Musings on Sci Fi Campaigns/Adventures

[Umbran]

1) Follow orders campaign - The ship isn't owned by the characters. They are employees of some sort on it (whether military, rescue, exploration, news, etc). Their employers give them mission orders. They attempt to complete the mission. These are simple. You know what to prepare because you can come up with the order/event. The problem then becomes how to give the characters more agency. There are some obvious ways to make an adventure less railroady - almost always some unexpected event that requires the players to have to do more than just the mission (while still trying to - in most cases - complete the mission). But overall, the characters won't have much control over where they go and what they're asked to do. A subtle distinction here is that the PLAYERS can still tell the GM what kind of missions they would like to have, therefore at least giving the players more agency than their characters have. The exploration possibility however could be more open ended if it's some sort of # year mission into an unexplored region.

I ran some years of Ashen Stars, a Gumshoe-based sci-fi game.

Imagine Star Trek, but the Federation almost collapsed after a massive war against a mysterious foe, and had to contract to recover and catch its metaphorical breath. They no longer have the resources to have a massive fleet of starships to patrol and enforce the law everywhere.

So, away from the core worlds, they support a program of Licensed Autonomous Zone Effectors - the "lazer" teams are freelance troubleshooters and investigators, a sort of Away Team for hire. For a fee, they'll come solve your mystery, fix your tribble infestation problem, stop your war, figure out your alien virus, out-logic your berserk supercomputer, or whatever it is you need.

The missions are handled on a contract basis, so the team gets agency in choosing their missions. And, how they solve the problem is up to them - the GM doesn't tell them how to address the issues they find.