People like me.
I will always be writing space adventure games, with starships, strange new (or old) worlds and aliens. Star Wars could be thought of as Starships & Blasters & Aliens, OMG!!! I just tend to get hung up on world-building and critter design (although that latter not so much here of late…), but starships are characters, too! 8-P Or at least they damn well should be, and perhaps literally are, sometimes. There are games where the ship is a player character, or the PCs are ships. There’s plenty of examples like Cowboy Bebop where the ship (not starships in CB, but there is FTL) is a defining character accessory, but I’m thinking of the ship as a player base and community property, like the covenants of Ars Magica.
So I guess what I want is to design a ship and setting around the PCs, or the PCs and ship around the setting, but group world-building is game play, the zeroth session, if you will. The typical situation is a ship and crew like the Millenium Falcon, or Serenity, what I call the cargo box, flying barn or whatever, with all those convenient nooks and crannies for hiding contraband or stowaways! Typically I envision this as the equivalent of a DC-3, which came into private hands as WW2 surplus, so that would probably explain this in a future setting, war surplus war-zone cargo delivery starships with anti-personnel weapons for dealing with hostile LZ, but not armed to the teeth or nerfed when sold off to civilians. On the other hand, we could have a death-trap belter special designed for keeping an asteroid miner alive, maybe, while slowly flitting around from rock to rock, a rock-hopper which doesn’t need to survive atmospheric re-entry and will probably be tethered to a pile of gravel and slowly fall to the surface after a few hours. There may or may not be artificial doubletalk gravity or spin gravity. There definitely needs to be a pressurized volume and life support and consumables, power, communications, sensors, some kind of reaction drive and reaction mass, tethers and grapples, etc.
So what do I want to run? How about humankind getting FTL from an alien starship which crash landed on Earth. It took a little while to reverse engineer and everybody was stealing from everybody else so the great powers and the hyper powers have FTL, cheap fusion power, artificial gravity, automated factories and robots (drones and droids?) a generation later and we’re exploring the nearby stars and worlds with national and corporate fleets. We’ve fought orbital and extrasolar battles but no all-in wars, as yet… Ships are big things built cheap out of steel and take off and land at airports or flat ground (and it will be!) and sometimes sea ports, they tend to be less dense than water. Ships take off under doubletalk impulse drive and jump far from any mass.
There are certain obvious questions about aliens and the current state of the galaxy and local space. The crashed starship is very old and has been near Earth for a long time. There are no space faring aliens nearby and we don’t know why. The alien homeworld is a long way off, in this galaxy but thousands of light years away and we don’t know what happened to them. The good news is we’re spreading out as fast and as far as we can, so there are lots of starships; it’s time to starship and every time a company goes bust, somebody is there to buy its' assets up… which implies boom and bust, boom and bust, plus lots of little guys vs. guvmnint or corp starships. The typical small operation has early mass-produced smaller cargo boxes replaced by bigger and better ships, needs a pilot to fly it, maybe, and engineer to keep it running, definitely!
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