The Forge Archives

The Ship and the Stars part 2. Worlds and adventures

In a space-western what is the reason for a world?  The reason for a  world is to be a place to have adventures. There is no other reason aside to be pretty spots of light in the brigde holo-map display. The number of possible types of worlds to have an space-wester episode is quite literally astronimical, and simply making worlds for your campaign can lead to the same paralysis of analysis the creating the campaign as a whole can.
This is why most games have used mechanical random generation to produce large numbers of worlds. The problem is that any worldgen system is going to have to be based around some kind of concept of what the universe is 'about' which means that they are not equally useful for all kinds of campaigns.

   Plus this isn't how space-westerns do it at all. Do you think that world from Star Trek where the people are black on one side and white on the other came out of a random generation system? No! First they decided they wanted to do a show about race predjudice, then they created the planet that would support an adventure of that type.


The game would be based around scene resolution mechanics. Both players and gamemasters would have the right to call for scenes which would resolve either personal or plot stakes.  

What are the consequences for failing to resolve consequences in a desirable fashion?  The player's groups could pick up a whale of a negative descriptor.

Episode and world premise
   Since the whole premise is of the planet-of-the-week you only need to create a planet per adventure. Coming up with ideas for the kinds of adventures your bunch wants to run are easier to come up with than planets because the very series premise constrains the type of adventures.

   So the first place you go for adventure ideas is the series premise.
Lets go back to the example of the series 'Outreach' and see what we can come up with....
The series premise is pretty obvious, a road trip. The basic pattern for the adventure are overcoming obstacles on the way to the unnamed colony planet. The most basic obstacle is running out of gas! Okay so what if the Conestoga runs out of gas? It pulls into a filling station, and what if the filling station is closed....?....

Why is filling station world closed? Local strife sounds promising as it provides a source of conflict. What kind of local strife? Since religious conflict is in the news a lot today lets bring it into this situation as providing an Intellectually Distancing Symbolic Structure for Discussing Contentious Ideas is something SF is good at. And since it's SF, what if the underdog group can actually work miracles because they are psychics?

So lets set this down as as up to 50 word episode premise:

Filling station world is shut down by religious strife as local persecuted groups of psychics commit acts of sabotage in revenge.

filling station world
Shut down
religious strife
persecuted psychics
sabotage

Once again my premise is well below the limit. As in all other Premise types you can add description up to the limit of 50 words anytime at no cost.

Now that we have out adventure we know what our world is about. It's filling station world by god! (filling station world? well we'll figure out a name later no sense committing ourselves to an unispired choice early just to fill a slot.....that's how this system works)
Since the only thing this place is for is to be our filling station nothing but that role really matters. So it is easy to produce a tightly focused world once you have decided the adventure you want.

World Premise-Filling station world
An asteroid colony miles across with artificial gravity and docking capacity for numerous starships. I has a fuel mining and cracking facility and large fuel storage capacity. It has a population of some 25,000

miles across
asteroid colony
artificial gravity
large fuel stores
fuel cracking facility
can dock many starships
25,000 residents

I imagine filling station world as an installation that calls to mind the Con-Am complex from the old Sean Connery flick 'Outland' although filling station world has 2 orders of magnitude more people and would be appropriatly bigger....

Special Guest stars: The Episode Character premises

Leader Of Orothodox religion
This fanatical leader of the local orthodoxy has uses his abilitites as a rabble-rouser to turn community against psis

fanatical
leader
rabble-rouser

Naturally any conflict is going to need compelling characters to make interesting. When creating npc's you should create characters that emobody the important sides in the issues of the episode. Since the biggest conflict is church vs psi's I'll start with them:

Leader of Psychics
An telepath and psi healer, this beatiful and charismatic woman is leader of the psychics, and is being hunted by the church.
Telepath
Psi healer
leader of psis
hunted by church

Station Operations Chief
An expert on the station and its technology ,he actually runs the station.
A pragmagmatic man who justs wants the station open.

station tech expert
actually runs station
pragmatic
just wants station open



This is how the division of labor between episode and World premise works, the episode premise tells what kinds of things will be happening in the adventure, the world premise,the places that they will happen. One (mostly) is the action, the other (mostly) are the sets...

Now that we have our adventure outlined, next we will deal  with actually playing out the game .....

Hey:

This is good stuff, and I almost missed it what with the holidays and loads of posts.

Waiting to see the "playing the game" post.

i agree with matt, all of this stuff is quite good and it doesn't look like you've hit any snags yet.  playtest it a little and hopefully we'll see you over in the Actual Play section.

laters,

   -m

This also works well for the more mythological fantasy RPGs.
(Rohan and Gondor existed in part to showcase the differences between
Aragorn and Theoden and between Isildur's Heir and the Stewart of
Gondor.)

Doctor Xero