Colony Building with GURPS

[FictionXVI]

So me and a few of my friends are wanting to start a new campaign where they are the settlers & leaders of a new world, but I have been having trouble finding or coming up with rules for how to manage, build, and grow the colony. I'm going for a techlevel of about 9 or 10. I don't want ftl but cryosleep and things like that. Any suggestions for systems or personal ideas would be greatly appreciated!

[Refplace]

Tech Level?
There are no real settlement building books for GURPS, though the subject comes up a lot. Most people think of it more as a separate minigame rather than an RPG.
However once we know more about what you have in mind we can point you at resources.

[FictionXVI]

I haven't quite settled on a tech level yet probably 9 or 10

[Refplace]

So a scifi setting?

[FictionXVI]

Yes, sorry for not making that clear. Like they are on the first spaceship to the new planet

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by FictionXVI

Yes, sorry for not making that clear. Like they are on the first spaceship to the new planet

Its fine. One of the things about GURPS is since you can do just about any setting more questions need to be asked and answered.
At that TL you wont need material from Low Tech. It has some farming info but I think we need a few of our better educated posters than myself.

[whswhs]

If you want to describe the colony as a community, GURPS City Stats provides tools for doing so. There are also suggestions on how to describe the effectiveness of community government/organization with skill rolls. This is fairly abstract and doesn't talk about how to deal with things like food supply, but it might be some help.

[Michael Cule]

There's going to be a distinction between the tech level that got them to the planet and the tech level that can be sustained once they're there.

And that in turn is going to depend on how much contact they have with the interstellar community. Are they the last remnants fleeing a shattered world... or does the salesman from INTERCORP turn up twice a year to take and then deliver their orders for spare interociters and UniBatteries?

[ericthered]

last year I ran a city management campaign. Gurps has resources for this, but it takes a little digging.

There is a book named "City Stats". You'll obviously want that. In addition, you'll want pyramid 3/54, which has an article titled "City Management". One key point in understanding those sources is to watch for rolls, and categorize them as either "construction rolls" or "monthly job rolls". The Monthly Job rolls are actually the core of city management. The Curia and Boardroom book is also helpful.

I made a chart when I first started that game to help me understand the system. Its posted here.

The true blog source for this sort of thing is mailanka's musings. He has a set of posts talking about this. The base project is called "orphan of the stars". He recently (this year in fact) returned to the project and posted about how to generalize city management.

I'd be happy to talk about any more specific problems you're having. I love that sort of game.

[AlexanderHowl]

In general, the maximum TL that can be sustained depends on population and trade. If you have regular deliveries of supplies and people, you can probably sustain TL9+ with a population as low as 100 people (as long as you have plenty of stores). If you cannot depend on regular deliveries of supplies and people, you need many more people to sustain a civilization.

Since Space suggests that 100 million are needed for TL 8, I would suggest a population of 200 million for TL9, 500 million for TL10, 1 billion for TL11, and 2 billion for TL12 (superscience, such as magical nanotech, can change those numbers as much as a GM wishes). If a colony cannot depend on regular imports, it is only capable of sustaining the TL supported by its population (it might have the knowledge to produce items by hand, but it would lack the economies of scale and scope that would allow efficient and effective mass production). I would suggest a doubling of the cost for every TL above what can be supported by the population of the colony.

So, let us say that Abandon Hope (a planet with Affinity 2) was settled as a colony by the 10,000 personnel of an outpost when their TL10 civilization collapsed. Such a colony is only capable of sustaining TL4 because it lacks even occasional imports, but it possesses a number of TL10 objects that may survive for decades or even centuries as long as the supplies hold out. The effective value of TL10 items would be 64× as much as normal though, as they are difficult to replace and to repair.

Let us say that they are visited a 1,000 years later. They would have never progressed beyond TL4 because their population would have never exceeded 2.8 million (the maximum carrying capacity at TL4 for an Affinity 2 planet) for long. Any visitors would see a bunch of primitives struggling to survive in an inhospitable world. With occasional imports, they could eventually go up to TL5, allowing them to support a maximum population of 10 million, but they could never go beyond that level unless they joined a greater society.