[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Mechanical warfare can be terrifying, especially in hostile environments.

The players are the damage control team for a most unlucky spaceship. The campaign starts when enemy weapons set off a chain reaction of damage in the ship, and it ends when the ship is saved. or Not.

obstacles include venting atmosphere, naked wires, raging fires, radiation hazards, secondary explosions, smoke, malfunctioning gravity generators, and whatever else your GM can dream up.

Players must stop the remaining ammunition from blowing up, patch small leaks, seal off large ones, keep the reactor from going critical, free trapped survivors of the blast, get life support on before folks run out of oxygen, connect various portions of the control computers together, get a semblance of a command chain together, and stop those fires!

Help will eventually come, but it will take a while: the rest of the fleet is still in battle. It may even be the enemy who shows up to take you all prisoner.

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I thought it would be interesting to run a war game where you never saw the enemy. In this scenario the challenges are almost entirely environmental. How would you do aboard a ship still undergoing damage? It can also be oddly similar to a dungeon crawl: what's behind this next door?

This is inspired by damage control stories in world-war era ships. If you'd rather ran it there, go right ahead.

If you're feeling particularly cruel as a GM don't tell the players that the game is almost completely damage control. Let them build their characters for a spaceships war game, and then stick them into the inferno of a damaged ship.

I like that. It gives something to do to someone besides the Captain. Also all that crawling through corridors with frightened spacers, or machinery going crazy, as well as fires and explosions can feel like a dungeon crawl.