New GM needing help with almost everything with space campaign

Tungsten93 · 09-15-2021, 09:03 AM

Hello. I am new to roleplaying in general. I've played a DnD one-shot once and a Pathfinder campaign for like 4 or 5 sessions before one of the players gave up. Me and my friends (who are just as unexperienced as I am) have decided we want to play a new campaign and I've made the stupid decision to be the GM. We decided on doing a space setting with a bounty hunter theme like Cowboy Bebop, so mainly adventures on planets, sometimes in space, with the spaceship mostly being a form of transport. Space combat is secondary. After looking at a couple of systems that do space, I decided on GURPS.

Now of course what any sane person would do is pick a premade scenario and play that to see if we can get a hang of the main rules and see if we still enjoy it after 5 sessions. Sadly I am not a sane person when it comes to projects like this because I always want to do way too much before I'm satisfied with a creative product. I've read Lite, the Basic Set and Space and I have mapped out a galaxy with jumplines and instant travel (to not have too worry too much about calculations that for now might not add much). I also have an idea for an opening scenario, where the Bounty Hunter group returns from a bounty mission to claim their bounty on a space station, but a robot 'terrorist attack' kills the person who offered the bounty right in front of them. The first scenario will be about staying alive on the ship and destroying the robots. I still have to map out the space station.

Now the part where I'm struggling with is trying to get the galaxy to make sense. How do I reason the space station being there in the first place? Right now I've basically made a galaxy by just putting random dots on a map and I've generated star systems using the GURPS Space generator and I've assigned the systems to different factions. I feel like I have to have a completely working economy before I can decide on reasoning why certain stuff is where it is, though. I feel like I'm going deeper and deeper and I'm now at a point where for every single planet I'm deciding what resources there and who is mining them, where they are going, why they are going there, who's controlling them, how much tax is being paid on them and on and on and on. I feel like I'm going down the rabbit hole pretty quickly right now. I feel like I should've done this entire project together with someone who's way more experienced than me.

Now I don't want to make this sound like I'm disliking the project of trying to make my own world. So far I've enjoyed creating what I have so far a ton and I don't want to give up on making this work. I feel like I just need someone to put me in the right direction. And yes, I really should've started small, with just the space station, playing a scenario on it, then build out from that.

So after that ramble, I basically have two questions:

What is your step by step process if you have create a new universe?
How do you have stuff make sense in your world, without going down the rabbit hole?

09-15-2021, 09:03 AM	#1
Tungsten93 Join Date: Sep 2021	New GM needing help with almost everything with space campaign Hello. I am new to roleplaying in general. I've played a DnD one-shot once and a Pathfinder campaign for like 4 or 5 sessions before one of the players gave up. Me and my friends (who are just as unexperienced as I am) have decided we want to play a new campaign and I've made the stupid decision to be the GM. We decided on doing a space setting with a bounty hunter theme like Cowboy Bebop, so mainly adventures on planets, sometimes in space, with the spaceship mostly being a form of transport. Space combat is secondary. After looking at a couple of systems that do space, I decided on GURPS. Now of course what any sane person would do is pick a premade scenario and play that to see if we can get a hang of the main rules and see if we still enjoy it after 5 sessions. Sadly I am not a sane person when it comes to projects like this because I always want to do way too much before I'm satisfied with a creative product. I've read Lite, the Basic Set and Space and I have mapped out a galaxy with jumplines and instant travel (to not have too worry too much about calculations that for now might not add much). I also have an idea for an opening scenario, where the Bounty Hunter group returns from a bounty mission to claim their bounty on a space station, but a robot 'terrorist attack' kills the person who offered the bounty right in front of them. The first scenario will be about staying alive on the ship and destroying the robots. I still have to map out the space station. Now the part where I'm struggling with is trying to get the galaxy to make sense. How do I reason the space station being there in the first place? Right now I've basically made a galaxy by just putting random dots on a map and I've generated star systems using the GURPS Space generator and I've assigned the systems to different factions. I feel like I have to have a completely working economy before I can decide on reasoning why certain stuff is where it is, though. I feel like I'm going deeper and deeper and I'm now at a point where for every single planet I'm deciding what resources there and who is mining them, where they are going, why they are going there, who's controlling them, how much tax is being paid on them and on and on and on. I feel like I'm going down the rabbit hole pretty quickly right now. I feel like I should've done this entire project together with someone who's way more experienced than me. Now I don't want to make this sound like I'm disliking the project of trying to make my own world. So far I've enjoyed creating what I have so far a ton and I don't want to give up on making this work. I feel like I just need someone to put me in the right direction. And yes, I really should've started small, with just the space station, playing a scenario on it, then build out from that. So after that ramble, I basically have two questions: What is your step by step process if you have create a new universe? How do you have stuff make sense in your world, without going down the rabbit hole?