What do I do with this setting?!

[Pbartender]

There's someone over on the Crafty Games message boards who's already doing this with Spycraft 2.0...

 

[papastebu]

Yeah, that's certainly one way of doing it--I'm a huge fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, although I always thought Pellucidar and the Land that Time Forgot settings were among his weaker ones.

Actually, in my original draft, they travelled from world to world in ancient space barges that travelled via some kind of quantum jump across the space-time continuum--a vague kinda hyperspace equivalent. These space barges were literally millions of years old, and their discovery was purely accidental. Nobody knows if that's what they really were intended for, but it's a use that by trial and error they were able to discover and utilize.

I liked the idea that I could bin this as some kind of science fiction rather than purely fantastic escapism. I also really liked the idea of the pilots of these barges only barely understanding the merest fraction of what they were capable of and going through the motions almost ritualistically because they didn't know enough to deviate from them and go exploring beyond the preset settings.

I do like your idea of having competing organizations trying to stake claims and corner potential resource markets here, though--corporate armies and pirates (privateers?) as a potential recurring antagonist is nice. Especially if there's a strong possibility of incredibly ancient alien ruins to discover and plunder. That gives me the opportunity to create an almost pyrrhic Weyland-Yutani type slimey agenda.

The space barge thing made me think. Head hurts...
Anyway, this udea has way more potential than what you are trying to use it for. The barges could be part of some interstellar machine, the moving parts. As the thing unfolds, it becomes more and more evident that the original scaly aliens brought some sort of trouble with them when they brought the "stargates"---using this word for lack of a better one. For some reason, the gray aliens--again, this smacks of SG-1--are trying to connect multiple worlds to each other. There is some major cosmic effect that this connection will have, and every use of the " barges"---and this name, I think, is more original---deviates from the purpose the future-people/gray aliens/spacefaring evolutionaries of the human race/etc, had in mind, and stranger and stranger things keep occurring the more they do so. The dinosaur hunting is barely the tip of the iceberg.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Treat it somewhat like "Firefly" - the crew of the barge go around hunting down dinosaurs using ancient shipbuilding technology = the crew of Serenity flying around performing marginal crime on a rundown spaceship. Then hang the elements of story and character on that, with the NPC's coming into play, rivalries, etc.

Each different dinosaur hunt should involve something specifically different and challenging - perhaps they need to take down one T-Rex, another time they need to take down a herd of velociraptors, then a swimming dino, or a pterodactyl; something different about either the type of dino or the environment that they need to operate in.

Leave unsaid the question of "why are there dinosaurs on all these planets, all of whom match earth species" until someone asks the question, and then be prepared with an answer - ancient species trying to populate various worlds with food stores for future use (whatever that might be). Eventually the game becomes more than dino hunting, but dino hunting forms the hook that drives the setting.