[Space] seeking advice for building a campaign

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Johnny Angel

The campaign is going to be somewhat of a space pirate campaign, so the ability to engage other ships is an important one.

The solution I used for empowering space piracy was to require a series of jumps through uninhabited systems.

For example, in the average area of space in my last campaign there were usually 3-5 uninhabitable systems between systems with Earth-like planets. You could do asteroid mining and such like in the empty systems but the asteroid belts weren't even close to the jump points.

As to time the weeks or months typical to Age of Sail travel may be a little too long for your game. The fewer trips per year a ship makes the more money it has to earn per trip.

This either favors big ships and quite possibly convoys of them or reduces the amount of economic activity in space.

In the Age of Sail the ships were really pretty cheap (or at least they were easy to build which is mostly the same thing) and the labor to man the ships was even cheaper. This might not translate well into an ultra-tech parallel.

Also, to duplicate an Age of Sail feel you're going to need to make ships very independent. No having to spend 2 weeks out of every year at a major system to get an overhaul. No buying expensive fuel or munitions either. Repairs and maintenance will have to be capable of being done in the field with little or no external aid.

There should be little or no FTL communications either.

A purely game mechanical thing to be mentioned is that in games like Gurps if you give players a long period of game time where basically nothing's happening they will want to train up their skills instead of just sit there.

I put trip times between planets at an average of 1 week between frontier worlds and at least 2 months to the major core worlds and it seemed to work well enough.