Space Opera Part Deux

So I’ve been running this Space Opera campaign idea around a bit more in my head and have a few more random thoughts to add to it.

So this star cluster (a group of stars near each other and grouped together) is a remote region that is not resource rich, it doesn’t have any real strategic value, and isn’t claimed by either major government surrounding it. So why the hell would anyone live there? Well, being not claimed by either government is exactly the type of place people who want to be left alone would go. There are always humans who will flee from civilization to be where they can just be left alone and I’m sure there are species of aliens that would do the same.

There are bound to be enough resources and such in the area to seem at least attractive enough to people to move out to there, so it isn’t going to be devoid of an economy. It’ll just be smaller than other areas. Maybe there’s a nice planet that people will fly to as a tourism destination, possibly on the way to another destination. So one planet in the entire cluster will have a larger economy and population than the rest of it, but it will be more of a tourism/consumer based economy than anywhere else in the cluster. Most of the cluster’s economy would be based around feeding raw materials and supplies to the largest consumer in the area because that’s how economies tend to work.

This means that interstellar shipping will be important. Great time and place to be a trader… or a pirate.

With the lack of a central government, each system is going to be policing their own territory and not caring about what other places are doing. Coupling this with how much shipping is going to the same location you’re going to see a decently large pirate presence throughout the cluster. The area being poorly patrolled by civilized society means that privateers, security companies, and bounty hunter types exist in droves to help provide the law and order. Most of them are even pretty decent folk.

Okay, so let’s talk about technology. Since this is my personal setting it has its own set of tech. Most of it is pretty straightforward.

Let’s start with propulsion and interstellar travel. Keep in mind that we’re going to go with the cinematic approach to speeds similar to how Star Wars or space flight sim games like Wing Commander use. It isn’t realistic and is explained by the “Rule of Awesome” as to why this is even practical. So you have 3 speeds of travel; Local/Combat, In-System Navigation, and Interstellar.

Local/Combat speeds are the slowest and are based upon the speeds required to safely maneuver near gravity wells of certain strength or around other ships. It also enables ships to operate weapons safely and accurately. This propulsion system is based off of Fusion/Plasma Engines generating thrust.

In-System Navigation (I-SN, ISN Drive) is kind of like Warp Speed, but it only works while within a certain distance of a star’s gravity well, the further away it is from the star the slower it goes. Once you pass the Interstellar space threshold the I-SN is about as useful as the engines for Local speeds. This is a separate type of engine that is essentially a field generator that manipulate space-time/gravity around it similar to the familiar warp-drive but interstellar space doesn’t have enough gravity generating matter available to provide the “wave/bubble” effect.

Interstellar navigation was a difficult thing for the various species to master. The true key to making a functioning interstellar drive was to design a system that didn’t interact with the physics of our universe. The Sub-Space Drive (SSD, sub-drive, subspace field generator, SFG) is the interstellar drive of this setting. It basically covers its parent ship with an energy field that allows it to travel into another reality that exists partially within our own. These drives more or less open a shortcut between two points in reality using subspace as the path because subspace doesn’t work the same as our universe and allows for quicker travel. The Navigation of subspace is dangerous and difficult. It must be plotted carefully or else you could end up very off course very quickly. Navigation Computers make it easier but they can take a while to put together a course. Auto-pilots can also help to handle the dangers of subspace, but leaving them entirely in charge without oversight has led to some spectacular disasters over the years. (There’s a lot more about the subspace field generators bouncing around in my head but I’m just going to call this much a good starting point for most people) Oh, one last thing about them, don’t use one that’s broken. It’s bad news. What they find is messy to say the least.

Weapons Technology is based around the classic trio of Projectiles, Missiles/Torpedoes, and Energy Beams. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses. Energy Beams/Weapons are based around Plasma technology. Projectiles are based around rail-guns. Missiles/Torpedoes come in various shapes and sizes and each have a different mission to fulfill. Defensive measures generally are energy shields, but there are anti-missile systems and armor plating as well.

The newest type of torpedo that is driving military planners crazy is the “Skipper” torpedo. Typically attached to a very large warhead and designed to take down the most heavily armored starships, the skipper torpedo has a small subspace field generator on it that allows it to briefly enter subspace. This essentially allows it to increase its speed and range with the same fuel load and makes it harder to target with anti-missile weaponry. The skipper’s targeting system can also time the shifts to subspace to bypass the defenses and come back inside of its target. These systems are extremely limited in distribution, expensive, and heavily controlled by the various governments of the galaxy.

The one time pirates got a hold of a cache of these weapons the cost and damage was catastrophic. The pirates didn’t survive, not a single one. There has been a big push to adapt this technology to fighters and ships, but each time they activate the test ships’ drives all organic matter disappears from the ship within the first few skips through subspace.

Stealth technology is essentially unheard of. Most everything that is able to circumvent a certain type of sensor is easily going to be able to be detected by another type of sensor. Most of the known types of stealth craft are extremely expensive, ridiculously short range, and extremely underpowered. They will usually be deployed by a different ship that acts as their support ship/carrier. Typically they will be used for Spec-Op insertion planetside. Most reconnaissance work is conducted by spies in civilian ships and cheap probes that only escape detection most of the time due to their small size.

One relatively common tactic in full-scale warfare is the use of boarding ships/pods on the target. The targets in these cases are going to be Starships, Space Stations, Planets, etc. There are two types of boarding ships, Breachers and Cutters. Cutters fly their way onto the hull of an enemy ship, using plasma beams it cuts open a section of the hull and allows its occupants to enter into an enemy ship and later be able to escape with ease just by reboarding the ship and flying away. Cutters are great for  Spec-Ops teams with precise missions to accomplish. Breachers on the other hand tend to be more brutal and direct in their approach.

These heavily armored and very fast ships act like missiles filled with troops. They slam through the enemy hull and anchor themselves to it, making it extremely difficult to remove the ship. Once the hull is breached the hull on the Breacher opens to allow all the troops inside to rapidly board the ship. These are typically used in large numbers when the controlling fleet knows it has a good chance of capturing an enemy’s vessel with those troops.

On the ground, limited stealth field generators can give some semblance of cloak to unaided vision, but most security systems and vision enhancement equipment is able to see through these devices. People will carry around man sized versions of the energy/projectile/missile variety and wear armors of various types. Robots, super-medicine, bionic/cybernetic implants, cloned body parts, and other such things will end up existing as well.

After looking through the book for D6 Space I realize I’m going to have to design equipment myself and/or steal it from other settings because the core rulebook has pretty much nothing in it. Same thing goes for ships. At least there are extensive design rules for that. I’ll probably just steal already existing pictures of other settings ships and use them as filler and a template for the time being.

As far as aliens go, I’ve never actually populated this setting with specific species before. I just never got around to actually doing it, I was too busy with the sculpting of the Humans and their struggles to actually give them specific aliens to encounter and deal with. I’ve got ideas about what’s out there, but my sensibilities regarding alien races have changed themselves so many times over the years that nothing has survived a purging of Tropes and silliness. I really need to figure out a few of them now.

Space Opera

So after discovering the absolutely wonderful webcomic Darths and Droids (I highly recommend it, check it out here) I have been kindly reminded about my love of sci-fi epics. It has put me in the mood to at least look into writing down some campaign ideas for some type of space epic that will go into the file of “Things that will never see the light of day again.”

Thanks to my new found love of Old School gaming groups on Facebook I’ve found that West End Games, the creators of the wonderful d6 Star Wars system, have released the core rulebooks for their generic Fantasy, Adventure, and Sci-Fi d6 rules to the public for free download from the various PDF distribution sites out there. They've even made them Open Game License products so anyone can use them as a baseline system for their own settings which is a very awesome thing to do.

So with those downloads fresh on my various storage devices and a glorious spark of sci-fi epic based creativity I've kind of gotten into a mood of wanting to play or run a sci-fi epic. I know it won’t happen because apparently anytime I try to run something it falls through and I've got some other things that are ready to go and are just waiting for players first (Geinrich, Dresden, multiple World of Darkness, an Exalted campaign, a couple Pathfinder/3.5 campaigns, and a partially built Star Wars D20 which I would like to convert to d6 now). I think it shouldn’t be a problem to use the D6 Space rules for this so that’s what we’ll use.

So picking a setting for sci-fi is a difficult thing to do. Most people end up wanting to play in a well established setting with certain tropes or various things they know well. That’s all well and good, but when given the ability to create sci-fi from scratch with a system I think this is as perfect a time as any to pull out one of my brain. Way back in those dark days of middle school (shudder) I started to develop and flesh out my own sci-fi universe. It had originally been a rip off of various established universes (primarily Star Wars and Wing Commander) but it was mine and I liked to come up with neat ideas for various characters and societies in it.

In my navy days I came back to it again to revisit and re-work it because underway you have a lot of extra time on your hands and watches are long. I wrote out a bunch of ideas and concepts that eventually grew into the current version of this universe. Now that I’ve been out of the Navy for years and some of that information I wrote is lost, forgotten, or stupid and I want to refine it again for my new sensibilities. So hey, look, an excuse!

Back to what I was trying to say, I’ll use my own setting for a Sci-Fi campaign. It’s your standard Sci-Fi fare in general. Kind of like what you’d find in various video game universes, animated shows, comics and such. You have a Human organization spread across a large number of planets, a bunch of alien races with varying types of governments and alliances, a semi-stable level of technology, shields, plasma cannons, FTL travel, and cinematic action.

I love realistic sci-fi combat, but in an RPG no one wants to deal with the realities of space based combat, they want to be Han Solo, Christopher Blair, or Captain Kirk. They don’t want to be John “Black Jack” Geary trying to calculate the relativistic distortion of two giant fleets coming towards each other at 0.1 Lightspeed over the course of dozens of hours setting up the perfect last minute maneuver that will give them the best advantage for that brief fraction of a fraction of a second that the opposing ships will be passing each other at insane speeds. That just isn’t very RPG-ish, so I have fighter wings and such in my setting because it’s cool.

So really, just think that the setting is a rip-off of Star Wars with elements of Wing Commander, Mass Effect, and Titan A.E. and you’ll probably be close enough.

So, what could I do for a campaign? That’s always the first question. For that I turn to my favorite settings and series and look for inspiration. There are two ways to approach a new and unknown setting, Railroad tracks or Sandbox. Railroad tracks you start off with everyone in a pre-defined role with a mission already briefed and ready to go. You don’t give them an option and force them into a story and drag them around to some set pieces. They can learn new things that way. The sandbox just plops them down and you say have at it! Sandbox can be very difficult most of the time but is far more rewarding in the end. I’ll probably need to do something that’s a combination of both though.

With those in mind, what’s a good starting point? Military? Freelancer? Traders? Privateer? Pirate? Stuck on a planet because of an accident? Do they have their own ship? Human only party?

Hmmm…

Primarily I’d say that starting out as some type of Freelance Trader is a good jumping off point. Firefly is a wonderful example of the possibilities that this type of starting point provides. So at least one of the players will be the owner of a ship, at least one other person is a member of the crew and everyone else can either be a passenger or a crew member. They’re doing their best to make a living for themselves as they make their way from planet to planet at their own pace. Ah, yes. That makes the beginning easier. The opening adventure module could be a simple transport job or something. Very easy for something to go wrong, money being owed, success or failure, etc. I like it.

Alright that basic premise is done. What’s next? Scope is a good one. Maybe make a cluster of star systems near the border of the Terran Interstellar Alliance and the Confederated Systems. Some type of semi-unclaimed set of territory. Call it “The Borderlands” or some other stupidly simple name that humans would name something like that. This particular star cluster has something like 10-15 systems in it usually with 1-3 inhabited planets and handfuls for stations or hollowed out asteroids in each system. The systems may have some type of general pirate/raider problem and aren’t patrolled very well by either major power. Each system probably has its own system of government and laws, plus their own militia/law enforcement. This is probably more than enough for the first module and possibly the campaign.

What types of major dangers and conflicts exist in this cluster that they’d have to deal with? Obviously the pirates as mentioned before will be one. There is likely to be some type of criminal enterprise that operates on multiple planets and in multiple systems. Maybe some of the planets in a system don’t like each other very much and are planning a feud or a violent trade dispute. Some of the planets are going to have their own sets of problems too. Yup, Liking where this is going.

The area isn't super resource rich and not of much interest to either government and isn’t important strategically so it isn't likely to be contested soon. This means that any major problems (like the pirates) will have to be handled by the cluster. Which also means that they'll probably be handled by the individual governments independent of the others.

That's a pretty good start maybe I'll continue fleshing this out some more just as an exercise in world building.

Of course I could just do Star Wars instead and scrap all of this… do some New Jedi Order, Knights of the Old Republic, or Rebellion Era and call it a day. Yeah, that does sound tempting, but whatever.

BAM-Con Panel Ideas

So some of you have heard about BAM-Con (Berkshire Anime and Manga Convention) that the wife and I have been a part of for the past two years. Some of the talks we've had about it are about expanding it beyond just the themes of Anime, Manga and Japanese culture. Mostly adding in more mainstream Sci-Fi/Fantasy and Geekculture themes.

Our convention is going to continue to be in early May. It's just a good time period to run one. It puts us between a couple of the big ones in the area and is early in the season so people aren't already burned out by other conventions. I can't talk about some of the things the organizers have been talking about yet, but the early May timing means that the convention happens around some important dates in Star Wars fandom. Which is of course one of my favorite subjects.

So I'm being told that I should be designing some type of Star Wars panel/panels for next year's convention. I'm not sure if I am going to do it, but before I figure out if I want to do it or not I need to figure out what types of panels I could do well at and what type of unique talk I could bring to the convention.

I'm not sure what I can do based upon my own interests and knowledge that can be turned into a half hour to an hour long panel though. I'm open to suggestions if anyone wants to post some ideas. I'll be trying to figure out some ideas myself. Hopefully I will find something that will stick.