"Voyager" Campaign

Some discussion over on the Fantasy & Sci-Fi message board about how Star Trek: Voyager wasted it's premise of two disparate crews brought together and having to survive together far from home got me thinking. Then I realized, the basic premise of that series could be turned into a very interesting low level or low magic D&D game.

Start a campaign with 3 or 4 players, playing rogues, bandits and generally disreputable types, a pirate ship or at least a smuggler, starting at level 1. At the same time start a separate campaign with 3 or 4 players playing a naval crew, responsible for keeping order, exploring, and generally representing their kingdom at sea, also starting at level 1. Both ships are in a sea far away from their normal homeland, but within normally charted and navigable waterways (like the Carribean to European ships). After 2 or 3 levels and a relatively short time (but long enough for the group to start feeling some sense of unity), they both separately discover or hear of a magical archway (of a scale akin to the Colossus of Rhodes) that has been discovered amidst ruins in an inlet of a small island that transports ships to a wondrous new and uncharted land that has been discovered that has untold riches.

Both ships enter separately but within a day or so of each other, and find the other side is the decaying capitol city on the other side of the world, uncharted and completely unknown, of an ancient Empire that has long fallen into factions, city-states, barbarism, and marauding foriegn powers. The two ships are in the same harbor when one of the marauding states launches a major attack, which destroys their archway home and strands them, as well as damaging their ships and killing most of their NPC crews (like the NPC captain of the Naval ship, leaving the low-level PC First Officer as the captain maybe). In the aftermath the pirates have found that their ship is sinking, although most of their supplies and equipment is salvagable, while the naval ship is relatively intact although it is in desperate need of more skilled crew as well as supplies and spare parts, things the other ship has in abundance. For either crew to get home would require them to work together to survive the long trip. A crew composed of half pirates & smugglers, and half of sailors and marines having to sail across the world to get home in a ship that is suffering increasingly poor and cobbled-together repairs, when they only have the vaguest clues of how to get back where they started from. The two campaigns merge into one.

New characters brought in would either be "offscreen" NPC crewmen who were promoted after the death of a main character, locals that became brought along for the ride for one reason or another (a guide to the local area, exile from an evil/intolerant society) or even lost people from their own end of the world who ended up far away themselves (other ships that were stranded when the new gateway was destroyed, victims of magical accidents, or long-lost explorers who became stranded somehow).

The DM has plenty of chances for this to be an "episodic" campaign, since the players are usually seeing cities, cultures, and islands that they may never see again, and only visit for a short time, and even recurring empires/kingdoms only last so long before they sail beyond their sphere of influence.

Preferably the campaign would be either relatively low level (to prevent them from teleporting home easily) or low-magic enough that teleportation spells are not normally available to PC's (like if it was based on the d20 Modern/Past engine instead of D&D).

Does anybody else like this idea for a campaign?
 

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I like the idea a lot, but if I were a player in the game I'd want everything you said above handed to me on a sheet before the first session.

I'm not a fan of campaigns that run on rails until the GM gets you where he needs you to be. If you need them to be there, discuss it with the players beforehand, and have the very first scene be the wartorn harbor, with a burning pirate ship sinking, catapulted balls of flame shooting overhead, hordes of armies on the shore...and just then the collossal stone Gate gets hit by a meteor swarm and topples into the sea. That'd be a great opening scene.

"You're on the forecastle, gazing out at an empty sea. What do you do?" is not quite as memorable.

The other advantage is that you'll know whether your players like the idea, before you strand them in a campaign they didn't know they'd signed up for.
 
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i like the idea, but remember that having two groups for a long period of time can become annoying for the players because they hav to sit there doing nothing half the time.
 

Yeah, co-ordinating the two groups would be a hassle and you'd have to inform the players beforehand. Springing such a major change in game flavor on them, then throwing an entirely separate gaming group in with them would be a major shock.
 

2 quick and easy solutions:

1) They could start off as an unrelated group of travellers on 1 ship that gets attacked by raiders.

2) As above, but some of the survivors are raiders and some are aboard the ship that got attacked.

In either case, have the attack happen in the first 20 minutes of the session, otherwise you'll just bore some people.

The attack damages BOTH ships to the point that the sole survivors (the party members) MUST work together or they will all die.

If you want, add a magical deus ex machina that teleports the flotsam and jetsam of the wrecked ships to a different place, different plane, whatever- so that there is no question about the cooperation factor. Work together to live, or divide yourselves and die off. Think not only of Voyager, but also Lost and Lord of the Flies.
 

Dannyalcatraz said:
They could start off as an unrelated group of travellers on 1 ship that gets attacked by raiders.

i like this one because it leaves room for potential interaction between the groups.
 

Dannyalcatraz said:
Think not only of Voyager, but also Lost and Lord of the Flies.
I do think about Lost. Often. Especially Evangeline Lilly (Kate)....she makes me ache in my naughty parts.

God I love that show, despite the Gilligan's Island effect.



....But this discussion is for a different thread. [/thread hijack]
 

I think this is a great idea for a game. It would be hard to pull off for real-life logistical reasons (you need two separate groups to GM for, then be confident that you can merge those two groups in the future and still meet everybody's schedule).

But if you can do it, I think it would rock. For it to work, though, I think the players would have to NOT know what they were getting into. This requires a certain amount of GM trust, of course, but would be well worth it.

As far as avoiding the quick teleport home...Teleport itself only has a range of, what, 100 miles per level? That eliminates it as a means to travel to the far side of a planet. Greater teleport is 7th level, so I think this could be easily open to any group below about 10th level. I would start it at about 5th so the PCs can be significantly more capable than the general crew, which still gives you plenty of time before the wizard just says "poof, we're home."

You would need some source of ongoing conflict between the two groups, if possible. In Voyager itself, the feddies were actually pursuing the Maquis. You could easily do that here, too. The pirates are pursued through the gate by the naval ship (both ships captained by NPCs to ensure that it happens). That sets the tone to "hostile" and makes the later co-operation more interesting.
 

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