SF Adventures in the Solar System?

[kronovan]

I looked up reviews of Expanse and Jovian Chronicles RPGs, they appear too system-heavy for my current Blades in the Dark-influenced tastes...

I have played Expanse a handful of times, but it was some years ago.
It is indeed system heavy...

While I haven't run The Expanse, I own it and wouldn't agree it's system heavy. It's based upon Green Ronin's Modern Age (Adventure Gaming Engine) rules which is the same rules light system that Dragon Age and Fantasy Age use. I've used those rules for Dragon Age and homebrewed campaigns and IMO they're relatively easy to learn - you can fit all character actions with their descriptions on 2 letter-sized pages. The only challenge with any version of AGE are focuses, which are its take on skills and work a bit like the skills+proficiency bonus in D&D 5e. The only challenge with them is that there's many of them, so players need to become familiar enough with them to know those they want during PC creation and advancement. I've had children as young as 10 play in AGE campaigns and they didn't have problems using the rules.

The Expanse does describe and treat the setting well. That said, if you didn't want to run a campaign in the Expanse verse with its themes, it may not be worth it. A nice thing about the book is it includes the Modern Age rules, so you don't need to buy the Mod Age core rulebook.

I've homebrewed my own setting that's restricted to Inter-system (Solar System) space travel. I'm a bigger fan of universal TTRPGs for such homebrewing. So I've used both Savage Worlds Adventure Edition (SWADE)+ Science Fiction Companion and the Cepheus Engine to run it and had good results with both. For CE, I used Moon Toad Publishing's edition of the rules and also used their terrific vehicle and ship design guides - my homebrew was Military SciFi and involved a lot of space and surface combat and travel. I would recommend CE over any edition of Traveller which I also own and run, because CE is specifically tailored for homebrewing and adapting other settings. As well, there's a dizzing amount of 3rd party support for it. So if there's something you nees that core CE doesn't have, you'll be able to find a publication for it and it will almost certainly be low cost and possibly even free.

I own Orbital 2100 for CE, but not the newer Orbital Cold War. I would recommend Orbital 2100 with 2 caveats; 1) it requires the core CE rules for which there's a free SRD, but IMO poor in comparison to the handful of payed-for editions; 2) it's very spaceship focused with campaign themed around things like cargo haulage, mining, salvage, search & rescue, exploration & science. It doesn't contain threats like aliens, but IMO that's not a problem because you can find a 3rd party publication that would contain just about any threat/adversary/monster you could imagine.

All I've said above for CE would be true for SWADE. Its Science Fiction Companion is all encompassing allowing you to build any ship or vehicle you could want -robots & power armor too- and its bestiary is expansive and impressive.
Considering these comments though...

...What I like about Alien is that though skill matters and various equipment gives relevant bonuses, you are never assured success. This makes environmental dangers feel very real...

...in some situations that can be tricky with SWADE. That's due to the effects of dice rolls that ace, the effect of the Wild Dice that's always rolled with a PC's skill/trait roll and the ability to use metacurency (called bennys) to make rerolls. It's the reason I'm not a big fan of those rules for certain Horror sub-genres. They're terrific rules for Action-Horror, but IMO not necessarily the best for survival horror or Lovecraftian/Cosmic Horror. Of the two, I'd give more of a nod to CE as a system that could make skill rolls uncertain and allow the GM to easily tweak things to make environmental dangers more threatening.

If you like BitD, have you considered possibly using Scum & Villainy and houseruling it to restict it to inter-system travel?
While I own S&V, I haven't run it and I'm less familiar with it than The Expanse. My limited understanding of S&V though, is that if you removed jump drives and Ur Gates, you should be able to make it more Solar System focused. Alas, I haven't given it a thorough enough read to know if it could be used to deliver a survival-horror vibe like Alien. What it would give you, is similar rules to BitD as it's another Forged in the Dark based system.

And as someone has already stated; have you considered tweaking Alien to make it inter-system only? I don't own it, so I wouldn't know how doable that is.

 

[aramis erak]

And as someone has already stated; have you considered tweaking Alien to make it inter-system only? I don't own it, so I wouldn't know how doable that is.

The ship designs are already problematic, in that there are only 4 frames given: C, G, M, R, and only C doesn't include a hyperdrive. Further most of the ships have additional space for hyperdrives to improve speed.
The sublight drives are not given an absolute value, but a modifier, and it's not directly linked to any rate of acceleration nor travel.

Much of the texture of space trucking in Alien is in the various things that go wrong while the players are in cryo for hyperspace... the weekly wakeup for maintenance. That's a primary stress source in campaign play.

That makes it rather different from most, tho' it's not too far from the feel of Cowboy Bebop. Which said, may be a good choice, too, either the narrativist system just released, or the older openly unlisenced Bounty Head Bebop.

 

[Umbran]

Oh, I should mention, as I'm prepping for a campaign of it...
Savage Worlds - Deadlands: The Lost Colony.

Not our solar system, but in the game the PCs don't have access to FTL tech, so all travel is in-system, and there's some decent rules for it. SWADE does have licensing, but it isn't "open".

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Oh, I should mention, as I'm prepping for a campaign of it...
Savage Worlds - Deadlands: The Lost Colony.

Not our solar system, but in the game the PCs don't have access to FTL tech, so all travel is in-system, and there's some decent rules for it. SWADE does have licensing, but it isn't "open".

Has anyone actually done a "Hell In the Solar System" Deadlands variant where humanity manages significant interplanetary flight and finds the rest of the Solar system is full of horrors too? Maybe something steampunk or VSF, or farther in an alternate future (post-Hell On Earth) with more of an industrial scifi vibe or even a more gonzo Gamma World/Metamorphosis Alpha vibe?

I know lost Colony talks a bit about space travel, but they didn't really detail the Solar system itself, did they? Never actually played that one.

 

[Umbran]

I know lost Colony talks a bit about space travel, but they didn't really detail the Solar system itself, did they? Never actually played that one.

The game does not take place in the Sol system, so, no, they don't detail it.

They detail the Faraway system, in which the game takes place.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Has anyone actually done a "Hell In the Solar System" Deadlands variant where humanity manages significant interplanetary flight and finds the rest of the Solar system is full of horrors too? Maybe something steampunk or VSF, or farther in an alternate future (post-Hell On Earth) with more of an industrial scifi vibe or even a more gonzo Gamma World/Metamorphosis Alpha vibe?

That's kind of Eclipse Phase. Short form of EP is that Earth got taken over by magic AI nanobots (Titans) who aren't far off from Earthdawn Horrors (the game is basically Earthdawn 2070).

Humanity was on the edge of sci-fi "post scarcity" utopia. Nuclear fusion, nanotech "cornucopia" machines, pseudo-immortality through gengineered bodies and being able to back up your brain. But before that really happened, it all went to drek. Earth became a place out of nightmares and only a relatively small number of people in space who didn't quite have enough resources without Earth to rely on.

People got insular and weird. The timelines dont make sense, but if you assume it's like 100 years post-Earth, its a little more coherent. Lots of weirdness, cultists, and Mad Science.

Additionally some Gates were found, or maybe built, by Titans. But they are essentially military research stations that may be full of scary monsters. Or, you know, bunnies. Who knows. It gives you that option to run Stargate SG1 or even Thundarr the Barbarian on a world full of Titan tech.

EP is theoretically back to the edge of post-scarcity, except Titan tech still turns up and does horrible things, and some humans now have "magic" powers and they tend to go crazy a lot, which might be some dormant Titan plan waiting for humanity to reach some density.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

That's kind of Eclipse Phase.

I'm familiar with the setting. Not quote what I was thinking of, a Deadlands Solar System as I envision it would much lower tech and lack transhumanist elements.

Maybe something like Space 1889 but with ghost rock-powered ether ships and every planet having its own version of the Reckoners with their own schemes in varying states of progress. Probably a ghost rock rush in the asteroid belt, which is the remains of a planet where Reckoner-equivalents won big time.

Or set it later, after Earth partially receivers from the Hell On Earth stuff, and instead of (or parallel with) Lost Colony a less antiquated version of Solar system gets explored by industrial scifi-style ships, finding more cosmic nastiness lurking out there tan expected. Maybe there's scheme to terraform and colonize Mars or Titan so people can escape the half-poisoned wreckage of Earth.

 

[Starfox]

My local game shop happened to have Scum and Villainy in their shelf, so now I have it. At first I was a bit disappointed how little difference there is from the base Blades in the Dark - I had expected more rules customization - but on a second read i think its pretty good.

Eclipse Phase is a cool setting though after reading the rules I'm not a fan - I like bell curves. I feel that posthumanism is the core of Eclipse Phase, and that's a bit hard to sell to my group - it has so many complications of its own and trivializes some issues. Why travel somewhere, even if you have constant G drives, when you can just send a splice of yourself on a laser beam? Cool, but not quite the genre I was looking for.

Diselpunk Deadlands in space sounds like a pretty good fit for the horror part of Alien.