Know any good "random complication" tables for SF games?

[Faolyn]

I made a random ship problem generator that outputs to look like the ALIEN universe Greenacres. I used a list of actual ship parts from NASA as well as other hard and soft science parts.

ALIEN RND SHIP PROBLEMS v.1.3 release VERSION.xlsx

Shared with Dropbox

www.dropbox.com

Thanks!

 

[TBeholder]

Anyway, random-out-of-nowhere stuff is likely to look silly more often than not. Random stuff shaped by otherwise observable details that can be randomly generated (and put together by GM) can look natural.

And since it seems like a system that thrives on not planning things out too much ahead of time, I'm looking for interesting random tables. I've found a few for encounters and plot hooks, but none for complications or other SF weirdness.

Try to look in sandboxes. Those are made of random tables. Specifically for SF, in Stars Without Number. Though a lot can be easily translated or generalized (see also Worlds Without Number for example) between various genres.
SWN encapsulates some flavor in World Tags, along with the sides that will obviously come up often.

In general, you should pick or roll two tags for any given world. […] Each tag includes associated entries for Enemies, Friends, Complications, Things, and Places that fit with that tag. GMs can combine the elements of the two tags to create ones flavored specifically for that world.

For example, #2 is:

Alien Ruins
The world has significant alien ruins present. The locals may or may not permit others to investigate the ruins, and may make it difficult to remove any objects of value without substantial payment. Any surviving ruins with worthwhile salvage almost certainly have some defense or hazard to explain their unplundered state.
E Customs inspector, Worshipper of the ruins, Hidden alien survivor
F Curious scholar, Avaricious local resident, Interstellar smuggler
C Traps in the ruins, Remote location, Paranoid customs officials
T Precious alien artifacts, Objects left with the remains of a prior unsuccessful expedition, Untranslated alien texts, Untouched hidden ruins
P Undersea ruin, Orbital ruin, Perfectly preserved alien building, Alien mausoleum

Then Adventure Seeds table can use those. For a simple case —

10. A Friend has been lost in hostile wilderness, and the party must reach a Place to rescue them in the teeth of a dangerous Complication.

There are also standalone tables to generate random urban encounters, random wilderness encounters, conflicts between 2 random groups over random things, random schisms for random religions, etc. These details can become plot hooks, of course. More in splats (which are not free). And in Sandbox magazine (which is). For example,

A Quick Backwater Spaceport
D4 What’s So Backwater About It?
D6 How Are Ships and Cargo Secured Here?
D8 What’s Wrong With The Starport Staff?
D10 Who Needs To Talk To Outsiders Right Now?
D12 What’s The Nearest Popular Entertainment?
D20 What’s The Problem Here?

A lot of such things are not genre specific anyway, so may as well take from anywhere. WWN:

Courts
A “Court” is shorthand for a particular group of NPCs tangled in a mutually-shared enterprise. It might be a classic noble court, a large business, a patriarch-led familial clan or dynasty, a temple with its clergy, a magistrate’s bureaucratic office, or any other circumstance where a number of significant NPCs have to work with each other while perhaps having contrary goals and ambitions.
Courts are used to provide intrigue-based adventures and help a GM manage the complexity of designing and running more socially-oriented challenges. When the GM needs to generate a social situation that can’t be readily solved with swords these tables and tags can provide the basic outlines for them.

With tables for Aristocratic, Business, Criminal, Familial Clan and Religious variants. It’s generic enough to use in most settings without any tweaking at all. Until you get to the Court Tags, but most of those are things like Ancestral Obligation or Decadent Court, and the few that rely on setting-specific details are nicely encapsulated and can be swapped one by one.

 

[Bohandas]

the site springhole.net has a random malfunction generator