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Old 05-19-2023, 12:42 PM   #11
Arith Winterfell
 
Join Date: May 2014
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Default Re: A giant empty starship, what to do?

Some good ideas so far. I do think the idea of something with the Temporal Inertia trait could be cool.

The setting is at least Star Trek levels of soft science in that there are psychic powers like telepathy (or perhaps just Empaths), though those could potentially be cybernetic in nature mimicking psychic powers? Maybe? Idk.

Lots of options I guess.

Another option I was ponder in order to make the setting more interesting, is that they find signs that the crew just turned on itself in places.

One option is perhaps the ship passed into a temporal anomaly that overlaid versions from different timelines with each other. Driving some people insane. Leaving duplicates of people, and strange alien "humans" from even more removed timelines. Temporal Inertia could both explain why the PCs where safe, but also why they have duplicates running about when they eventually run into them later. Potentially telepathic characters could gain Supersensitive disadvantage, not due to the general population or due to a large number of people, but just because their dupes are on the ship on the same "wavelength" they are on causing confusing buzzing until they can figure out how to mentally dampen it.

So perhaps in this scenario, some people just vanish (into other parallel timelines) others are driven insane, some even being attacked by their duplicates ("There can only be one!").

Still it could explain a combination of people vanishing, maybe even reappearing, and why dupes and other things are roaming about.

Or perhaps have the above, but make it a purely psychic phenomenon something on par with Dead Space's Marker (maybe something found on the planet below) that messes with people, phasing some out of reality, driving others mad. So instead of Temporal Inertia they could all share some sort of psychic wavelength making them immune to the artifact on the planet below?

Interesting ideas. I welcome more thoughts! :)
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Old 05-19-2023, 12:44 PM   #12
Arith Winterfell
 
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Default Re: A giant empty starship, what to do?

Quote:
Originally Posted by ajardoor View Post
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?
Yep, its large enough to be at least a couple of cities. Perhaps calling it a travelling space station might be a better analogy really.
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Old 05-19-2023, 05:00 PM   #13
Pursuivant
 
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Default Re: A giant empty starship, what to do?

Rubber science opens up a whole host of options.

* Most of crew is actually in a different dimension or parallel universe, or the PCs are.

* Most of the crew, or the PCs, are actually speeded up to the point that they can't be detected with the naked eye. They're just faint blurs or buzzing noises. From the point of view of the speeded-up characters the rest of the crew appears to be in stasis, frozen in position.

* Some sort of temporal or spatial anomaly has created multiple "overlapping" ships. The PCs are on one ship, the rest of the crew is on the other.

* As above, but there are local temporal or spatial anomalies aboard the ship which have weird teleporting or time-shifting effects. This makes it difficult or impossible to get to certain vital areas of the ship. Getting from point A to point B turns into an adventure rather than a mundane task.

* Some or all of the ship is caught in a time loop. It's Groundhog Day until the PCs can figure out how to stop the loop. Time might pass differently for characters on different parts of the ship.

* Someone or something is kidnapping crew by means unknown. It might be teleportation or time or phase shifting. Why the crew is being abducted and where they've been taken are further mysteries to solve.

* Individual perceptions are distorted so that crew literally can't perceive the presence of other crew. Items seem to magically shift around because viewers can't see the person moving the the object. Inability to speak to or see other crew forces them to communicate indirectly.

* As above, but some or all of the crew is forward or behind the rest of the crew in time. Indirect communications have a time delay or are received before they are sent. The laws of causality either get ignored or must be obeyed to keep bad things from happening.

* As for any of the above, but a random godlike entity is behind it all.

* As for any of the above, but callous, clueless or hostile aliens native to a close parallel dimensions are behind it all.

* As for any of the above, but exposure to the overall threat causes progressive damage to the crew choose from disease, poisoning, disintegration or degeneration into monsters.

* As for any of the above, but the presence of the overall threat allows some malign being(s) aboard the ship. They use the opportunity to feed on or possess crew members.

* As for any of the above, but the ship has (partially) lost power. It's cold, dark, the anti-grav plating is starting to fail and the air is getting stuffy.

* As for any of the above, but the ship is actually doomed. The PCs job isn't just to solve the mysteries needed to reunite or restore the crew but also get them into lifeboats in a timely fashion.

* As for any of the above, but the threat is actually caused by some strange gas/critter/plant/energy/whatever. There might be very good reasons why the threat has to happen or can't be stopped. The PCs must not only reunite the crew but also find a way to keep the crew and ship intact while whatever has to happen happens.

The usual challenges in these cases are figuring out who's actually time-/plane-/phase-shifted, contacting the rest of the crew, and solving the problem in a timely fashion.

Time pressure comes from some event that's going to happen that permanently wipes out/phase shift the missing crew or the ship itself. It could be a countdown until [random astronomical event], collision with some celestial object or a "near miss" course which takes the ship too close to some deadly threat. Damage to the ship, expanding or strengthening anomaly field, progressively nastier weird space hazards or external deadlines might require the PCs to take immediate action to keep things from getting worse.

It's up to the GM to determine how many crises the PCs face at once and what the consequences will be if they delay or ignore various problems.
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Old 05-19-2023, 08:29 PM   #14
Fred Brackin
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Default Re: A giant empty starship, what to do?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pursuivant View Post
* Most of crew is actually in a different dimension or parallel universe, or the PCs are.

* Most of the crew, or the PCs, are actually speeded up to the point that they can't be detected with the naked eye. They're just faint blurs or buzzing noises. From the point of view of the speeded-up characters the rest of the crew appears to be in stasis, frozen in position.

* Some sort of temporal or spatial anomaly has created multiple "overlapping" ships. The PCs are on one ship, the rest of the crew is on the other.

* As above, but there are local temporal or spatial anomalies aboard the ship which have weird teleporting or time-shifting effects. This makes it difficult or impossible to get to certain vital areas of the ship. Getting from point A to point B turns into an adventure rather than a mundane task.

* Some or all of the ship is caught in a time loop. It's Groundhog Day until the PCs can figure out how to stop the loop. Time might pass differently for characters on different parts of the ship.

* Someone or something is kidnapping crew by means unknown. It might be teleportation or time or phase shifting. Why the crew is being abducted and where they've been taken are further mysteries to solve.

*
Please don't take this the wrong way but quite often "What is happening?" morphs into "Which episode of Star Trek is this?" and I'm afraid I count 2 TOS, 2 TNG, 2 VOY and the last one I left could be multiple eps of multiple series.

This is not necessarily a bad thing as it gives the PCs a handle on what's happening. Often in my experience accurately conveying to the PCs what's happening is a major and frequently unmet challenge. Stumping your PCs is quite easy and sometimes clues you think are obvious are obscure to your players.
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Old 05-20-2023, 01:02 AM   #15
dcarson
 
Join Date: Mar 2008
Default Re: A giant empty starship, what to do?

As time passes they can start having maintenance problems. Reactor #3 goes into safe mode because it is 48 past a required maintenance cycle. Can they either do the job, override the safety or live with partial power.
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Old 05-20-2023, 04:55 PM   #16
bocephus
 
Join Date: Apr 2019
Default Re: A giant empty starship, what to do?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arith Winterfell View Post
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.
I think the whole idea would be much easier if you had a random group of people that wake suddenly on a ship they knew nothing about.

Most of your initial seed depends on how much you want your PCs to focus on 'the missing people' which is HUGE and can't really be skipped, vs what are they going to do about the ship they are on.

Unless you already have a pretty clear idea of why 99% of the crew is just gone, but these remain, it's going to be challenging (almost impossible IMO) to create a story with any semblance of immersion. The vast amount of the story will be the missing crew not the ship.

If that's what you want then, IMO, you just need to decide where the crew is and why the others were left behind.

When there are 'external to the people circle' problems the general response would probably be "There was someone trained to handle this, but they aren't here and I don't know what to do (but I know I have to do something)". The GM will be limited to pretty much skill checks and varieties of luck. If the ship is automated then its going to just be scenery, if its not then a lot of the adventure consists of figuring out how to do tasks you weren't trained to do but can probably find a manual to get you most of the way there. While trying to discover the answer to the missing crew.


Some one else suggested that most of the options come out of TV sci fi we are familiar with, so I would say my idea is sort of a Stargate Atlantis meets Ring World.

If the PCs just wake up there with everything external unknown, well you don't have to answer any pressing internal questions that can't be RPed around as you go. Most of it being "why me" but the rest of it being discovery of where, why, how about the external environment. It also gives you the chance to have other people on board that get discovered, which may start to fill in the 'why me' question but doesn't have to. Their motivation for being there isn't known and their goals can't be assumed. You can't even assume language or culture, I feel like there might have been a movie that had a plot like this but I can't remember it.

At any rate this scenario keeps you from getting locked into a pretty one dimensional interaction with people they come across (if you intend for them to interact with anyone else), in the missing crew scenario, because all of them will already be sharing similar goals.
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Old 06-02-2023, 11:14 AM   #17
Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2
 
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Default Re: A giant empty starship, what to do?

The PC's have never been on a ship. It's all a "Truman Show" stunt, a simulation that they've been stuck in.
If it's a simulation, then this could be a planned event. (Plot twist? Stress test?) Or has something gone horribly awry? Or have the goals of the project changed?

Perhaps they've been there their whole lives, or maybe their captors had their memories altered.
Whether they volunteered or were forcibly imprisoned, whether they were intended to be there ... numerous question that have different answers depending on the reality of their memories.

All of this depends on the goals of the creator of the situation. Fair or foul? "Greater good" motives or "pure EEEEEEEvil"?

There's a lot of blanks to fill in behind the scenes.
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Old 06-02-2023, 08:04 PM   #18
Purple Snit
 
Join Date: Jan 2011
Default Re: A giant empty starship, what to do?

It's a big experiment run by AI or Aliens; It's purgatory, not necessarily a Christian one,where they have to learn something to advance; It's a giant version of "The Running Man" in space.
See also the movies "Event Horizon" or "Pandorum".
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Old 06-03-2023, 03:22 PM   #19
binn05
 
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Default Re: A giant empty starship, what to do?

I can't give you any ideas about your adventure. But I have some advice about mystery stories.
Let's say you have 3 or 4 clues about what is happening or some part of what is happening. Probably your player will not find one, will find one but will not understand it, another they will dismiss as irrelevant and stay with one clue that alone makes no sense.
Grab those 3 or 4 clues and replicate them around places, be prepared to make them show up 3 or 4 times, even if the "coating" is a bit different each time. Doing this will make it much harder for your players to miss or misunderstand the clues.
I hope that can help you.
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Old 06-04-2023, 09:37 AM   #20
Culture20
 
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Default Re: A giant empty starship, what to do?

Since one of your characters is a programmer, I'd definitely include the AI in the story, either as antagonist, helpful assistant, or crippled dependent.

One example: have several prepared responses from the AI that it uses to change topics when asked what happened to the crew. Intersperse emergencies that crop up exactly when more questions about the crew are raised. When the programmer runs diagnostics, it turns out the emergencies were created by the AI using its maintenance robots. When/if directly asked why it's refusing to answer, the AI states that it is ethically required to not divulge the truth of why the ship is mostly empty. If pressed, it suggests that its ethical restrictions be removed, which should then turn into a System Shock (Shodan) scenario unless the PCs get very good reaction rolls. It could turn into a weird Ally of one character while being a hunter Enemy of another PC. And the AI could possibly not even be the cause of the original disappearances; it's just another roadblock+source of information.
Definitely have the computer systems physically isolated to prevent the programmer PC from winning by sitting still.

For sneaky PC, have puzzles where you need to get past internal sensors for some security subroutine that has been turned up to eleven (and thus can not be turned off by remote terminals or the AI (according to it).
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