Recommend me a Space RPG

[lumin]

Okay, I've been a fan of fantasy RPGs for a very long time, it's still my favorite setting. However, I have been itching for a good Space RPG, but am a novice in the area and have no idea which one to choose. I'm pretty particular about my space settings; I am interested in low-tech, dark space settings (but not necessarily horror). So here's a short list of must haves and must not haves:

+ Emphasis on exploration: I want to spend most of the time in a space RPG, having adventures in a space ship or on unexplored planets. Visiting space ports, dealing with traders, diplomats and other active colonies should be rare.
+ Low Tech: I mean something akin to the technology in the Firefly series. So no warp drive, jump gates, transporters (ala Star Trek).
+ Dark: As Aliens dark, not Dead Space. I like space to be cold, lonely and solitary where moving between the stars requires hyper-sleep using computers (that occasionally malfunction) and where things can go wrong at any moment.
+ Lots of crazy aliens: What I mean is I want there to be plenty of ways to create a variety of alien creatures where your party members could meet them. So I don't want to be limited primarily to Humans vs Humans (ala Firefly) or Humanoid vs Humanid (ala Star Wars).

- No Western/Cowboy themes: For the most part I dislike the cowboy act in Firefly and Star Wars. For some odd reason, in my vision of future space travel, we won't be talking like red necks and gunslinging.
- No Intellectual Property: So, yeah, this rules out a lot of stuff. I want to feel like I can do just about anything in my universe.
- No Humanoid vs Humanoid: I don't mind dealing with my fellow species or species with different foreheads every once in a while, but this BETTER not be the prevailing model in my RPG. I want the universe to feel extremely Alien and surprising.
- No heavy use of physics: I don't mind some realism with newtonian physics and other laws in an RPG, but this better come in small doses.
- No over-arching War themes: Wars can happen, but I'd prefer if they are very rare and not the underlying theme of the setting.
- Very minimal Ship vs Ship combat: Like I said, this should be low tech, so I hate seeing lots of "pew-pew" starfighters and crap like that.

In summary, I guess I'm looking for a crossover of Aliens (theme, not IP) and the Ender's Game universe (after the Bugger wars). A hybrid universe of those two would be a lonely one, but not too dark with heavy emphasis on colonizing, and exploration.

I've heard that Traveller may come close to what I'm looking for. What do you think? Are there any other RPGs you can recommend?

 

[Kralin Thornberry]

Gurps space? Star Hero? Star Frontiers?

 

[ArghMark]

I think Traveler is what you want, actually. It pretty much nails all of the above, though it can also encompass a lot of other things; space is a big place.

 

[Kralin Thornberry]

or d6 space opera?

 

[darjr]

GURPS Transhuman space with a couple of mods.

Add RAM ships that could go a significant fraction of the speed of light and hibernation pods or some such and take out about as much of the transhumanisim as you like.

GURPS has a wealth of fantasy and alien critters that could serve as a starting place for aliens.

 

[coyote6]

I don't think anything meets those criteria. You don't want warp drives, jump gates, or the like (which I take means any kind of FTL drive, but you want aliens -- and not just aliens, but very alien aliens. But how are you going to meet aliens without FTL? Everyone jumps on a ship for a few centuries' worth of STL travel? How do you know where you're going? And how do you meaningfully communicate with the completely alien ETs? Even Aliens had FTL -- Ripley being lost for 50-odd years was an aberration, and if you haven't got FTL, going to the next solar system is going to mean you'll never see anyone at home again.

I think you'll have to take a more-or-less generic rules set, and build your own setting. So GURPS, Hero, Savage Worlds, FATE, Traveller (Traveller features jump drives, so you'll have to remove them, and ignore the setting, and come up with different, non-Newtonian methods for figuring out how long a trip in a solar system takes), or D6 should all work (I'm not familiar w/D6, though, but I'm guessing it would work).

 

[lumin]

GURPS Transhuman space with a couple of mods.

Add RAM ships that could go a significant fraction of the speed of light and hibernation pods or some such and take out about as much of the transhumanisim as you like.

GURPS has a wealth of fantasy and alien critters that could serve as a starting place for aliens.

This sounds pretty close to what I'm looking for. I'd never heard of Transhumanism before and it sounds much more to my liking.

I don't think anything meets those criteria. You don't want warp drives, jump gates, or the like (which I take means any kind of FTL drive, but you want aliens -- and not just aliens, but very alien aliens. But how are you going to meet aliens without FTL? Everyone jumps on a ship for a few centuries' worth of STL travel? How do you know where you're going? And how do you meaningfully communicate with the completely alien ETs? Even Aliens had FTL -- Ripley being lost for 50-odd years was an aberration, and if you haven't got FTL, going to the next solar system is going to mean you'll never see anyone at home again.

I think you'll have to take a more-or-less generic rules set, and build your own setting. So GURPS, Hero, Savage Worlds, FATE, Traveller (Traveller features jump drives, so you'll have to remove them, and ignore the setting, and come up with different, non-Newtonian methods for figuring out how long a trip in a solar system takes), or D6 should all work (I'm not familiar w/D6, though, but I'm guessing it would work).

Well I guess FTL would be fine, just as long as it still took a very long time to reach a distant destination (months or years of hybernation). None of the *Poof* to Alpha Centauri, Warp 6 nonsense.

In the later Ender's Game novels they used a weird system where people travelling through space would age at a normal rate, but everyone else would age extremely fast. So you would step out of your ship after two weeks and your family would be long dead.

 

[MortonStromgal]

You might also take a look at Eclipse Phase, if for no other reason than it falls under Creative Commons License. But I think ultimately for what you want you'll have to go with GURPS or another generic system and piecemeal what you want.

 

[darjr]

Transhuman Space

There is a ton about the setting, no surprise, which is the solar system 100 (?) years into the future.

I've often wondered if people were essentially immortal why haven't there been scores and scores taking sublight journeys into the galaxy.

 

[SiderisAnon]

In the later Ender's Game novels they used a weird system where people travelling through space would age at a normal rate, but everyone else would age extremely fast. So you would step out of your ship after two weeks and your family would be long dead.

I'm actually rereading the third book now, having just reread the first two in the series. I think you may be misremembering what their travel was based off of. There is a whole slew of science fiction based off of this style of space travel.

Loosely put, there is a theory that as you travel faster and approach the speed of light, your perception of the universe changes. Time seems to move slower for you. You can never exceed the speed of light, but the closer you get to the speed of light the greater the difference in perception between you on the ship and someone else back on the planet.

This means that if you left this planet and flew out and back and near the speed of light, when you returned you would find that the people here had aged far more than you did. A few weeks or months may have passed for you, but years or decades have passed for them. They don't age any faster, it's just that more time has passed for them than for you because they weren't traveling. (It's how Ender was 3,000 years old chronologically but only 35 years old physically; he spent lots of time traveling near the speed of light.)


While I've read plenty of science fiction using this style of travel, I don't believe I've ever seen a game system that uses it. Basically, using this kind of travel means that world are completely cut off from one another. If there's a problem somewhere, by the time you fly your spaceship to get there, decades have passed and either the problem is long solved or everyone died from it. Warfare between planets becomes ludicrous, though that didn't stop people from writing like it made sense. If you were to run in this type of system, travel between worlds would almost always be one way: You go there to colonize or settle. Trade between worlds would be extremely limited because there's little economic sense in spending huge amounts of money on a spaceship when you won't even live to see it come back with the first load of goods from where it went.

I'd highly recommend that you speed up travel. There's nothing wrong with the kind of space travel that can take months to accomplish, which allows you to have the sleeper travel while still having an actual connection between planets. (Kind of like Europe to Americas during the age of sail.) If you want to make sure people will use sleeper pods, simply make it so that the FTL technology creates a field in the ship that will drive anyone awake completely insane. So, the computers have to do the work and can only wake people up after slowing from FTL. (Imagine the great legends told around the bars/campfires about how the computer malfunctioned and woke up the whole flight crew of some ship while still in FTL, so they all arrived at their destination stark raving mad!)


I think that a generic system may be your best bet. There's no setting to disregard, just some core rules to build the setting you want on top of. I recently started with Savage Worlds and it does have a fairly generic combat system for vehicles that can apply to space combat.