 

Are you kidding? I have a full run, minus one issue. I especially like the fact that Matthew Sweet wrote an entire song about that character on his Girlfriend CD. Early Chuck Dixon... great stuff.

[RDU Neil]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

Warren Ellis' current mini-series Ocean is a great s-f mystery thriller. Not really a supers style, but provides great atmosphere.

 

One thing that can work is the introduction of "ancient tech" or the like. Say the badguys are doing something, and the result is obvious, but the method can't be explained... clues to this kind of event are known only to a few rare researches on Gamemede III, who have spent several years translating artifacts of a long dead race... and the current events are eerily similar to events that occurred right before the race disappeared/was wiped out, whatever.

 

Sounds like a fun campaign... but a lot of work for the GM. Good luck, and drop back in to let us know how it went.

[Metaphysician]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

A sort of inverse: crimes done using low tech means to evade certain means of scrutiny. Simple example would be evading energy-supply detectors and such that normally screen for blasters. . . by carrying in a small chemically-powered pistol. Or, maybe you smuggle information in your personal computer. . .not in the memory, where it might be detected if you get inspected, but on paper stuffed inside the case.

[The Mad GM]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

Take a theme of technology, extrapolate outward, and twist into a desired shape:

 

Nano-technology

1. A cyber-organic virus that simulates a known drug and is contagious.

2. Someone figures out how to reprogram the nano-bots that are in everyone's bloodstream since birth - with a wave of his data-wand he can cause debilitating pain and tumor like growths leading to an unexplainable death. Only someone from a colony world without advanced nano-medicine (or whatever) is immune.

3. The repair nanobots that keep the infrastructure of the city working have been subverted by a mad scientist, allowing him easy access to any part of the city through mysterious tunnels.

 

Computers

1. The police droids go amok whenever they enter a certain area of the city. Is it a localized 'wifi' virus? Some strange broadcast signal? Bizarre radiation? Or something even more sinister?

2. Everyone is so bored with cyberspace that no one but historians go there anymore, so why have several historians wound up dead from brain hemmorages?

 

The same can be done for any genre tech, as Steve and others have pointed out. I haven't even touched on Space Piracy, or the murder mystery on the isolated deep space station, etc.

 

I'm at work or I'd keep going.

[GamePhil]

Re: Dark Galactic Champions

 

I love these boards