I'm reminded (not sure how) of Traxo Vihhumli, my Andorian Star Trek character. He joined Starfleet after a dodgy life in some Godforsaken border colony region between the Federation, Klingons, Romulans and Cardassians and as a result I talked my GM into using a submachinegun-style disruptor. Bringing an automatic weapon into Star Trek phaser battles - good times. An undercover mission was fun, too, with his idea of civilian clothing involving tie-dyed shirts and multiple strings of orange beads to go with his white hair and blue antennae.
Tales from a Spaceport Bar (Forked Thread: Space RPGs?)
- Thread starter The Green Adam
- Start date
Ed_Laprade
Adventurer
There are times when I wish my memory was a lot better. (Like, most times!) Anyway, I recall that I had a pretty cool ST character once. She was half Romulan and half Human (or was it half Vulcan?). Grew up Romulan but killed someone important and was on the lam. She had fake Federation ID and had a penchant for knocking off (in secret, of course) anyone she thought was looking for her. Which the GM used to get the party (a tramp freighter crew) involved in spy missions and such. It took a while before anyone realized what she was, and why all these weird things were happening to them (and why she had all that Romulan equipment). Good times!
Psion
Adventurer
Unfortunately for me, it's been way too long since I ran SF games.
Traveller used to be my "summer refresher". After a year of D&D, when the summer hit (in high school and college), we'd switch to traveller for a change of pace.
We had 2 main Traveller referees back in the day, myself and one other ref who was way too much into Call of Cthulhu and it showed in his game. We were always being plagued by some dangerous and perhaps horrifying phenomena in his games unless he was running a published adventure. Which he ran a few... The Traveller Adventure and Leviathan stand out as some of the most fun.
Somehow, in our games, the group was either
1) Near criminal, embroiled in a bunch of extra-legal activities, or
2) Working for imperial intelligence, and then got caught on the other side of an enemy border, whereupon they were again operating on the wrong side of the law.
Adventure is harship aestetically considered, they say.
Traveller used to be my "summer refresher". After a year of D&D, when the summer hit (in high school and college), we'd switch to traveller for a change of pace.
We had 2 main Traveller referees back in the day, myself and one other ref who was way too much into Call of Cthulhu and it showed in his game. We were always being plagued by some dangerous and perhaps horrifying phenomena in his games unless he was running a published adventure. Which he ran a few... The Traveller Adventure and Leviathan stand out as some of the most fun.
Somehow, in our games, the group was either
1) Near criminal, embroiled in a bunch of extra-legal activities, or
2) Working for imperial intelligence, and then got caught on the other side of an enemy border, whereupon they were again operating on the wrong side of the law.
Adventure is harship aestetically considered, they say.
I just finished reading Hal Clement's Mesklin stories, collected as the book Heavy Planet. The stories are classics of hard sci-fi, well worth the read. They revolve around the relationship between exploring humans and their dealings with a particular tribe of Mesklinites, shortly after first contact with the pre-industrial natives.
Mesklin is a heavy world planet with ultra-high rotation shaped like a discus. At the rim, the gravity is 3g...at the poles, its 700g! Its day is only a few minutes long.
The Mesklinites themselves strongly resemble 15"-36" long (depending on tribe) red & black caterpillars. Their lifespans are much longer than humans.
At one point they discuss the amount of intelligent life encountered by humanity. There are only a few other alien races mentioned in the stories, but none but humans and Mesklinites actually appear in them. AFAIK, none of the other races were ever fleshed out by Clement in other stories.
Mesklin is a heavy world planet with ultra-high rotation shaped like a discus. At the rim, the gravity is 3g...at the poles, its 700g! Its day is only a few minutes long.
The Mesklinites themselves strongly resemble 15"-36" long (depending on tribe) red & black caterpillars. Their lifespans are much longer than humans.
At one point they discuss the amount of intelligent life encountered by humanity. There are only a few other alien races mentioned in the stories, but none but humans and Mesklinites actually appear in them. AFAIK, none of the other races were ever fleshed out by Clement in other stories.
Herobizkit
Adventurer
My deepest foray into the SF universe went as far as Robotech. To date, I have never played a purely science-fiction RPG.
The Green Adam
First Post
Getting better and better...
Let's jazz this bad boy up with some crazy cosmic capers and stellar stuff...
Traveller - It Was War...
(Classic Traveller/MegaTraveller Hybrid)
Set barely 2 years after the Fifth Frontier War (but long before Babylon 5 somehow swiped the idea
), an Imperial Star Fighter Pilot (a PC and the 'Good Guy') and his squadron kamikaze into a Zhodani (the 'Bad Guys') Space Station/Defense Outpost. Before impact and as his allies are blasted out of space, the Imperial Pilot blacks out. He awakens some 3 or fours days later in an Imperial Hospital to find the war is over and he was found adrift in space in the wreckage of his fighter.
The campaign follows the Pilot and a host of other rag tag adventurers whose lives were changed by the war and they join to find their fortunes and try to make sense of a post war galaxy/space sector. In the process they learn of a secret plot to obtain Ancient Artifacts (which may have been an official reason behind the conflict) and discover that the Zhodani are out to capture and study the aforementioned pilot who may possess untold psychic powers. There were a few other subplots (one for each of the 6 or 7 PCs) but most were only barely explored.
Traveller - Jumping Jack Flash
(Classic Traveller)
I forget all the details but the plot of this fast moving, action packed campaign focused on the PCs stealing an experimental, prototype Jump-7 Spacecraft (Jump-6 is the fastest drive in Traveller canon) so it couldn't be used by a corrupt Admiral for a military coup or something. I remember all the odd jobs the players had to pull to keep up repairs, pay off people to say they hadn't seen the ship, get ammo and fuel, etc. It was hilarous.
Star Frontiers - The Alpha Dawn Patrol
(Star Frontiers - Alpha Dawn/Knight Hawks)
The player characters were members of the Star Law Rangers! (must use a '!' when the name is spoken or written) in a rip-roaring, almost pulp future space patrol game. Mostly, the heroes spouted heroic rhetoric, fought evil space pirates, saved alien princesses and battled our arch-nemesis Malacious BlackNova! Each player had their own Starfighter type ship reflecting their personal style and each ship had an unique feature like a cloaking device, extra heavy weaponry or short range jump/teleports. The game was mostly played for laughs and yet has some of the best space battles and firefights we'd ever run until of Star Trek campaigns of the mid-to-late eighties.
AD
"It's a rock monster. It doesn't have motivation."
Let's jazz this bad boy up with some crazy cosmic capers and stellar stuff...
Traveller - It Was War...
(Classic Traveller/MegaTraveller Hybrid)
Set barely 2 years after the Fifth Frontier War (but long before Babylon 5 somehow swiped the idea
), an Imperial Star Fighter Pilot (a PC and the 'Good Guy') and his squadron kamikaze into a Zhodani (the 'Bad Guys') Space Station/Defense Outpost. Before impact and as his allies are blasted out of space, the Imperial Pilot blacks out. He awakens some 3 or fours days later in an Imperial Hospital to find the war is over and he was found adrift in space in the wreckage of his fighter.The campaign follows the Pilot and a host of other rag tag adventurers whose lives were changed by the war and they join to find their fortunes and try to make sense of a post war galaxy/space sector. In the process they learn of a secret plot to obtain Ancient Artifacts (which may have been an official reason behind the conflict) and discover that the Zhodani are out to capture and study the aforementioned pilot who may possess untold psychic powers. There were a few other subplots (one for each of the 6 or 7 PCs) but most were only barely explored.
Traveller - Jumping Jack Flash
(Classic Traveller)
I forget all the details but the plot of this fast moving, action packed campaign focused on the PCs stealing an experimental, prototype Jump-7 Spacecraft (Jump-6 is the fastest drive in Traveller canon) so it couldn't be used by a corrupt Admiral for a military coup or something. I remember all the odd jobs the players had to pull to keep up repairs, pay off people to say they hadn't seen the ship, get ammo and fuel, etc. It was hilarous.
Star Frontiers - The Alpha Dawn Patrol
(Star Frontiers - Alpha Dawn/Knight Hawks)
The player characters were members of the Star Law Rangers! (must use a '!' when the name is spoken or written) in a rip-roaring, almost pulp future space patrol game. Mostly, the heroes spouted heroic rhetoric, fought evil space pirates, saved alien princesses and battled our arch-nemesis Malacious BlackNova! Each player had their own Starfighter type ship reflecting their personal style and each ship had an unique feature like a cloaking device, extra heavy weaponry or short range jump/teleports. The game was mostly played for laughs and yet has some of the best space battles and firefights we'd ever run until of Star Trek campaigns of the mid-to-late eighties.
AD
"It's a rock monster. It doesn't have motivation."
Sounds like one part Blake's 7, one part Firefly, and one part Hitchhiker's Guide- I bet it was a blast!
Personally, I'd love to play a hard-SF game set in an early age of space exploration, like you see in Ben Bova's Planetary and Asteroid Wars books- both set in the days when humanity was just getting around the solar system. Odds are, however, that I'd be the one who has to run it. C'est la vie!
Not that I don't like space opera and the like, its just that its an era so rarely covered.
The Green Adam
First Post
Agreed - the closet I came to this was a very strange campaign I ran in college...
We used Traveller: 2300 but it wasn't set in the game's default universe. Instead, the players were drafted into the service of a future United Nations space agency from various other services (including one PC freed from a prison after being court martialed). The purpose of their mission was to establish first contact with an alien spacecraft that had been sitting in the orbit of Neptune for the past 20-25 years. About 10 years prior to the start of the campaign the vessel was detected by an unmanned probe. The information was covered up and not released to the press while a secret UN committee worked toward communication. Finally, with the help of another probe and a satellite placed in orbit around the Earth, we could talk to the alien craft. Think of a cross between Contact, 2001/2010 and a little The Day The Earth Stood Still. The story was set in the year 2192-93 I think. It was a very interesting, thought provoking game with character who proved a greater hinderance and danger to each other then the aliens did. Not a long of action but what action their was became pretty epic. I remember one scene where the players were targeting missiles aimed at the alien craft with missiles of their own while two PCs argued over their next move. All the while one PC was on the alien craft communicating/grokking one of the aliens telepathically. Yeah, it was weird.
AD
"Oh *that's* not right."
