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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Old Drew Id" data-source="post: 2393619" data-attributes="member: 12175">Keep in mind that in sci-fi, you rarely see an entire planet. Instead, you usually just see one city on that planet. So, in SW, you don't see Tantooine, really. You just see the city of Mos Eisley. Similarly, in Star Trek, you don't see the backwoods towns of the planet Vulcan, you just see the capital city. The same thing applies in a game. You don't need to plan out entire planets, just the "landing city" on that planet. And the landing city is really very similar to any town in a D&D campaign, and you can use the town generation rules there to give you a start. Pick a town size, determine the rulership, etc. Once you have four or five towns, you really have four or five planets, which can be spread out among several star systems. Similarly, Design another town as a mining colony on an asteroid, and maybe another as a free-floating space station. You don't really even need maps for most of this.As far as general campaign design, though, the original D&D plan still applies. You said "It's not as easy as building a simple village and the surrounding area for a D&D game setting" but it actually is. You can start by building a simple village and the surrounding area and saying that this is a village on Planet X. Now, your first adventure or two does not ever have to leave this area. You can fight the sand people over in Mugger's Canyon, or gamble with the spice smugglers over in that bar in Eos Misley and get involved in a "local" adventure or two. In the meantime, you might see one or two spaceships come and go, but the PC's are not welcome to come aboard yet, they do not have their immunizations or flight certifications yet, or they can not afford the tickets, etc. During this time, you can build up your world as you see fit. You can have no local aliens, or one or two, and you can decide from that how many other aliens you want in the wider galaxy. You don't need to worry about space flight yet, or other more advanced tech yet, since your players will not get to experience it for at least the next few adventures. Then, following the rules of dungeoncraft, you develop just enough to keep you going. During those first few adventures, you may have made reference to a Trader's Guild, or a Galactic Council, or a mega-corporation that supplies the entire system, etc. And so with your third or fourth adventure, there is the chance to board a shuttle and visit one of the colonies on one of the local moons. If that goes well, you can have the next adventure require travel to a city on the neighboring planet within the same system, (which really is just the same as visiting the next kingdom over as far as the DM planning is concerned.)Then, if all goes well and you still need to expand further (and you may go the whole campaign without ever leaving this system if you want) you can let the PC's get passage on an interstellar ship and finally see some more of the galaxy. Further campaign design tip: Create a "Campaign Bible".(By the way, I am building up a sci-fi future setting myself right now, which is why I am so verbose about all of this)I tend to outline everything before I write anything. I start with a nice outline in a Word document as my Campaign Bible, and then I fill in the blanks in the outline a little at a time. If I am working on one section of the outline, such as the timeline, and I think of something else, like a cool faction of NPC's, then I skip over to that section of the outline, and add a little note there, and then return to what I was working on. I also update this outline after each adventure, and as I plan each adventure, so that at any time, the bible has everything I need to write new adventures. (This is what a lot of sci-fi writers and sci-fi TV writers do as well, so it is a successful strategy)My initial outline for my sci-fi setting looks like this:Setting TitleGeneral Overview ---Describe the Setting in one paragraphRole of the PCs in this settingGeneral Adventure Seeds ListSetting Details---General Map Plan (Including any maps I create, or a general physical description)---Travel Times based on current tech (just for handy reference)Tech Level---Medical Tech (cloning, brain transplant, disease cures, etc. - what is possible)---Transportation Tech (ranges for how fast, how big, how tough, how expensive)---Power Generation & Storage (how powerful, how small, how expensive)Races---Human Variants---AliensFactions / Organizations---Businesses---Governments / Political Groups---Religious Groups---Social Groups (charities, universities, social clubs, extremist groups)History---Really long time ago---Long time ago---Recent HistoryRule Variants---Classes---Wealth System or GP or Requisition System---Action Points---Allegiances or Alignments---VP / WP or HP---Heroes / Ordinaries or NPC classes---Sanity Rules / Horror Checks---Variant Chase System---Enhanced Poisons System---Other House RulesFX---Mutations---Psionics---Force Skills---MagicGear---Vehicles---Weapons---Armor---Mecha---EquipmentLocations---Planets---Cities---Other (Stations, Nebula, The Black Hole of Doom, etc.)NPC's---Special Classes---Famous Individuals---Local IndividualsI personally tend to do a lot of my initial work in the timeline section, because I find that this guides me through the process of filling in the other sections. But I would say that you should just start anywhere that you have an idea of what to fill in, and from there it will naturally guide you from spot to spot until your outline starts to really get filled in.For the timeline, I recommend starting with just little phrases in each section, like "First Colony on Mars" listed in the "Really long time ago" section. Then later on when you get more detail or when you need more detail, you can go back and change that to "2079 AD First Colony on Mars founded. Named Ares Station." Then even farther down the line, if it becomes relevent or you just get a clever idea, you can fill in even more info on each event. And please post whatever you come up with. I am eager to steal any ideas I can find. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" /></blockquote>

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