A giant empty starship, what to do?

[Arith Winterfell]

I'm working on a sci-fi RPG game with its general opening premise is the Player Characters wake up on board the starship they've been working on/living on much if not all of their lives, and find it suddenly empty of its crew.

The idea is that the starship is the size of several cities, and is a "gardener colony ship." A generational (or cryostasis) ship designed to travel to new star systems at sub-light speeds, gather raw resources, create new colonies, manufacture everything they need, spending time in a star system till ultimately they leave behind flourishing colonies and infrastructure and journey to the next star system. If it worked as planned.

The PCs wake up to the horror/mystery setup of finding themselves seemingly alone on the massive ship. So I was starting simply with this premise, but need suggestions on where to go from here.

So far I've pondered various elements. Starting with the PCs waking up and heading to their jobs, only to slowly discover no one else is around. This the leads to the key mystery of what happened to the rest of the crew? Why were they the only ones who were left there?

I've got general ideas of mood setting scenes of stark emptiness of the ship. Perhaps a struggle to reach the bridge to try to learn more? Finding out that all the escape pods are still in place. Glimpses of maybe human/maybe not-human figures. And then . . . ? I'm unsure where to take it from here.

One player has expressed interest in a Programmer character of some sort, but I'm unsure of how to build on that. The other player hasn't decided what type of character to play, but tends to enjoy stealthy assassin-like character play I think.

Thank you for your help with helping to coalesce this setting into a coherent whole.

[johndallman]

Are they waking up from an ordinary night's sleep, or a period of cryostasis? If the latter, were they expecting that, or have they been put in cryostasis unexpectedly?

Where is the ship? On an interstellar trajectory, orbiting a planet, or somewhere else? Is that what they expected?

What date do the computers say it is? Does that match expectations? How intelligent is the ship? What records does it have of the time since the PCs were last awake?

What's missing, apart from people? Smaller spaceships? Terraforming equipment? Supplies?

[Arith Winterfell]

Hm. Good questions!

I was imagining they were awakening from what seemed to be a normal night's sleep. Which makes it all the weirder because if there had been an emergency alarms would have gone off that would have awakened them. But they simply remember turning in for the night and waking up seemingly as usual.

As to its trajectory. I was imagining somewhere in a star system they had been helping to colonize. They would be near a planet, but the planet like wise isn't answering and may be just as eerily uninhabited as the starship.

I'm imagining the computer as a very intelligent A.I., but it has little in the way of answers. It records various problems occurring on the ship (issues such as failed lifts and other things that end up making travel to the bridge harder), and the A.I. having alerted the crew to the problems, but no crew responds until the PCs wake up.

But as to the computer's time, that's something I hadn't considered. I'm imagining some weird stuff with time and space distortions going on would be fun. So maybe then the computer thinks only an uneventful night has passed, but astronomy examination of the positions of the world they are orbiting reveal something different.

I'm generally imagining something happens large enough to impact the star system as a whole, leading to no easy answers for a long time. Giving them a lot of time to explore the starship, other colonies in the star system too, without getting answers quickly.

As to smaller spaceships or terraforming equipment/supplies. I'm unsure. My default thought originally was that everything is left in place, even half-eaten food, as if the people simply vanished from whatever they were doing.

Perhaps the A.I. would at least record the record of an approaching "spatial anomaly" before losing all track of the crew as entrance into the anomaly messed with the A.I. for a time leaving it confused until it was able to self-correct.

Now all of these ideas aren't set it stone yet, and if people have suggestions as to interesting scenarios that jump out at me, I can tweak things. I haven't started the game yet. So I haven't dropped any clues yet. But I realize I need to figure this out before hand so I can know what clues to drop.

These are also all my starting ideas. I'm very open to new ideas that might make for a better game. As I worry I'm leaving things too answer/clue lite.

[Varyon]

The first thing you'll need to figure out is what caused the rest of the crew (and apparently the earlier colonists) to suddenly vanish, and why the PC's are still around. Maybe the Rapture finally happened, and the PC's were the only ones in the solar system that wound up Left Behind. Maybe aliens with advanced temporal-manipulation technology showed up, bubbled the ship in suspended time, and abducted everyone but the PC's (maybe as an experiment, maybe because the PC's were deemed poor specimens for collection, whatever), then did Something that cut off the colony's communications (there are still people down there, they just can't talk to the PC's). Maybe it's a Langoliers-type situation, where the starship has been shunted backwards in time by some sort of temporal anomaly, and it turns out only the present typically contains living things (in the story, the characters stick around on account of being asleep at the time). Maybe it's a large beam/wave of unknown energy that destroys living beings and whatever is immediately next to them (so their clothing is destroyed as well), but the PC's were somehow shielded. Maybe the PC's were put in suspended animation, someone (or someone's) murdered and disposed of the rest of the crew, messed with the ship's communication protocols so it can't communicate with the planet, and restored the AI from a pre-killing-spree backup. Maybe it's a situation like in Prey (the 2017 game), where the PC's have actually been in a loop with their memories erased daily to repeat the same simulated day, but now something has gone wrong (or what was eventually revealed to be the truth: they're actually strapped into a VR reconstruction of the past). Maybe it's something else entirely.

Whatever the cause, it should suggest clues you can throw the characters' way. Maybe there's clothing strewn about, where people were standing when they got Rapture'd (bonus points if you have an empty EVA suit attached to the hull by a tether). Maybe there's scorch marks where people were standing - or a fine coating of ash over everything from everyone else being incinerated. Maybe the planet is further along its orbit than it should be (or earlier long, for a Langoliers-type situation). Maybe there are bloodstains hidden in hard-to-reach crevices. But there's no way to know what path to take without committing to an original reason for all this happening (that said, if the players come up with an explanation of what's going on that matches all the clues they've found so far, and you like their explanation better than your original plan, you may well want to switch over to their idea).

[thrash]

Originally Posted by Arith Winterfell

So I was starting simply with this premise, but need suggestions on where to go from here.

The key to all of the various options is, I think, "What makes the PCs different?" After all, they were left behind when some (surgically precise) phenomenon removed everyone else. If you can establish why, that might point you to the rest of the situation.

One possibility is that this is not really what happened: instead of a phenomenon removing all the other people, the PCs were extracted and placed in a duplicate of the original ship and system. This could be an alternate dimension, a "lab-rate maze" (re-)created by a sufficiently powerful being, or even a digital simulation with the PCs unaware that they are logged in.

Another is a "rapture"-type event, where all the other people were forcibly ascended/uploaded/etc., but the PCs remain behind because they share some minor but unsurmountable flaw. This is harder to pull off in GURPS than in less detail-oriented systems, however. You could (e.g.) secretly assign them all a 1-point Quirk or Incompetence in some skill beyond their tech level (Physics (Transcendental), maybe).

A hybrid possibility: There is an impending disaster. The powerful-and-inscrutable-but-benevolent-former-inhabitants-of-the-system decide to save the colonists by shifting them to another location (close parallel, different system, who knows?) where the disaster won't occur. Unfortunately for the PCs, they all have some form of (e.g.) Temporal Inertia. This caused them (or copies of them) to be left behind. Now, they have to recognize the nature of the disaster and use the resources they inherited to save themselves -- leave the system, contact the paibbfiots for help, or some such. This has the advantage of coming with a ticking count-down for drama.

Last option: don't decide anything. Throw out some mysterious red herrings and see what the PCs make of it all. Encourage cross-talk; take notes. Then pick the best of what they come up with to be the "right" answer.

Edit to add: ninja'ed by Varyon, but consider some of his ideas seconded.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by thrash

instead of a phenomenon removing all the other people, the PCs were extracted and placed in a duplicate of the original ship and system.

For extra fun, run two games in parallel: one with the PCs investigating the mystery of their empty ship, while the other has the PCs as important crewmembers of the colony ship investigating the mysterious disappearance of a scant few members of their enormous crew/passenger list. They're also asking the question "why them?" Who figures it out first, and how does the ship's complement get reunited?

[Donny Brook]

Maybe what makes the PCs different from the vanished crew is they have Temporal Intertia (B93), or something similar.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by thrash

The key to all of the various options is, I think, "What makes the PCs different?"

Maybe one character was temporarily put in suspended animation as a punishment, while another is actually a hologram, and the third character is the somewhat demented ship's computer who doesn't quite remember what made the rest of the crew disappear. :)

Two other important questions are how "hard" is the science fiction and how much time (appears) to have elapsed since the rest of the crew vanished?

Rubber science allows lots more reasons for mysterious vanishing than hard science. They might have all been shrunk to nano-scale or been phased 90 degrees into an adjacent subspace dimension. Meanwhile the PCs were protected by their recent exposure to anti-nadion particles while working on the ship's anti-grav plating. Hard science demands different explanations, preferably a better one that "it was all a dream"/"you're actually in a VR scenario."

A longer time period between the crew disappearing and the survivors discovering the disappearance gives the GM more reasonable explanations as to how the crew disappeared as well as more time for things to go wrong aboard the ship. The GM can have lots of fun keeping the party busy as various ship's systems fail or the ship flies towards certain doom in between giving them clues as to "what really happened."

Originally Posted by thrash

One possibility is that this is not really what happened: instead of a phenomenon removing all the other people, the PCs were extracted and placed in a duplicate of the original ship and system. This could be an alternate dimension, a "lab-rate maze" (re-)created by a sufficiently powerful being, or even a digital simulation with the PCs unaware that they are logged in.

Which many players will see coming from several parsecs distance and might not appreciate, particularly if they feel like they've just been shoved into a boxcar on the G&M Railroad. It's not an unreasonable scenario, but it needs to be managed in a way that lets the PCs retain agency.

A scenario that hasn't yet been mentioned is that the crew is still there, just hidden away in some part of the ship that can't be scanned or which has deliberately been hidden from internal sensors. They might be dead, sick, engaged in some secret rite or experiment, held prisoner, turned into scototropic mutants, or just trapped due to a series of stupid mistakes.

If you're going for a horror type scenario, "not missing, just hidden" allows for slow reveal of clues, preferably via gory corpses floating in zero-gee or shadowy figures glimpsed at a distance down darkened corridors with eerily-flickering lights. At some point, some of the missing crew might reveal themselves as monsters - anything from bloodthirsty fanatical mutineers to shambling space-zombies. That sets up a moral dilemma for the party - who can we save and is there still enough of their original personality left that they're worth saving?

There's also the option of, "the crew was lunch, you're dessert." Suitably spooky space carnivores picking off the surviving crew one by one is another classic. Select for plucky, pretty ship's second officer as the point-of-view character.

Given that the ship is probably moving at a fair clip, a final easy explanation for the crew disappearing might be, "They all went out the airlocks and the ship moved out of sensor range to detect them before the PCs woke up." If (some) of them were wearing spacesuits, the adventure could turn into a search and rescue mission. If not, you get the terrible final tableau of thousands of explosively decompressed corpses floating in space, backlit by the merciless glare of an alien sun.

[ajardoor]

In addition to practical facilities like factories, medbay and brig/prison, there could also be luxuries like a casino, a restaurant, a movie theatre and a swimming pool?

[Dr. Beckenstein]

Maybe the pc awake at strange place (empty fuel tank, waste recycling plant, potato cellar...), a place where they never would have gone to sleep.

So, another crew member (who? why?) must have moved them there to hide them (from what?) before the "event" happened.

But why them?