5 Excellent Sci-Fi Tips (Mail Bag)

Monday I explored some scifi stuff with Orbital Trouble: d12 Space Outpost Hooks. Got some great responses and tips from fellow Roleplaying Tips GMs:

Outposts vs. Colonies

From Wizard of Adventure ExileinParadise

First, for my Salvage Space RPG, I am pushing both “colonies” and “outposts”

What’s the difference?

Colonies are “mostly” self-sufficient on food, air, water, power.

Outposts are not and so those things need frequent replenishment runs.

In Salvage Space, the replenishment runs are part of how the Alliance Navy keeps track of who is doing what, where…because they can see the ships moving from across the system if nothing else.

The question the Navy has… “but what are they REALLY carrying?”

Exploration in the setting starts with “flybys” by ships or probes.

Then an orbiter does an initial mapping.

Ground surveys from landers follow.

First human landing.

Outposts are established and torn down as needed at promising ground spots.

Outposts that grow and expand enough can evolve into colonies.

Colonies can fail and devolve into outposts if they lose their self-supporting endurance for long enough or population drops far enough.

Here are some examples from my checklist page.

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Realism Gotchas

From RPT GM Rafael

Hi Johnn,

I feel your pain. I love sci-fi, I want to get my players into sci-fi campaigns, but boy is it hard to adjust to running them.

I can probably come up with a perfectly acceptable fantasy adventure (structure + scenario + NPCs + twists) in an hour with minimal effort. This is probably because I played sooo many fantasy campaigns over the years. Now watch me struggle with my sci-fi campaign.

I started one last year using my newly published game Alpha Cephei, but damn, it looks like preparing sci-fi adventures are just harder to figure out and stitch together.

One of my struggles is with the science. We wing magic fantasy “science” like it’s nothing, but for sci-fi, I don’t know, there are higher expectations.

Here’s an example. I had the PCs investigate “anomalies” in three locations in a sparsely populated planet. Anomalies can vary wildly by definition. In this case, one was a huge magnetic emission, and two others were new “hills” appearing out of nowhere in two separate regions.

Dude, the players get crazy with how much they can get just from reading sensor reports, and you have to come really prepared for it. They want to hear the exact type of magnetic emission from the anomaly and amount of energy being dispersed.

Then one said “hills” were leaking clouds of ammonia. In secret, I decided this was a massive, ancient, underground/half-buried alien facility “moving” to the surface, and the ammonia came from a city-sized refrigeration system.

A player went straight to Google though, right as I described the clouds of ammonia, possibly even asked ChatGPT what would cause that phenomenon, and then asked me if this could be a volcano manifestation. To be able to answer this, I had to quickly search for that science myself mid-game.

Anyway, really nice list, thanks for sharing.

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Research Base Features List

From RPT GM tc

I liked that you had research bases as one of the options, the first option! on your table.

If it’s any help to develop such things further, I put this research base features list together not so long ago.

Just in case it’s of interest.

All the best.

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Keep It Simple

From RPT GM Jeremy Brown

If this is your first scifi outing, I suggest a couple of things.

First, B5 is a very good representative of the genre. The Star Trek franchises are not terrible, but B5 is harder SF than Trek.

Second, limit your vision. It’s easier to design a single star system than it is an entire galaxy. If you still want big and inclusive, gradually add things to the mix. Just saying, this and this and this and that are all in the stew makes it harder to assess what’s working and what’s not.

Third, you don’t need to worry about all the mapping of everything. Start with what the PC’s will be most likely to come upon, then sketch in the rest.

Last, as some of these pieces of advice reveals, scifi is fantasy, or westerns, or police dramas, etc., in space. Don’t strain at it. Most of it comes from your knowledge of gaming and tropes in general, not necessarily scifi tropes in particular. Think about what you’d want in your first town on a fantasy map, and there goes your first few settlements, space stations, planets, etc.

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Avoid Game-Breaking Tech

From Wizard of Adventure, Loz

Hello Johnn,

Voxcoder-of-experience here: If you are going to run a Sci-Fi RPG, I strongly recommend getting a VERY firm grasp of the technology and its capacities (i.e. its limits) and DON’T let your players get their hands on game-breaking stuff. You can have the OP thing burn out during its first attempted use to overkill the PCs’ enemies, if you want.

This also means you should throttle any impulse towards player-pleasing improvised Rule-of-Cool exceptions. Pre-planned Rule-of-Cool is still good, though.

Cheers,
Johnn
roleplayingtips.com
https://discord.gg/6MxTRAqQ76
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