TIPS Sought for Sustainable Sci-Fi (not Star Wars) Gaming

[Azgulor]

Unlike fantasy genres, where the violent & often lawless nature of the world support the adventuring party, science fiction typically brings constraints (as well as opportunities!) that are unavailable in the fantasy genre.

I’ve run various sci-fi campaigns over the years using a variety of systems. While most of them have been successful, none of them have had the longevity that my fantasy campaigns have had.

Unless you’re doing Post-Apoc sci-fi, chances are good you’ve got an interstellar society with laws, police, advanced technology, etc. In other words, it’s a little harder to run a sustainable campaign for free-wheeling adventure-types. Usually, there’s a theme/subgenre utilized to allow the PCs to have those gunfights, explosions, and … well, adventures. Methods I’ve used include:

1. Military Campaign.
Everyone is a member of the military – and authorized to carry a gun.
Pros: Missions are assigned. Lots of high-tech toys.
Cons: Chains-of-command can be problematic in “adventuring parties”. Players sometimes feel freedom is limited. Easy to make missions repetitive.

2. Troubleshooters.
PCs work for corporation or are freelancers for hire.
Pros: Supports “Adventuring Party” style play.
Cons: Characters are criminals/must work outside the law. Genre setting “conceits”, i.e. cyberpunk.

3. Space Cops
See Military Campaign, just focused on law enforcement. More relaxed chains-of-command.

4. Space Merchants
Classic Traveller-style tramp freighters trying to make a buck.
Pros: Character-freedom to choose adventures.
Cons: Firefights attract authorities. The merchant side of life usually isn’t as interesting. Nobody wants to play Space Accountant.


For 1 & 3, the characters work for the establishment and it’s generally benign/neutral. In 2 & 4, if the PCs are “good guys”, the establishment is often corrupt or evil.

In my campaigns, I’ve opted away from the corrupt establishment as it seemed too reminiscent of Star Wars’ Empire. However, given how well the BBE Alliance works for Firefly/Serenity, I’m starting to think that is a mistake.

Thoughts? What Sci-Fi tips do my fellow EN-Worlders have for long-term sci-fi campaigning?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Part of the trick is knowing what kind of sci-fi setting your players want to adventure in- hard science? space opera? Getting inside your players' heads and internalizing their desires to a certain extent by putting that stuff in the campaign can be key. They'll connect more quickly and thoroughly.

Also, the more Sci-Fi you read, the more campaign types you can design...and mix & match!

For instance, Kristine Katherine Rusch's Retrieval Artist novels are an excellent series in which the Humanity is the NKOTB in an interstellar confederation of dozens of races, and they are learning the hard way about the interactions between local and interstellar laws, esp. with interspecies conflicts.

In a sense, imagine the galaxy in which every culture has a mutual extradition treaty with every other. Thus, if you commit a crime in one race's zone of influence, their law enforcement officers may lawfully arrest, extradite or even execute you anywhere else, depending on the severity of the crime...and as in RL, ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Unfortunately, some things humans do on a regular basis, or by accident, are capital crimes in the eyes of other species. Planting a certain kind of plant of the wrong color might be an offense against a particular religion, for instance, or perhaps one makes a comment or gesture towards the recently deceased? Death penalty time.

Understandably, many humans find this fundamentally unfair, if not outright insane, and opt to Disappear or aid in the Disappearances of scofflaws. And of course, that means there is a need for those who can find the Disappeared...either to bring them to justice or to clear their names or just bring them vital information. Those who do this job are called Retrieval Artists.

(Yes, this is a lot like that episode of ST:tNG in which Wesley Crusher gets the death penalty for falling into a flower bed...but on a much larger and more involved scale.)

In such a setting, PCs could be law enforcement, military, Retrieval Artists, Disappeared, Alien Bounty Hunters and so forth.

Besides the Retrieval Artist books, other good SF books & series to read:

1) Bova's Grand Tour

2) Stirling's Lords of Creation and The Change (Nantucket and Emberverse)

3) Brin's Uplift

4) Dickson's Dorsai

5) Niven's Known Universe and Dream Park with Pournelle

6) Heinlein's Starship Troopers

7) Asimov's Nightfall, Robots or Foundation

8) Donaldson's Gap

9) Bear's Way or Forge of God series.

All of them have either classic elements that show up all over sci-fi or present unique twists that your players may not expect at all.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Now, for more practical stuff.

Just because its sci-fi, doesn't mean you can't have good, old-fashioned huntin'-and-killiin'-stuff-for-their-stuff type adventuring:

1) Even in the most organized of societies and advanced nations, there are "Badlands."

The same applies even moreso to the vastness of space. Despite the seeming orderliness of many SF settings, undoubtedly there are places where the rule of law is tenuous, if not completely absent. Places where the only law is what is yours is whatever you can hold onto.

Places like abandoned colonies, interstellar backwaters, DMZs & war zones, or even abandoned portions of a huge domed city or continent-spanning arcology (see Logan's Run, David Wingrove's Chung Kuo novels or the Paranoia RPG).

2) One of the big archetypal sci-fi settings is one of exploration. The PCs take the role of personnel or civilians aboard a ship or in a convoy on an exploratory mission. See Star Trek or the later seasons of the Gil Gerard version of Buck Rodgers.

3) The party are colonists on what appeared to be a lush and welcoming world. However, after the dropship left/they landed and cannibalized their ship to build their settlement according to plan, the world proved to be less hospitable than previously thought. Perhaps there are nasty critters heretofore unknown. Perhaps its an alien race's breeding/burial/sacred planet.

4) A close cousin of the post-Apocalyptic game is the survival fiction game. The party are survivors of some kind of alien (from space or another dimension) invasion, passing raid, or visitation on their normal migratory pattern. Perhaps spores from space released alien plant life intent on eating all the humans around (The Thing, Day of the Triffids, The "Seeds of Doom" episode of Dr Who), or they animated the dead into something resembling zombies.

Society is still somewhat intact, and some places are almost as well off as they are today. However, those places are the exception rather than the rule.

5) The PCs are alien abductees who are enslaved or hired to serve an alien race in some capacity- police, infantry, babysitters, "hunting dogs," living proxies for gladiatorial bloodsport games or whatever.

 

[GreatLemur]

3) The party are colonists on what appeared to be a lush and welcoming world. However, after the dropship left/they landed and cannibalized their ship to build their settlement according to plan, the world proved to be less hospitable than previously thought. Perhaps there are nasty critters heretofore unknown. Perhaps its an alien race's breeding/burial/sacred planet.

Aw, man, I was just about to post something along those lines. A lot of different kinds of frontier planet situation could be developed for the kind of long-term, freewheeling campaign common to fantasy RPGs. It's not hard to picture a world in the early years of colonization as being a D&D 4e-style "points of light" setting, where you've got settlements with some degree of safety and supplies and laws--at a sort of Old West level--while the rest of the planet is dangerous wilderness full of alien beasts, intelligent natives of various dispositions, criminals or dissidents cast out by the colonies, and lots and lots of potentially lucrative resources. The PCs could be the law--with little to no oversight by higher powers--or they could be surveyors, prospectors, settlers, or any number of other things.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Depending upon tech level and system size, the planet could have had multiple colonizations by different races.

If you're using David Brin's Uplift as inspiration, the colonization could be in the form of illegal colonists on a world that was designated to lie fallow (due to its being the past home of an intelligent race or the current home of a race that is trying to devolve).

Heck, Star Trek is full of episodes in each series that involve colonists getting into trouble with heretofore unknown intelligent life forms and so forth.

Which reminds me...

6) Adventures on a Space Station. Similar to a colonial setting, space stations can get you all kinds of fun adventures. Besides Trek, Babylon 5, and a number of novels and short stories feature the venerable space station as a focal point.

7) The Caravan. A variant of the Explorer setting, the space caravan is either running away from a foe (Galactica) or towards a goal (countless SF stories).

8) Lost in space. Yet another Explorer variant, except this time its entirely involuntary. Besides the show and movie that had this as its name, there have been others. The most recent incarnation that I can think of is Star Trek Voyager.

9) Still another variant of the Explorer setting is Leaving the Nest. It could be at the interstellar level- see Star Trek Enterprise- or as early as the final stages of exploring and exploiting the solar system. While the latter rarely has intelligent aliens, they don't need to be completely absent.

An example of the latter would be the aforementioned SM Stirling Lords of Creation series, as well as ERB's classic Barsoom books.

An excellent example of the former would be the aforementioned Ben Bova Grand Tour. No intelligent aliens, but who needs them when you've got a "Darkest Africa" meets "Wild West" approach to exploring the planets and exploiting them? Especially in the asteroid belt!

 

[Woas]

When it comes to sci-fi that includes a lot of space flight time (for example a typical Traveller game) a good source of ideas and inspiration is novels and stories of tall ships during the 14th through 19th centuries. And even a lot of modern day shipping too. It fits a certain type of Sci-fi, in which FTL isn't easy or instant. Each planet like a harbor with a unique culture and environment. When you're out in the black it's like a ship out to sea.

 

[Azgulor]

Thanks for all of the tips and suggestions thus far! Definitely some great ideas to explore further.

One clarifying question, though. What have you found works best as the hook/premise for the PCs? A lot of the examples given utilize a PCs-as-military as the reason for the mission/adventure/exploration, etc. (I find military-style sci-fi much more accessible for scratching my gamer side as well.) Is that really the best format, though? I think the chain-of-command & less free will to pursue player's interests contributes at least a little to hurting sci-fi campaign longevity.

What PC party dynamics/set-up have been most successful for you? (Even if it's strangers meet in a bar...)

 

[ValhallaGH]

It's pretty likely that PCs will end up in service to some entity/group in a sci-fi campaign. The military, an intelligence group, law enforcement, or even a merchantile syndicate.

If space travell is or might be a key component, take a look at some of David Drake's novels (especially the "Reaches" series, "Cross the Stars", or "The Voyage"). These are modelled on various ancient recordings (the life and times of Francis Drake for the Reaches; the Odyssey and the Argonautica for the other two) and emphasize travel, conflict, exploration, and the psychological effects of living in a war zone. If you'd rather do mercs in space, "Hammer's Slammers" is some good stuff with similar themes.

Good luck.

 

[Thanee]

You can also merge some of your concepts... for example, the PCs could start out as military types and run missions, until some event (for example they desert because they get a mission they are morally inclined not to follow; or they could be cut off from their support (i.e. kinda like ST:Voyager); etc) forces them to adopt to a new situation, where they might become merceneries/merchants looking for scrap parts to keep their ship going, or something like that, until they finally get home, only to find out they missed the alien invasion and now have to... and so on.

Bye
Thanee

 

[threshel]

If space travell is or might be a key component, take a look at some of David Drake's novels (especially the "Reaches" series, "Cross the Stars", or "The Voyage"). These are modelled on various ancient recordings (the life and times of Francis Drake for the Reaches; the Odyssey and the Argonautica for the other two) and emphasize travel, conflict, exploration, and the psychological effects of living in a war zone. If you'd rather do mercs in space, "Hammer's Slammers" is some good stuff with similar themes.

Good luck.

Yes! Drake's series is very good. He wrote a similar book for Tor that would make a great SF game adventure: The Forlorn Hope

Azgulor, I always found the mercenary company to be a good framework for sci-fi. It can be run with a titular head, but tends to be more democratic in the long term, much like the colonial pirates did back in the golden age of piracy. That should give the players the equal status they need to feel satisfied with a long term game. Also, mercs are easier to put in varied situations - they don't have a government backing them up/reigning them in and their "employer" will change from job-to-job. Don't neglect the chance for "between jobs" adventures as well. It will be easier to break the rut you mentioned about repetitive missions.

Good Luck and let us know how it goes!

J