My Dragonstar game
What I did was to take the party and their adventure-in-progress (typical clear-dungeon-return-loot mission), and interrupt it with strange occurrances. First off, the party's cleric (my PC, a cleric of Farlanghan) disappeared (obviously, I had to make him an N/PC). Then they saw a huge explosion up way, way high in the sky on their way to meet the cleric, who told them he'd meet them halfway to the dungeon a couple days later. They left on their merry way, fought off a couple of outposts of orcs, etc., until the wizard's owl familiar caught sight of strangely-dressed figures marching through the forest.... an odd, hairless, artificial man runs from the forest and begs for their help.... A huge, metal, four-legged creature with a man inside its head charges out through the forest.... and the party's cleric appears suddenly, right where he said he'd be, and leads the party away into a small shack. The strange newcomer is shot by an odd beam of light from the metal creature, and he hands some object to the party's paladin, begging her to take the object "to Dryden." The cleric says some words into an odd piece of equipment coming out of his ear, and the party is teleported into the cargo hold of a ship... not the ship they were meant to escape onto, mind, because that one exploded. This one is an independent freighter, and one that doesn't take kindly to stowaways. The cleric (obviously a priest of the god of travelers) reveals a decades-old plot to protect a small group of travelers from outer space who had crashed on the planet and were protecting a single object of vast, mysterious importance. Being the church of travelers, the Temple of Farlanghan teamed with a group of wizards known as the Society of the Horizon to keep watch over these out-worlders for the past 60 years. The soulmech was the last survivor of that group, and the Dragon Empire has found him.
I ran one adventure involving a space station that was attacked by ogres and left under the "care" of a cannibalistic wendigo and small packs of ghouls. I adapted the Swords & Sorcery adventure "The Siege of Durgham's Folly," which was easy to make into a Dragonstar game. The party has just recently gained the Technical Proficiency feat, just in time for me to return them to their home planet, and they're starting to get involved in the Dragon Empire politics. The paladin is a terror with a blaster rifle, now, and the party thief has a ring that gives him Predator-like camo. It'll be interesting to see how "old-world" threats react to this new high-tech might.
Anyway, all I did was yank 'em into space and let them take care of the rest. They'll learn how to function eventually, and until then, give them encounters they can handle without being proficient with energy weapons (my example, ogres with heavy auto-cannons who are so stupid that, when enraged, they use the heavy cannon as a huge greatclub....).
-Tar
