Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

[AmadanNaBriona]

So I was just perusing the rather cool set of Star Hero conversion links, and it got me thinking...

What are some other fictional Sci Fi settings that we haven't seen conversions from yet, or better yet, what are folks' fave settings that haven't been touched on yet?

 

Maybe if we're lucky, someone will get inspired and start doing writeups.

 

I'll start.

There are two sets of books that I think would make for great Star Hero games.

 

The Matador Series, by Steven Perry is a quite cool heavy Martial Arts oriented setting with a big bad totalitarian Government. The main series plot is basically about the ability of a small group of highly trained rebels to give the already dying government the right kind of push in just the right place.

The Man Who Never Missed, the first book of the series, was one of the bibles for my old Star Hero campaign WAAAAAAYYYYY back in the 80's.

 

The Santiago books, by Mike Resnick, are a "space fable" of sorts set in the wild frontier of an fairly advanced spacefaring civilization. His Widowmaker series, Oracle Trilogy and in fact almost every sci-fi bok he's written all fit into a master timeline for his works, making it potentially one of the most documented settings I've ever seen, roughly divided into 5 different eras (not incluing his pre galatic era books). I specifically named Santiago tho for one reason.. I LOVE the idea of Black Orpheus and his epic poem of the Frontier, where earning a verse in the saga pretty much means that you've made your rep as a frontier legend.

[Karmakaze]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

Good thinking. One of my big disappointments with the Star HERO books is that they seemed too closely geared to the published setting, and it wasn't a setting that interested me much.

 

I did have a campaign setup that I never go around to running. The interstellar transport was the old "pulled wormhole" setup, where one point of a wormhole was set, and then a regular ship had to drag the other end. Once the other end was set, you had a tunnel. This resulted in a sort of spoked-spiderweb travel net. The campaign starts at the edge of colonized space when something takes out most of the "vertical" spokes (and some, but not all, of the 'horizontal' ones.) The PCs could then pick from a 'lawless frontier cut off from civilization' campaign if they wanted to stay put or a 'long walk home' if they wanted to try to make their way back to Earth to find out WTF.

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

Whenever the topic of HERO being used for sci-fi settings comes up in the wider gaming community, one of the most common requests I see is for a conversion of GURPS Transhuman Space. This is certainly a high-quality book with the GURPS recognition factor, and "transhumanism" is one of the more popular cutting-edge topics - sort of an evolution of the older "cyberpunk" concept. Transhumanism actually gets only brief mention in Star HERO, so there's probably plenty of room to develop it.

[Savinien]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

Whenever the topic of HERO being used for sci-fi settings comes up in the wider gaming community' date=' one of the most common requests I see is for a conversion of [i']GURPS Transhuman Space[/i]. This is certainly a high-quality book with the GURPS recognition factor, and "transhumanism" is one of the more popular cutting-edge topics - sort of an evolution of the older "cyberpunk" concept. Transhumanism actually gets only brief mention in Star HERO, so there's probably plenty of room to develop it.

 

I don't know what you're talking about. I'm one of those people that was never much involved in GURPS.

 

It is vaguely familiar, but I'm not sure why.

 

Feel free to start another thread so we aren't drifting on this topic.

[AmadanNaBriona]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

Good thinking. One of my big disappointments with the Star HERO books is that they seemed too closely geared to the published setting, and it wasn't a setting that interested me much.

 

I did have a campaign setup that I never go around to running. The interstellar transport was the old "pulled wormhole" setup, where one point of a wormhole was set, and then a regular ship had to drag the other end. Once the other end was set, you had a tunnel. This resulted in a sort of spoked-spiderweb travel net. The campaign starts at the edge of colonized space when something takes out most of the "vertical" spokes (and some, but not all, of the 'horizontal' ones.) The PCs could then pick from a 'lawless frontier cut off from civilization' campaign if they wanted to stay put or a 'long walk home' if they wanted to try to make their way back to Earth to find out WTF.

 

I had a similar idea, that wound up never getting off the ground except as background material for my old campaign (and one of the characters within).

 

The nice thing about this kind of tech level setting is that it gives the option for a much more rugged frontier. It allows for a Exploration themed setting that requires a LOT more self sufficiency and competence from the characters than the usualy Star Trek style exploration.... If survey scouts are heading all over the place at near light or light speed (with apporpriate time dilation effects and probably using some sort of suspended animation) then a team exploring a new system to see if it's a viable location for a gate/transponder/whatever will have a certain Lewis & Clarke feel. Precious little or no backup, tech resources limited to what they can bring along in the ship, and LOTS of heavy improvising if something goes wrong or weird.

 

A similar type of campaign is a "first wave colonists" game. I think that I've wanted to do one of those since I read "Legacy of Heorot" by Larry Niven.

[Karmakaze]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

One of the odd effects on pre-disaster colonization, of course, would be that the second your explorers settle down and "drop" their end of the wormhole, there's a conduit for a flood of inner-planet tech and immigrants. So right up until the pipeline collapsed, you could have colonies dangling out at the end of the chain still fairly tightly tied to Homeworld. (Although I would expect that the farther out the colony, the fewer local gates and the more jumps to the center and thus a greater need for self-sufficiency).

 

I'd actually taken a map of the I-80/I-90 corridor and was going to use it for a rough map of the systems to be passed through. There's a population cluster at the 'start' in Seattle or San Francisco, then a more sparse distribution of cities pretty much until Chicago, at which point the populaton gets progressively denser and denser until NYC. (And yes, I realize claiming NYC as the center of the universe is the typical New Yorker syndrome - I don't care!) I was sort of inspired by this image ( http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights2_dmsp_big.jpg ), altough by that one, runing the Trans-Siberian highway from east to west would also work rather well.

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

I don't know what you're talking about. I'm one of those people that was never much involved in GURPS.

 

It is vaguely familiar, but I'm not sure why.

 

Feel free to start another thread so we aren't drifting on this topic.

 

I don't want to digress too far either. These two reviews of the book on RPGnet should suffice for all the info you'll need:

 

http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_6129.html

 

http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_6815.html

[Matt Frisbee]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

Anything similar to the Cowboy Bebop franchise would make my day.

 

Matt "Still-a-hopeless-Fay-Valentine-fanboy" Frisbee

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Cowboy Bebop

 

Anything similar to the Cowboy Bebop franchise would make my day.

 

Matt "Still-a-hopeless-Fay-Valentine-fanboy" Frisbee

 

Hopefully this will make your day at least a little brighter:

 

http://surbrook.devermore.net/adaptionsanime/animechar.html#CB

[Nyrath]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

I'd like to see a setting based on James Blish's story "Surface Tension".

http://sites.inka.de/mips/reviews/TheSeedlingStars.html

 

In the future they use genetic engineering to alter embryos so they will grow into people that can colonize planets that would kill ordinary humans. Seedships explore new planets. When a suitable planet is found, embryos are custom engineered for that planet, and a new colony is established.

 

On one remote watery world, a seedship crashes. Before the crew starves to death, they engineer colonists. The crew doesn't live long enough to teach the colonists. And the only open ecological niche is that of micro-organisms.

 

So the colonists are about the size of single-celled creatures, living in ponds of stagnant water.

 

In one pond, the colonist go through many years of war with the rotifers, the dreaded "eaters". They finally manage to kill them all.

 

Then they start wondering about what lies above the surface of the water. Past the barrier of surface tension.

 

They wind up building a "space ship", basically a watertight tank build from microscopic bits of wood. Banks of algae are used to generate oxygen in the water, volvoxes circulate the water, noxlucidae provide illumination at night, and diatoms on treadmills provide the motive power. It manages to penetrate the barrier, and travels through "space" to the next pond.

 

It is quite entertaining to research various micro-organisms and figure out how the colonist would use them, or fight against them.

 

This is real science fiction, in the sense that the setting of the story is not just some other historical period dressed up with spaceships and ray guns.

[TheRavenIs]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

I'd like to see a setting based on James Blish's story "Surface Tension".

http://sites.inka.de/mips/reviews/TheSeedlingStars.html

 

In the future they use genetic engineering to alter embryos so they will grow into people that can colonize planets that would kill ordinary humans. Seedships explore new planets. When a suitable planet is found, embryos are custom engineered for that planet, and a new colony is established.

 

On one remote watery world, a seedship crashes. Before the crew starves to death, they engineer colonists. The crew doesn't live long enough to teach the colonists. And the only open ecological niche is that of micro-organisms.

 

So the colonists are about the size of single-celled creatures, living in ponds of stagnant water.

 

In one pond, the colonist go through many years of war with the rotifers, the dreaded "eaters". They finally manage to kill them all.

 

Then they start wondering about what lies above the surface of the water. Past the barrier of surface tension.

 

They wind up building a "space ship", basically a watertight tank build from microscopic bits of wood. Banks of algae are used to generate oxygen in the water, volvoxes circulate the water, noxlucidae provide illumination at night, and diatoms on treadmills provide the motive power. It manages to penetrate the barrier, and travels through "space" to the next pond.

 

It is quite entertaining to research various micro-organisms and figure out how the colonist would use them, or fight against them.

 

This is real science fiction, in the sense that the setting of the story is not just some other historical period dressed up with spaceships and ray guns.

 

I read that short story, a long, long, time ago. It would be a good story but might be a bit hard to do. If you do the work to make this type, please post it.

 

You could also go with the idea of micro-humans, reduce them to say 6" as an adverage, then build the world around them as normal sized. Then thay have to learn to live as small mostly defence-less, but really smart animals.

[Susano]

Re: Cowboy Bebop

 

Hopefully this will make your day at least a little brighter:

 

http://surbrook.devermore.net/adaptionsanime/animechar.html#CB

 

Outlaw Star is fun too.

 

http://surbrook.devermore.net/adaptionsanime/animechar.html#OS

[Intrope]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

I'll put in a nod for Crest/Banner of the Stars; good, pretty hard SF anime show (well, it's also a novel series, but it's written in Japanese).

[Duke Bushido]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

Actually, I was rather taken with John DeChancie's Starrigger setting; we even incorporated elements of it many years ago.

[Curufea]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

I wouldn't mind seeing the setting of Pandora's Star.

[dbsousa]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

I've never seen a game set in Asimov's Foundation Series. I don't even know how you would run such a game.

[Curufea]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

I don't think any of the main characters in the books could be PCs....

[Duke Bushido]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

And I don't think I could keep my players awake long enough to do anything....

[Old Man]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

For a real mind-bending exercise, try to define one of the starships from Iain Bank's Culture series as a vehicle. Then as a character.

 

Hey, if any game system can handle Culture tech, it's Hero. Right?

[sinanju]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

For a real mind-bending exercise' date=' try to define one of the starships from Iain Bank's [i']Culture[/i] series as a vehicle. Then as a character.

 

Hey, if any game system can handle Culture tech, it's Hero. Right?

 

...or Richard Morgan's "Takeshi Kovacs" series. There is no FTL travel, but there is FTL (essentially instantaneous) communication. Colony worlds are established by slowships. But once the colonies are in place...people can travel from colony to colony by riding the needlecast.

 

...because they have braintaping down to a fine art. Everyone has a cortical stack embedded in the base of the skull that keeps a constantly updated digital recording of his personality. Get killed? They'll slap the stack into a new sleeve (body) and you're good to go. If you're poor or an ex-con coming off long-term storage, you get whatever's available (like the body of some other guy who just got sentenced to a few decades in storage).

 

If you're rich you can buy the sleeve you want, up to and including heavily genetically-engineered bodies specialized for any conceivable occupation. If you're _really_ rich, you not only have a stack--you keep off-site backups just in case your stack is lost or destroyed (it happens...sometimes on purpose).

 

I suppose this is really more of a cyber-HERO kind of setting, but it _is_ an unexplored gaming environment.

[Curufea]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

For a real mind-bending exercise' date=' try to define one of the starships from Iain Bank's [i']Culture[/i] series as a vehicle. Then as a character.

 

Hey, if any game system can handle Culture tech, it's Hero. Right?

 

That's easy - 800pt VPP for ship related purposes

[TKing]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

That's easy - 800pt VPP for ship related purposes

Would that be the same for the Carriers from the Starwolves series?

 

And on a side note, I wouldn't mind seeing something written up for the Aliens/Predator series'. I was considering using Hero to create three different scenarios, all intertwined, one as Alien, one as Predator, and one as Marine/human and letting my players play through each in whatever order they chose. Sort of like the AvP computer games, but anything for the setting would be cool. However, I've not fully memorized the rules yet(it's a lot to take in) so I might ask for some help before the scenarios are finished.

[Curufea]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

Scenarios wouldn't be too hard, there are established relationships between the three races in the movies, comics and computer games...

Humans want Alien DNA for weapon research, or Royal Jelly as a super drug.

Predators want Aliens as prey, or Humans as an easier prey.

Aliens want food, to breed and to survive.

[John Desmarais]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

For a real mind-bending exercise' date=' try to define one of the starships from Iain Bank's [i']Culture[/i] series as a vehicle. Then as a character.

 

Hey, if any game system can handle Culture tech, it's Hero. Right?

 

http://www.rpgarchive.com/index.php?page=adv1&advid=550

[Basil]

Re: Star Hero fictional settings we haven't seen

 

The settings for Mission of Gravity, Nitrogen Fix, and Still River by Hal Clement; indeed, anything by Hal Clement.

 

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner.

 

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

 

The Cities in Flight series by James Blish.