SF Rant

[tkdguy]

I'm okay with having them be space cops or bounty hunters; I don't know if they'll want to do that in the long term. The Firefly route sounds like the best way to keep them together. Not all the players are fans of the show, so I won't mention the name.

 

The invasion theme could work, but it will be tricky setting it on Mars or the Moon. They could form the resistance movement.

[Xavier Onassiss]

I'm okay with having them be space cops or bounty hunters; I don't know if they'll want to do that in the long term. The Firefly route sounds like the best way to keep them together. Not all the players are fans of the show, so I won't mention the name.

 

The invasion theme could work, but it will be tricky setting it on Mars or the Moon. They could form the resistance movement.

 

That's pretty much what happened in happened in my campaign. The PCs were involved in the resistance from the beginning, and did a great job of organizing it all, until the new government rolled in and "dropped the hammer." They had enough advance warning to evacuate about a third of the colonists, along with most of the resistance leaders and the entire defense squadron. They returned after the war (which was Act II of the campaign) to take the colony back, in a series of games which resembled the "Scouring of the Shire" as they found several members of the defeated Junta hiding out there, and up to no good.

[NuSoardGraphite]

Space cops is a good scenario to run.  lots of stuff you can do with that from ordinary street crime, gang warfare, investigations, harrowing chases, prisoner escorting etc.

 

You could even get political if you want to by having an investigation lead the characters to the office of an electee politician, then have all of the requisite manuvering that happens in those delicate situations (the captain orders the characters to drop the investigation, but find some way to make it personal so the characters dont want to drop the investigation.

 

I would suggest making the characters agents of the federal government so they have far ranging police powers and you can take the campaign anywhere in the system you want rather than to be limited to a single city or colony, unless thats what you want to do with it...

[tkdguy]

I was thinking of running a relief mission to a starving Martian colony. Assuming I can get five people to play, I'd give them these archetypes (chances are, I'll have to create the characters for them): pilot, doctor, investigator, government official, bodyguard. Maybe someone chosen at random will secretly be working for a hostile government. However, there will be one major plot point the players will probably discover.

 

 

The colonists turned to cannibalism in order to survive, and they're determined to keep that fact a secret at all costs.

 

[Cancer]

That way lies prion diseases, and having those pop up "unexpectedly" in a space environment would give lots of chances for red herrings.

[kahuna's bro]

the quote function still isn't working for me

I guess the " hard science" types consider energy weapons the province of space ghost and/or iron man

[tkdguy]

@Cancer: That will be one of the clues, hence including a doctor in the party.

 

@kahuna's bro: I have no problem with energy weapons in hard sciences. There are a few in development right now, after all. But like I said, going with kinetic weapons was purely a stylistic choice, especially since it's rare in any type of SF.

[Old Man]

There's energy weapons and there's energy weapons. It looks like vehicle-mounted energy weapons will be deployed on a limited basis within the next decade or so. But they'll be limited to relatively soft targets that can be easily tracked--aircraft and projectiles. Man-portable energy weapons, or mounted energy weapons that can be trained quickly, or that can defeat armor, are still a long way off.

[massey]

The exact makeup of a hard sci-fi universe will depend entirely upon which underlying technological, political, and economic assumptions you make (unless you, the author, happen to have a time machine and you know what is going to happen).  The problem with hard sci-fi is that it concerns itself with a lot of details that aren't really all that interesting.  If I'm a player then I want to get to shooting aliens or whatever, I'm not particularly concerned with the exact workings of the ship's waste treatment system.

 

I have toyed with writing a hard sci-fi novel myself, though I never actually have time to sit down and write anything.  I find myself most inspired by the Alien movies.  I don't think space combat has to occur at all to have a decent quality setting.  But in the end, doing all the mental gymnastics to plan out how my prospective novel world would function, I found I was going through a lot of details that only I would care about.  The temptation to put in loads of exposition about why X, Y, and Z function the way they do is very great.  My background is in the social sciences, so I'm much more interested in the economic and political conditions surrounding the creation of a colony rather than exactly how a ship functions.

 

Ultimately even small changes in how something operates can result in fairly large changes to the world you're using.  Does travel to a colony take a week, a month, six months?  How many ships do you have and how frequently can they make the trip?  How is financing arranged?  If you have enough ships and you can make the journey in a week then life on a colony will be very similar to life on an island on Earth.  Things may be more expensive but you'll have all the creature comforts of home.  If the trip takes 18 months and ships are rare enough that you only get a visit once every year or two, your colony might look a lot more like the Old West, with everyone riding horses and having no electricity.

 

My never-gonna-get-written novel's assumptions were that within the next two or three years (perpetually in the future of the date of reading) we discover proof of alien life.  But analysis of the transmission reveals that life to be very, very hostile, and potentially able to reach us.  This causes the world's governments to dump obscene amounts of money into developing an Alcubierre drive as fast as possible.  When failure is not an option and you're willing to spend a few trillion dollars a year, you can jump start a pretty good space program pretty quickly.  By 2025 (we'll say) we have a ship.  By 2030 we have a small fleet, and six months later we've dropped about a thousand nukes on their planet, turning it to cinders while starting (and finishing) the galaxy's first interstellar war.  In the fear that we've only destroyed a colony, and not their homeworld, humanity establishes small colonies (10-20 thousand inhabitants each, just enough to ensure genetic diversity) on every inhabitable world we can find.  Preserve the human race from retaliation and all that.  Unfortunately all this spending results in worldwide economic collapse and a cessation of contact between the brand new colonies and Earth.  The story begins 50 years later, when the ships return.

 

That world is going to have a very different reality than one that doesn't have such an aggressive timetable.  Giving another 50 years, or another century, gives you lasers and rail guns, large populations and things like that.  More futuristic science, even if it operates on real world principles.  In mine even Earth-tech is scarcely more advanced than what we have today, given that all development was poured into building those ships, and then everything ground to a halt.  So saying that one outcome is more likely than another depends entirely on which assumptions you make going into it.

 

The question is, in a game universe, are your players interested in the background?  Do they want to play in this universe?  Is there good story potential there?  If your eyes glazed over as I described my world, remember that your players are probably doing the same with yours.

[Old Man]

I think you should write that novel.

 

From the standpoint of space combat, I think real life technology has reached a point where the hard part is figuring out how to keep your characters alive for more than a few milliseconds once the shooting starts.  Nukes, directed energy weapons of various kinds, extremely high velocity kinetic penetrators, nerve agents, small form factor explosives, microdrones, guided small arms, precision guided munitions, omnipresent surveillance, all aimed and coordinated by computer near-intelligences in an environment of hard vacuum and microgravity--good luck, Flash.

[L. Marcus]

Flash would be a remarkably appropriate name -- gone in a flash of plasma.

[Cancer]

And not blood plasma.

[L. Marcus]

That too.

[tkdguy]

I had decided to separate the role-playing elements from the combat games. That way the PCs can survive longer and do other stuff besides go into battle. I'm planning to use other rule sets for mass combat and space combat anyway. But if the players want a military campaign, I'll go along with it.