Tales from a Spaceport Bar (Forked Thread: Space RPGs?)

[The Green Adam]

Forked from: Space RPGs?

So we're always hearing about everyone's D&D/Fantasy RPG campaigns, adventures and ideas - Let's show some SF/Space Adventure love people! Tell us about your Science Fiction milieu, notable sessions, alien sentients and critters, robots, gear, etc.

If you play, have played or will play Hard SciFi or Space Opera, be it Fading Suns, Space Opera, Star Frontiers, Star Trek, Star Wars,Traveller, 2300 AD or what-have-you, I want to hear about it!

Incidentally if you've never read Tales from a Spaceport Bar, try to find a copy and do so. Frellin' cool. I believe its out of print but information and a cover image can be found here: [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Tales-Spaceport-Bar-George-Scithers/dp/0380899434"]Amazon.com: Tales from the Spaceport Bar: George H. Scithers, Darrell Schweitzer: Books[/ame]


AD
"Never Give Up, Never Surrender!"

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

As I mentioned here:http://www.enworld.org/forum/genera...s-bizzarre-form-vs-vaguely-humanoid-form.html

I have a supers PC based on Greg Bear's aliens from Anvil of Stars.

My dude "Threadd" is a heavyworlder who looks like a thick, metallic ropy coil many hundreds of feet long (the millions of legs that exist along his body's length are so short and fine that they look more like a haze or halo around him). Instead of just going around looking like a vast mechanical snake or animate suspension bridge cable, he usually "piles" himself up into a vaguely humanoid shape, not unlike a T-1000 or Chain Golem. While not technically a superhero, his heavyworlder physique makes him more powerful than most Terrans, and as a moral sophont, he generally exerts himself for the greater good. "Powers" include minor shapechanging & multiple limbs (reflecting the way he twists and loops his body), super strength and toughness, resistance to pressure, radiation and acids, but his alien biochemistry makes him exceedingly vulnerable to electrical, heat, and other conventional energy attacks.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Another supers PC- this one an "alien gladiator" type who won her freedom from the death pits to become a wanderer...and crashlanded on Earth.

For the most part, she was a nice mix of typical density increasing/growing "brick" and a Gladiator's Code that permitted her to kill a foe who who fought with honor or who was so mortally wounded that death was a mercy.

The interesting part about her was that she had a "realistic" alien metabolism. She needed a LOT of calories to power her abilities, especially her super strength- she ate about her body weight in food every day. In addition, certain foods, spices and additives were toxic to her alien metabolism, so she always ran the possibility of going into anaphylaxic shock after eating.*

She was 100% fun!

*In an example of convergent thinking, her appearance and the "some foods are toxic" detail to her metabolism were very similar to details contained in C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner books. She looked like an atevi in many ways, and Earth food affected her like some atevi foods affected humans. And I hadn't read or seen any of the Foreigner books until 2005...something like a decade after that campaign ended.

 

[Starglim]

I have good memories of a 2300AD campaign in uni days, though it didn't run very long, objectively speaking. Currently running Mission Arcturus online and it's going well so far, though they have just run into their first combat with quite a lot of Kafers:

Current play: Face of the Enemy
Introduction

 

[The Green Adam]

Almost gave up hope...still might

With all the talk recently about SciFi/Space gaming I really thought there would be a bigger turn out for this thread.

While almost anything from DannyAlcatraz is bound to catch my attention and I love 2300 AD, I was really expecting more people to chime in. I mean, the 'Resurrecting Old RPGs' thread and the '5 Games on a Desert Island' thread make numerous mentions of Traveller, Star Frontiers, Star Wars and Star Trek. You mean to tell me that with the illustrious assemblage of awesomeness here on EN World nobody remembers some good SF anecdotes? This could well explain why SciFi gaming has always suffered in comparisson to its Fantasy counterpart.

I do really like the odd, alien metabolism 'brick' character though. Very cool concept.

AD
"Sure, they're cute now, but in a second they're gonna get mean, and they're gonna get ugly somehow, and there's gonna be a million more of them."

 

[Ed_Laprade]

I've got a couple, but the details are pretty fuzzy these days, and I've metioned one before.

Original Star Trek, Klingons: A couple of things happened with this one. There was the time when we had forward shields up and the helmsman put the ship in a position where the 'bad guys' could, and did, beam a boarding party onto the ship. The captain, and the rest of us were not amused.

Then there was the mutiny. Some of the crew decided to improve their rank by causing an 'accident' to happen to the captain. But the captain's player figured that we might try something like that and set up some safeguards. He died, we died, everybody died!

GURPS Space: One of the characters decided he wanted a more powerful weapon than was legally available 'just in case'. Ok, I give him a couple of real low rolls to find someone with one, who wasn't part of a sting operation. (It was a tribarrel laser, which was very illegal!) He actually made them. The rest of the crew were "Holy crap!" when he revealed it later.

But it turned out to be a good thing he got it. I had them run into a 'Martian War Machine' that had been buried and activated when they dug it up. They'd left the 'big gun' on the ship. But I was allowing psionics so the teleporter hopped over to the ship, grabbed the gun, then hopped back with it. He passed out from the strain, but someone else used it to stop the war machine.

Oh, that reminds me of another bit from the GURPS guys. I had them run into some pirates out in space. I figured they could take 'em if they blew away the other ship's drive, and could salvage the rest. Some quick calculations later and Mr. Teleporter hopped over to the pirate ship with a sack full of grenades, pulled the pin on one and bugged out. He ended up knocked out again, but they ended up with a mostly undamaged ship to salvage!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

For some reason, I find myself playing more female PCs in sci-fi campaigns. Besides the gladiatrix mentioned above, I have the following:

From my buddy Marlon's Mekton game in Austin (early 1990s at Henchworld):

I was playing Heather, a caucasian bisexual female engineer- EXTREME RP content! since I'm black, straight, male and have absolutely no business using a slide rule or scientific calculator. Besides the obvious differences above, I designed her to be a typical sci-fi "wizard-engineer"- able to kluge replacement mecha parts out of twine and aluminum foil...but she had almost ZERO flight skill. This made for some real fun since each PC had to pass a launch/touch n' go/landing test from the carrier from which the campaign was based.

It took her 3 tries and 2 wrecked mecha to pass the test, which she did by a single pip on the rolled die.

From a Cyberpunk GURPS game in Austin (early 1990s at Henchworld):

As mentioned in the cross-gender PC thread ( http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/243804-cross-gender-pcs.html ), I played an über-slutty, über-hawt decadent albino biker/street samurai chick with a vibrosword & a .50 cal handgun. Yes, she was a modern, cross-gendered version of Elric. And yes, I was tying her into the whole Eternal Champion thing. Her sexuality could have wound up being awkward or offensive, but with the coaching I got from the female members of the group, she was merely cooler than ice on Pluto. She used sex as a weapon, then used her weapons on those she had sex with...(if she didn't like them, of course).

From a RIFTS campaign in D/FW (late 1990s):

I played Angel Zero, a Ley Line Walker who was a member of a secret society who believed their mystic powers derived from remaining virgins. Unlike the PC mentioned directly above, she could be quite the ice princess, and at one point actually had to sacrifice a relationship she had with an NPC in order to retain her mystic abilities.

From a HERO game in San Antonio (late 1980s):

I played what appeared to be a 3' diameter orb of chrome and glass- somewhat like one of the balls from Phantasm on steroids. Everyone thought it was merely an alien life form. In reality, it was an interdimensional spacecraft of exploration, the 430 souls aboard being only a few centimeters tall relative to natives of our dimension- much fun was had addressing the various "bags of mostly water" and having them assume I was playing one being.. The ship was lightly armed but heavily armored, and its main contribution was in the form of intelligence gathering- with its suite of sensors, very little could be concealed from it, and naturally, it had a Universal Translator. It was faster than almost anything around except the true super-speedsters, and had access to amazing computational power.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

How could I forget?!?!?!?

My first Traveller PC- died during character creation. I was trying to role-play a military hero, and like many of those, he got "killed on a mission."

I always loved that rule. Its a classic example of a rule that lets players play PCs who are differently abled compared to their partymates.

Balance? Balance came in the form of risk/reward. You risked your PC's life in exchange for the potential reward of more money and equipment. Risk nothing, gain nothing- risk everything, potentially get to play an ACTION HERO!

For the record, my second Traveller PC was the younger brother of the first, who had joined the service inspired by tales of his bro's exploits. Eventually, he got to take out the person responsible for his brother's death (not ME!- the commander of the rogue ship upon which his brother was killed during a mission).

 

[The Green Adam]

What could take out a guy like that?!

MegaTraveller (Original - Early 90s Campaign - I think)

So my friend was on a roll, creating a character with incredible stats who roll after roll got commendations, special duty, re-enlisted, etc. Tour after tour the guy was making lucky rolls each and every time. When he started to get on in years he rolled on the aging tables and didn't loose a single attribute. Finally, he decided to go for one more tour...and died. After nearly 30 minutes of rolling him up, stats that would make Capt. America jealous...dead.

The air was still. We bowed our heads and paid our respects in a moment of silence for the coolest character never played.

My pal remained stoic. He got back on the horse right away, rolling up a decent character but not doing to many terms. Then he said he had the perfect background for his new character. He was determined to find out what happened to his uncle, whom he believed was killed and the incident covered up by the Imperials, censoring the media.

"I mean come on, how does a guy like that just die all of a sudden. I mean my uncle was some kind of super soldier! He got commendations, special duty, re-enlisted, etc. Tour after tour the guy was making amazing strides every time..."

So his character's goal was to find out the truth of what killed his character who died during character creation. Oh YEAH!

AD
"I'm just jazzed about being on the show, man."

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Dude...is your buddy me from another universe? (I have a goatee, so that may make me the evil one.)

Actually, that's something I've been toying around with for some time...alternate "me"s. Not idealized versions of me, just versions of me that went down slightly different paths...the "me"s you might meet in episodes of Sliders. One who spent more time on the sports he loved instead of D&D, for instance, or one who studied languages or music seriously instead of dabbling.

Ah well, back to other PCs I've actually made...

Slapstick: this was an unusual PC. The idea was to design a PC that I could run in almost any modern/supers/sci-fi game so that regardless of system, I'd always have a "pregen" PC to run. Slapstick was the result- a nutjob merc who wore body armor and carried typical heavy sidearms- pistols, assault rifles, grenades of various types...and had a Joker-esque countenance, so he always looked like a creepy clown (not unlike the one they eventually used in ATHF). I have a HERO, GURPS, and RIFTS version of him, and a couple of others besides.