I've been wanting to run a sci-fi space opera campaign for a while now, and the opportunity to do so is coming near enough for me to actually start planning it. I've got the outline of the premise and a lot of ideas for encounters and misadventures the players can come upon during their travels, but something I'm beginning to question is exactly how to lay it all out. Originally I planned to draft up a hex map to represent the "star sector" the game would take place in in order to make travel distances easy to calculate and the information fairly readable, but I'm beginning to wonder if that's actually the best way to go about it. Aside from travel time (which isn't instant, though it is much faster than light) I don't have a reason in mind why I'd NEED to emphasize distance, and while the hex map is good for marking the location of stars in a sector, it doesn't seem great for noting the details and important locations at a smaller scale. Anyone have any ideas for how I might want to go about it, or ever done a game like this before?Also general space adventure thread, I guess.
What kind of campaign/map scale are you looking at?IIRC there are some campaign building questions in GURPS Space that would likely help.
>>93223739I think the best way to do it is keep your space constrained. A solar system is big enough for almost infinite stories, a star sector is barely manageable but a full open galaxy (like most space operas) makes it hard to bound the game around the story you want to tell. Space opera means large scale drama on the scale of nation states, it takes a lot of skill to wrangle a bunch of goofy friends around a story like that. That said, I've never run a space opera campaign so feel free to ignore that warning.
>>93223739just rip off firefly and your gucchi
>>93223739Don't bother with shit that the players aren't going to see or care about. Just go with a tag system and assign random hexes vague things like corporate world, giant monsters, space locusts, pirate enclave, prison barge, psychic cult, and so forth. If the players are interested in going to one of those places then you can prep some real material for them.
>>93224696Firefly setting is really good. I like how it's just humans but they tell stories about aliens. I like how there's so much blatant cowboys stuff, but it doesn't feel forced, it's just intersections of different tech levels with legacy Earth culture. I like how the feds are used as badguys but not portrayed as badguys, they're really just gubermint and they're doing the best they can.>>93223739Make a map if you're excited about making a map and if you think that some of that excitement can be communicated to your players. Something can be part of the experience and be fun without being 'useful'. But also use a map if you want your PCs to be space truckers with the freedom to plot their own course, because that's great fun and leads to a stronger sense of engagement with the world (even if it's just an illusion, even if you have the campaign all planned out and you just change the window dressing based on what planet they're on, it helps them to think of the setting as a real place).
>>93224679Thinking I want the game to take place over multiple solar systems, with room for a few factions to hold territory and all that jazz. Will check out GURPS stuff, thanks.>>93224693That's completely fair. I've run a lot of campaigns that've taken place over large geographic areas before, but the players were more the actors of powerful interests rather than the driving forces themselves. I'm thinking that by keeping most planets sparsely populated (working idea is mostly failed terraforming projects) that in practice it won't take much more management than what I could realistically fit in a much smaller area.>>93224736Oh, I'm way ahead of you there. Prepping the content isn't something I have any worries about, I'm just debating myself whether going full hexcrawl is actually the ideal way to lay things out, or if I'd be better suited with something more 'loose' for lack of a better word.
FTL game when you're in space. Force your players to actually run that ship as a ship.
>>93224761My recommendation would be a mass effect style map if its a galaxy, with tons of points of interest and hub to get coords to new POIs.
>>93224696>>93224759Firefly is super kino and definitely an inspiration for me when it comes to spacefaring scifi. The point about the map helping get across a sense of players having their own direction is something I don't think I gave proper consideration, though, and I think that's definitely something I want to lean into.>>93224769I've considered it but I'm not sold on the idea personally. I've toyed with similar concepts in games before and never had it really 'click' in a way that was very fun to play. I could probably work out a way to do it, but I think I'd have better luck focusing on the player characters as being the leads in a show like Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica, where most of the ship running is the responsibility of namelss crewmen and therefore a background process.>>93224786That's a good reference. I was thinking of something similar as an alternative to hexes, but I didn't have an example to look at in mind.
>>93224795Mass Effect is a great space map. It has quadrants that unlock via the Mass Relays and within that you have PoIs that open up as you get info.
>>93223739Travel distance matters for only a few things. First of all, resource management. If you want your players to need to be concerned about how much fuel, food and water they need for a trip, you need to be able to tell them based on how long the trip is. That's not always everyone's cup of tea but it's the foremost reason you need to emphasize travel distance. The second is time constraints. The players can't be in two places at once. If something bad happens at Proxima A and they're at Betelgeuse it's going to be worse by the time they get there. This is, imo, the more interesting situation. Resource management is paperwork. Making the players choose what they can and can't do, what's too far away to handle, what they're willing to go out of their way for, is the way to engage them more with your scenarios. In order to do this you're going to need to track time and what happens when. Pirate raid occurs in this many days, space whales migrate close to New Folson in this many days etc. and then have consequences for missing those events, which have their own timelines etc. It's easier than it sounds and is very rewarding.
A different take on Classic Trek mapping. The campaign is based on a faster version of Warp Drives (using some of the TOS episode data that support those values) and world positions are not quite what you might expect. There is also a network of Warp Superhighways (not shown on this map) connecting certain worlds inside the respective political alignments. Worlds are delineated based on both font size and the symbol preceding the actual name. There would also be world tags (listing planetary quirks) for each of these worlds. Each circle/hex would actually work as a skeleton individual Sector Map allowing for exploration, trade, and other mission assignment.This map was never finished, and most of the original support files are gone. Probably today I would use a combination of Space Aces, Starforged, and Stars Without Number to develop the expanded world and sector details.
>>93223739Just make your sector map and keep it to yourself unless the players reasonably request it or you yourself need it in-game. If the specific details aren't helpful, you can always just disregard or modify it as desired when you aren't showing it off.
As a GM i really hate keeping track of galactic travel times. I'm running a Starwars campaign for a good year now and the fact that something like a schoolbus with welded on engine can cross the galaxy in a handful of days really makes the galaxy feel kinda small. At the same time there are whole uncharted regions after many thousand years of a central galactic government being around.Makes it really hard to determine how hard it is for the Party to get somewhere. Answer usually is "pretty fast and easy" unless its super hidden and secret but there is never a reason as to why. I'm also running some rogue trader on the side and with space-travel being much harder and difficult it makes single planets more important and more likely to be fleshed out during the campaign. Also makes space adventuring much more epicIf you don't have an official setting with fixed lore and travel times in mind then I would suggest to keep this >>93224693 anon in mind. Try to constrain the scope a little bit. A star sector is fucking massive and can hold so many worlds it is hard to manage. If you have the entire galaxy at your fingertips with just a few days of scratching your balls on a space-caravan then it's hard to manage an open campaign and fill things with meaningful content.
>>93223739Diaspora's clusters are pretty neat though as the name suggests they imply a closed pocket of space rather than a map with plenty of terra incognita edges.>>93225766Can't parse it too well but it's certainly visually arresting.>>93224679nta but at most a dozen systems, more likely around 8. Galactic travel times are important as STL travel and generational machinations are the setting's bread and butter. However the relativistic drives running on nebulous woo lets me handwave each transit as "a couple of decades" with as much wiggle room as the story demands. Means I can pour a far amount of detail into those worlds (and their futures sans intervention) too.
>>93224693>>93225900That's the reason why for my own SF setting I limited it to a tiny area in galactic terms (most human-occupied planets fall inside a circle 30 parsecs in diameter, and even if you included the space controlled by all alien civilizations humans have made contact with it'd be a barely noticeable blip on the map of the galaxy). Having only about 70 inhabited systems also means I could at least in theory detail them all out (though so far most of them are just a name on the map and a single-sentence description).Most people have no idea just how fuckhuge the galaxy is. Case in point, the entire Battletech setting, which has thousands of inhabited worlds, is a few thousand light-years across and that's including all the most far-off reaches of the deep periphery with barely any habitable planets where nothing of note happens. The Inner Sphere, which is the focus of the setting and where the vast majority of humanity lives, is only about 500 light-years wide. The main disc of Milky Way is something like 100 000 light-years wide.
>>93223739If you have a fairly low number of worlds, just draw lines between them and label the lines with distances/times. If there's not a direct line between two worlds, you can't go there without traveling through another system, because that's how the FTL works.Almost nothing matters in a system besides the inhabited parts of it, which are going to mostly be planets/airmoons or stations. (Though, it's probably better to visually identify the traits of the local population hubs on the map, rather than the star type.)
>>93227962This is a great way to do it as well. Star Control 2's map did an EXCELLENT job of this, where its a huge area of space (but an absolutely TINY area of the galaxy) and has tons of races, spheres of influence and local politics to navigate but constrains you to your nearby area of only a few thousand stars.
>>93227962>Most people have no idea just how fuckhuge the galaxy is.I don't even know what a galaxy is.
>>93227616>Diaspora's clusters are pretty neatYes, each of the alt-Trek circles can be thought of as a Diaspora cluster. How the clusters connect to each other is the fun trick.>>Can't parse it too well but it's certainly visually arresting.The map was mostly started as a way to make an abstract spiral galaxy. The map colors measured things like probability of star types, percentage of lifebearing and populated worlds, and even an abstract (strategic) value of the mineral wealth of sector worlds. Maybe a bit like the old boardgame Federation Space with some worldbuilding baked in to make rpg campaigns easier to develop.>>nta but at most a dozen systems, more likely around 8.Sounds like a Traveller subsector or SWN sector in size, but with a more flexible transit time system. If you haven't done all your world/factions yet, may I recommend Stars Without Number for factions.
>>93229927>Sounds like a Traveller subsector or SWN sector in sizeNot to be pedantic but Traveller/SWN sector generation will create an average of 40 systems
>>93233848Well, in Traveller, that would depend on how you set the subsector density.https://www.orffenspace.com/cepheus-srd/tools/subsector-generator.htmlAnd in either SWN or Traveller you could throw away systems you didn't want to use.
>>93224693>a star sector is barely manageable but a full open galaxy (like most space operas) makes it hard to bound the game around the story you want to tell.And what if you want your campaign to be intergalactic?
>>93239372>And what if you want your campaign to be intergalactic?The low to mid tech answer would be to use Bloater Drives from Bill, The Galactic Hero. They probably work well if you're jumping less than 500,000 LY. For a quicker solution I'd use one of the many networks of Ancient Stargates, since most of the Ancients have disappeared from the corporeal plane their stargate tech is easily available.
>>93225900The thing to remember about star wars is that travel happens at the rate of the story. It isn't traveller, moving through space isn't usually part of the story, you just do a cinematic screen wipe and dun dun dunana and you're to the next place.
>>93223739>I've got the outline of the premiseSo.... spill it. >a hex map to represent the "star sector"Yeah ok. If you want them to plan out travel logistics and fuel and cost and races and general territories and such. Like any other map. > I don't have a reason in mind why I'd NEED to emphasize distance. . . So everything isn't just right next door to everything else and there's an actual frontier and national borders and reason for going places? This is something that has bugged me in modern media. They just don't respect that "things are far away" and they can't just immediately get there or call it up on a cell phone and have a chat. I think the younger generation has grown up with cell phones and immediate instant contact with literally everyone else on the planet has made them forget how basic principles of distance work. It's wild. But the alternative is that you the DM simply control it all. "You are here" "Now you are there", "no you don't have any choice in the matter this is where the story is". If you want them to explore or have an open sandbox like, you know, most space operas, then you should give them something to explore. If you want a pre-canned story on the rails, that would be pretty stupid and pointless.
>>93229927>How the clusters connect to each other is the fun trick.How's that then? Inter-cluster highways at extreme edges?As to SWN it is indeed a resource I lean on a lot though not so much for this game. The "psychopunk" theming is specific enough imo that the generic sf mish-mash Crawford does so well doesn't really fit. Also one of Diaspora's strengths is that cluster creation is communal; since things are changing fast and light lag limits news spreading I'd even make that initial "so how fucked is the Cluster?" duiscussion mechanically relevant.>>93233848True though systems aside tables for transition from pre to post-collapse government and colonial outposts with plot hooks are always handy.>>93242709>>93240139 can be a blessing or curse depending on the game's tone. I'm trying to have it both ways >>93227616, we'll see how that goes...
>>93244592>can be a blessing or curse depending on the game's tone. I'm trying to have it both waysThis is a mistake. Either the procedure of travel is an important focus of the game or it isn't.
>>93245296>>93245296It's an important focus in regards to decades passing between arrivals at minimum but a malleable one in that "a generation" can have killed off all previously introduced NPCs or else just enough for a few of them to linger.
I beg of you manPlease don't do that shit where the players travel to some shit tech world and are essentially a d&d party hunting and killing a big monsterI don't know what it is about my luck but 9/10 of my previous sci fi games were that, I don't get it
Here's the map I use for my star wars campaign. I contains the faction borders, planets, points of interest and hyperlanes. For measuring travel time I use the width of my index finger as a measurement of one "day" of travel, which is modified by the quality of hyperdrive, proximity to a major route, etc.Mapping out things with distance is important for a space opera, as it's the primary way players figure out how to pace their goals. Do they want to go to a planet, but it is 5 days there and they have to be on the current planet for another 3? Then they have to wait, do some adventures where they are, and eventually set off.You could use a hex map, but it isn't needed unless your players are the types who really like getting into the logistics of travel and all that.
>>93246625>was planning on doing that for a single session adventure in my current campaignKek, does it help that the low tech guys still have laser guns and all that, just shittier ones?
>>93246527>>93245296Not a space game, but I did a pirate ship dnd game set in fantasy scandanavia where the travel phase was broken down into days.1. Select a destination. DM determines number of days to destination. 2. Proceed through the days, each day is as follows:A. Roleplay - Every player character has a chance to do a "scene". This means any PC can choose to talk to any member of the crew, and if another PC wanted to join that scene it was up to the PC. This resulted in some amazing and fun scenes such as our "not mormon" Gnome Sorcerer who worshipped a space snake handing pamplets out to people, a bugbear cabin boy becoming an apprentice helmsmen to our "dwarf Ice Giant" (only 11 feet tall) named DOOMSCAR (always in all caps), the captain talking to our drow navigator about the truth behind the captains backstory, etc.B. Encounter - An encounter occurs. This includes sighting or being attacked by other ships or sea monsters or environmental challenges like harsh weather , a sickness among the crew, or a mysterious night that never ends.C. Deduct supplies (extremely simplified).3. Make Port - Arrive at the destination and decide how to approach it.It was about ease of use not granularity of travel, basically "story paced" travel. I don't think I would ever use another form of travel for something ship based ever again and it would be really fun in a spaceship based game too. My players all loved getting to talk to their favorite NPCs and it naturally caused them to develop from random google image art tokens I made into full fledged characters.
>>93244592>How's that then? Inter-cluster highways at extreme edges?That was the easy way to do it, the hard way involved separate maps and a bit of hammering and cursing.
>>93223739I'm an old man that's going to suggest something that might come off as mean but it is NOT intended as such in any way. There is an old space opera game published by FGU called Space Opera. It has a lot of what you are looking for and is a lot more sandbox than the very great game of Traveller. Space Opera doesn't do hex maps. Sector maps are linear (though the distances are 3D) Ship speeds are X ly/ Time period, for example 35ly/day. Divide the distance between star systems by speed and you have how long it takes the crew to get there, no physics degree necessay. The character generation system allows for flexible character concepts. The no classes per say as in many games, as it is more like career paths. There are my 2 cents.
>>93246527I mean there is a world where whales and mammoths are infested by and birth oracular cancer monsters. That said the only reason PCs ever get directly involved rather than sending minions is because there's either too much memetic risk for anyone else to do the job (PCs are roaches cognitively speaking) and/or because they need to experience the world "authentically" before their experiences can be scanned and fed into their chained hyperintelligence.PCs hunting said gaintspawn would involve it having grown to divinely malignant proportions or else getting fucked on drugs and hero-questing as the locals do.>>93247107Not a bad idea since I want starship + crew to feel like characters unto themselves with the caveat that the institutions act as NPCs. With a few exceptions individual faces are lost to time. Rather than "days" the PCs could each have a "cryo stint", waking up from cold dreams to ensure that crew raised from crèche are being brainwashed the right way and that the pesky AI hasn't smuggled any furtive triggers into their programming.It's unlikely stints would overlap so it's a good chance to make the hulk feel like the haunted ancient thing it is.
>>93247981>>93246625Wrong reply. Anyway tldr is "not DnD, Runequest"
>>93227962Whats going on in Wojak's Planet?
>>93247648Agreed, Space Opera lets you do sandbox pretty well, and their systems have some good bits to borrow for other systems too.
>>93247981What do you expect that the PCs will actually be doing in this game?
>>93250305The broad sweep is manipulating the development of cultures and trying to pre-empt their ongoing decline for profit. The best way to do that happens to be an AI vivisecting virtual copies of them for info, the best way to gather that info is to directly experience the world (even if the PCs have more effective underlings it's counterproductive to rely on them exclusively).There are also interludes of horror as the PCs are the only ones resilient and greedy enough to space hulks and other detritus of the semantaclypse. If not in search of riches they also have to nip unshackled hyperintelligence in the bud, when those metastasize the game takes on more of a wargame scale. The PCs would be throwing everything they have at such an outbreak in hopes of sterilising it.In the 3-shot I'm actually running it's horror with some generational intrigue. The PCs awaken confused, parley with insane cannibal crew and realise shit's fucked in ways that'll take years to fix. They're balancing cryosleep stints where the brainwashed crew (hopefully) fix what needs fixing to enable further exploration with hints that the ship is nearing catastrophic meltdown. Since they dream in cryo and amnesia keeps unpersoning people there's steadily rising eldritch stuff too, especially as the more they piece together the ship's workings the more awful aberrations are actually business as usual,,
>>93248662Wojcik's. It's a Polish surname. It's one of the ones that only exists as a name to fill the map, but given that I named it in reference to Jonathan Wojcik of Bogleech.com I figure it should be a planet full of horrible space-bugs.
Has anyone ever used something like this as a drop table?
>>93253962You mean randomised inspiration source? That's pretty much what Stars Without Number IS.
>>93247648>>93250232Do you guys have a pdf link I could take a look at? I'm not OP, but you've got my interest.
>>93254003>You mean randomised inspiration source?Yep, I know you can get lots of wild quirks using normal tables, but thought this would be a fun way to build the setting while doing a sandbox style exploration campaign.I wondered what would've happened if Kirk's Enterprise had exited a wormhole into Kirby Space—all those random Kirby dots bubbling into subspace and having to deal with a Galactus class entity...
>>93254259Here are some of the Space Opera pdfs. Maybe this will help.gofile.io/d/mPD0d5
>>93223739Space Operas happen on different scales at the same time. You have usually like a macro scale of conflicts (factions at war or political tensions) which somehow interact with localised problems and personal storylines. This is the big strength of the setting: You can tell a story about the fall of an empire or civilisation in the background while your PC's focus on their very own problems.With that said, ask yourself in what adventures/plotlines you want throw your party and what narrative you want to have going on in the background. You're out for conflict in the open? Let them witness a Star Battle from Inside a ship while they try to escape to the emergency pods inside to drop on the next planet for the next adventure. You want more plotting? Throw them out on a boulevard that spans several planets through some stargate-fuckery to buy a gift for a dinnerparty at some influencial persons home and involve them in a murder mystery.Create a Setting that fits the Mood of the Story you want to tell. Look at f.e. Cowboy Beebob: The story has a certain blues going on and this is reflected by a almost bored setting in which there is no major driving conflict that affects people directly. People go on with their stuff and noone is mobilised to care for a greater course. This is in contrast to f.e. Star Wars which uses backworlds like Tattoine to show the pressure and presence of the Empire. Once you have the mood and rough story just gather what you need. Factions and tension with aliens? Map their areas, give them some planets and routes to link them along some "frontlines". You want to discover ancient alien ruins? neat, place them in some outer places and so on. You want to have metropolitan feel? Create a chain of well interconnected worlds and think about how people travel there to sprawl. You need to add a planet on the fly? Just do it and say that it is a backworld most people don't care unless they have a business with it.
>>93223739Please read Stars Without Number's GM section
For a Star Trek-style "exploring a frontier" game, should the players be part of a Starfleet? Or should they be "free traders" or something like that?
>>93254259Well if you're familiar with Share Thread here are some links. /Ji-Ral /FGU Both have Space Opera folders. Drive Thru also hs the filles at a decent price.
