ST Andromeda (Post Apocalyptic Star Trek)

[isf]

I'm planning on running a Star Trek/ Andromeda inspired game next year using Gurps. A section 31 ship is thrown forward in time a few hundred years and has to deal with a PA galaxy. I'm taking the position that the movies and tv series were a Hollywood accurate representation of the setting (ignoring voyager for the most part).


In addition to general questions and feedback, I'm looking for three things specifically:

1) character suggestions for npcs (crew members and encounters)
2) Non-humanoid Aliens
3) Plot suggestion for ethical/moral problems for the players.



Aliens
Aliens generally fall into three main groups: humanoids descended from terran protosapients (humans, vulcans, klingons), non-humanoid aliens that are carbon based (something like Niven's Pupetteers), and really alien life (like Tholians). I do plan on using Sparrials in some form.



Really brief history
One of the first intelligences seeded the galaxy with carbon based life long ago along with some stellar engineering. There is evidence of periodic galaxy wide crashes of civilizations for the preceding several million years. Around 100,000 years ago several protosapient species were seeded throughout the galaxy, including some terran homonids. Variations of the Eugenics Wars are common when species try and engineer psionic abilities.



Tech

I'm taking inspiration from Shadowjack's Federal Space and toning the tech down and making it more consistent (using his version of transporters and warp drive, but mostly TL 11 otherwise}. The primary basis for most superscience and psionics is the interaction between normal space and subspace. As with Prime Directive and the Psi-Trek thread, the transtator is the key superscience device for the setting. It acts as an interface between subspace and regular space.


Transporters enclose an area inside a warp bubble and projects to a location. Transporters can send or receive but cannot retrieve.
Warp Drives are psuedovelocity in nature and developed form stutterwarp drives to true warp drives.
Subspace Sensors are ftl in nature but mostly detect gravity wells and warp bubbles.
FTL comms are limited in range and bandwidth and require a series of relay stations to reach between stars.
Cloaking devices both reduce warp signatures and act as heat sinks to allow for stealth in space,
There are no replicators but robofacs and nanofacs are available. Despite the federation's wealth, there are still scarce resources (in particular, anything that has a subspace component cannot be manufactured by current federation tech, dilithium crystals and some plants and animals primarily).
Genetic engineering is fairly common and unstigmatized though trying to genetically engineer psionics or posthuman intelligence is generally banned due to rotine catastrophic failure.
AI's run on specific robot brains and are not just software models. Most are non-volitional and are within normal IQ ranges. Post-human AI's remain in the realm of precursor artifacts and frontier stories.



Psionics

Psioincs is the result of genes that are multidimensional and exist in subspace as well and have a 4d structure (inspired by a conversation with Christopher Rice). This makes trying to genetically engineer psionic abilities to be dangerous and unpredictable though traditional breeding is often more successful. Psionic abilities mostly fall under telepathy and esp.

[ericthered]

Do you know what caused the collapse? Do the characters? If that's not known, that can easily be a driving plot point: figuring out exactly what happened, especially if everyone has a conflicting story about what it was.

For non-humanoid Aliens, the Vote up a space opera Thread has a number of them. They are of varying quality, but there are some solid ideas. I'm especially fond of "engineer ants", whose "brain" is formed by the nest of the colony, rather than any individual.

For Moral Dilemmas...
give them a member of the crew from this side of the time warp they can all fall in love with, then give them the opportunity to go home... but with the knowledge the will cease to exist. You don't even need to actually offer the option to the players, just the illusion of it...

[isf]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Do you know what caused the collapse? Do the characters? If that's not known, that can easily be a driving plot point: figuring out exactly what happened, especially if everyone has a conflicting story about what it was.

I haven't decided yet; though a suggestion from rpg.net was to make it something caused by ;Section 31's actions.

Originally Posted by ericthered

For non-humanoid Aliens, the Vote up a space opera Thread has a number of them. They are of varying quality, but there are some solid ideas. I'm especially fond of "engineer ants", whose "brain" is formed by the nest of the colony, rather than any individual.

I hadn't thought of that thread but will look into it. I'm also going to go through G:Aliens.

Originally Posted by ericthered

For Moral Dilemmas...
give them a member of the crew from this side of the time warp they can all fall in love with, then give them the opportunity to go home... but with the knowledge the will cease to exist. You don't even need to actually offer the option to the players, just the illusion of it...

I like that but there isn't an option for time travel to the past, though alternate unniverses are fine.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by isf

I hadn't thought of that thread but will look into it. I'm also going to go through G:Aliens.

Template Toolkit 2: Races has a lot of material for creating aliens, from rubber forehead humanoids to evolved animals to wildly exotic types. There are metatraits for both body morphology and variant solvents, atmospheres, and temperatures, for example.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by isf

I'm planning on running a Star Trek/ Andromeda inspired game next year using Gurps. A section 31 ship is thrown forward in time a few hundred years and has to deal with a PA galaxy.

IIRC, S31 is the Federation's uber-secret wet work and dirty tricks division. What sort of ship is an 'S31 ship'? Is it a big general-purpose Swiss Army Knife ship like the various Enterprises, or is it a little ship full of comms and spy gear? How fast is it and how much support does it need to run? How big is the crew, and what are their specialties?

AI's run on specific robot brains and are not just software models. Most are non-volitional and are within normal IQ ranges. Post-human AI's remain in the realm of precursor artifacts and frontier stories.

I highly endorse this. Pure-software SAI tends to either eat the setting, or force elaborate kludges to keep the setting from being eaten, see the recurring issues with Transhuman Space.

I also recommend that sapient AI brains be complex, expensive, and hard to make. That way, you can have Mr. Data or the like robots, but keep the setting bio-centered. (Whole races of Mr. Data also tend to eat settings.)

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by isf

Psionics

Psioincs is the result of genes that are multidimensional and exist in subspace as well and have a 4d structure (inspired by a conversation with Christopher Rice). This makes trying to genetically engineer psionic abilities to be dangerous and unpredictable though traditional breeding is often more successful. Psionic abilities mostly fall under telepathy and esp.

One suggestion: the catastrophe was psionic in nature. Otherwise, it's a little hard to come up with something that smashes down everybody all at once in an interstellar setting like that, though war can work, or outside invasion as well.

Maybe extra-galactic invaders, or somebody from the far side of our galaxy, invaded home space, somebody genocidal. They started thhe catastrophe, burning worlds and wiping out whole species. To stop them, somebody (read Section 31) resorted to a psionic superweapon. It worked, but the cure was almost as bad as the disease.

An idea: borrow a trick from Larry Niven and the Slavers. Imagine the following conversation, between two S31 higher-ups, just before the End:

"The good news is, the tests show that the super-psychic amplifier will work as intended. Plug a few hundred telepaths into it, and 'broadcast' a mindblast. We can tune it so that it'll be over 99% effective on Invader minds. Once we hit the button, and 999 out of every 1000 Invaders will keel over dead in seconds."

"What's the bad news?"

"It'll also be about 30-40% effective on almost every other intelligent life form, except for pure-robotic minds."

"So...we can stop the Invaders from killing 100%...but only at the cost of we ourselves killing over a third of our own people."

"Yes."

The interesting thing about this is that among the descendants of the survivors, Section 31 might not be much better remembered than the Invaders, and the few Invaders still around are also likely to have it in for them. Our S31 crew may be in for a hard time.

[cptbutton]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Maybe extra-galactic invaders, or somebody from the far side of our galaxy, invaded home space, somebody genocidal. They started thhe catastrophe, burning worlds and wiping out whole species.

Revenge of the Kelvans!

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

"So...we can stop the Invaders from killing 100%...but only at the cost of we ourselves killing over a third of our own people."

"Yes."

So the Ritual Of Desecration, then?

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by cptbutton

Revenge of the Kelvans!


So the Ritual Of Desecration, then?

Kind of like that.

The actual inspiration is Larry Niven's Slavers. In the Known Space world, a billion years or so ago, the Milky Way was ruled by a race of super-powerful telepathic beings called Slavers, they used their psi talent to dominate the minds of all the other races of slaves.

Eventually, there was a mass slave revolt, which the Slavers lost. But they built a giant amplifier to boost their telepathy, and took everybody else down with them with a galaxy-wide mindblast that left the Milky Way free of sapient life and even bright animals until whole new intelligent races had time to evolve.

[cptbutton]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Kind of like that.

The actual inspiration is Larry Niven's Slavers. In the Known Space world, a billion years or so ago, the Milky Way was ruled by a race of super-powerful telepathic beings called Slavers, they used their psi talent to dominate the minds of all the other races of slaves.

Eventually, there was a mass slave revolt, which the Slavers lost. But they built a giant amplifier to boost their telepathy, and took everybody else down with them with a galaxy-wide mindblast that left the Milky Way free of sapient life and even bright animals until whole new intelligent races had time to evolve.

Except for the Bandersnatches.

[Flyndaran]

A time travel experiment could go sideways creating a massive reality quake destroying/unmaking everyone.
I'm thinking in a similar fashion to the Krenim ship in Voyager's two part, Year Of Hell. But by being an incomplete screw up, there are more "chronoclastic ruins" than pristine uninhabited worlds.