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.

 

[aramis erak]

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.

Sounds like ST: Picard, seasons 1 & 3. And the Fenris Rangers and private medical ships.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

• The Space Merchant: buying and selling, using the T&C system in Bk 2. If you want this to be dominant, you must interpret "A trader" from within "A trader with cargo space available and free capital with which to speculate may seek out suitable goods to buy and sell." as an individual, not a ship, as purchased cargo by the rule is one lot per trader per week. Note that most consider it per ship... others hybridize with Bk7 Merchant Prince, or just use MP itself.
• The Space Trucker: default mode - most of the hold is filled with other people's stuff, and you're just the carrier. This provides a very thin, but doable, margin for operations and property.
• The Mercenary: You're hired guns in a war... someone else's war, at that. Better done with Bk 4 weapons, even if you stick to Bk 1 characters.

If you look at the classic Traveller adventure Twilight's Peak (Adventure 3, 1980) it assumes the players are doing these things, whilst at the same time seeding an arc plot, which, if they follow the clues, will eventually lead them to exploring some alien ruins. This is structurally similar to modern CRPGs like Witcher 3*, which have a fairly linear main story arc within a sandbox.

GDW also put out a book of scenarios, which support a style of gameplay more commonly associated with cyberpunk games these days, presenting the players with a menu of potential missions and patrons to choose from.


*Taking into account that a Witcher's day job is killing monsters, not shipping cargos.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Some more thoughts on classic Traveller adventures.

Research Station Gamma (Adventure 2). This was a mission based adventure, in the style of a fantasy RPG that was popular at the time. Go and investigate the dungeon research station and kill the monsters robots.

Leviathan (Adventure 4). This one was written by Games Workshop, and involved the players being given command of a large (eponymous) merchant ship (for reasons only known by the referee) and sent to explore a strange new sandbox subsector, meet new civilisations, and merchant the c-redits out of them. Basically Star Trek, but playing as the Ferengi*.

*Historical note: Ferengi hadn’t been invented at the time, it was probably inspired by Poul Anderson’s Polsotechnic League stories.


It’s also worth mentioning that in Traveller, the players could indicate what type of campaign they wanted by choosing what type of starship the party were going to use during character creation: broken down freighter, tiny scoutship, frail science vessel or clapped out navy surplus corvette (later additions). The Mongoose version makes that more explicit.

 

[Umbran]

Sounds like ST: Picard, seasons 1 & 3. And the Fenris Rangers and private medical ships.

You could run such a game with Ashen Stars, yes.

 

[dragoner]

I don't know why, but SciFi seems so much harder to set up an 'open campaign setting' for me compared to Fantasy.

It is about 3x harder. So you are not wrong just to say. Spaceship vs magic rules, seems almost like it balances out, though usually it doesn't.

 

[bloodtide]

So I've recently been perusing some Traveller/2300AD rules, and watching Stars Without Number playthroughs with the eye towards eventually setting up a SciFi campaign involving characters with/assigned to a starship of some kind (merchant/military/exploratory). I don't know why, but SciFi seems so much harder to set up an 'open campaign setting' for me compared to Fantasy. At a superficial level, Traveller sectors appear to give you everything for a Hexcrawl which is something I can easily grok in a fantasy setting. But in a Hexcrawl, each hex is pretty simple, even the ones with stuff in them to explore. In a SciFi setting, each system feels daunting to characterize 'on the fly'.

Metaplots work great in Sci-fi.

A popular one for my games is the ship full of criminals. Either harden criminals, Folks that sort of did it , and innocent ones...or a mix of those. They escape, grab a ship and they are on the run. Mix of A-Team, Burn Notice, Firefly and Dark Matter.

Bravestar Galaxy Rangers--The PCs are the Law. Way out on the Rim, Edge, or Frontier. Far enough away that they can only get short orders occasionally. And are mostly left on their own to take care of things.

Dirty Dozen Leverage-- The PCs are at least shady or criminals. They are let out of prison to do 'off the books work'. They might be employed by a good guy, a bad guy or something in the middle.

Reverse Exploration---have the PCs make alien characters....even from another setting. then have them explore the Core Setting

 

[Paul Farquhar]

A popular one for my games is the ship full of criminals. Either harden criminals, Folks that sort of did it , and innocent ones...or a mix of those. They escape, grab a ship and they are on the run. Mix of A-Team, Burn Notice, Firefly and Dark Matter

Actually that’s Blakes 7.

 

[bloodtide]

Actually that’s Blakes 7.

Yes, very much so.....but it is such an old obscure show I doubted anyone would know it.

My classic Traveler games from back in The Time Before Time were set in the Blake 7's type setting. Often complete with a Zan ships computer, a box supercomputer Oracle and a robot dog (though that was from another show.....)

 

[Tonguez]

Yes, very much so.....but it is such an old obscure show I doubted anyone would know it.

Blake-7 was very popular in the Anglosphere, even if it only got limited runs in the US and elsewhere. So given the ENWorlds demographic I guess its at least well remembered by a few of us