I let my players choose what kind of game they wanted me to run next and what they decided on was a hard sf game about setting up a colony on an alien world.
I've got two weeks to cobble together an ecosystem and work out some ideas for adventures. I'm going to keep the planet fairly earth-like, have the local biology close enough that they can eat each other, etc.
I've found Snaiad, which is fairly well done example and I'm planning to take inspiration from it, but unfortunately I don't think my players would be OK with all the huge cocks on the creatures so I can't steal directly.
Some ideas for exciting things too happen:
>A piece of equipment or group of personnel (possibly the PCs themselves) have trouble landing and have to crash some distance from the colony. Cue journey through the wilderness.
>Food supplies are lost to bad weather or eaten by local wildlife. They have to work out what native plants and animals are good to eat and then gather enough to feed the colony.
>The colony is stalked by a dangerous local predator. They have to hunt it down.
>A huge storm is heading towards the colony, they have to relocate to an area which offers better shelter.
>>47439054
Depending on how hard you want to fuck them in the first place?
Read Redliners by David Drake.
Or have them discover that some native species or other is sapient, and then throw bureaucracy and aliens rights activists at them.
Or, you know, give people the information they need to make educated suggestions? Are they part of a corp? A government? How much infrastructure and population are they getting to start with? What's the tech level like?
>>47439054
I don't really have any concrete ideas but you might wanna look into ancient life on earth. there's shit that used to walk around on this planet that looks thoroughly alien
>>47439054
>Food supplies are lost to bad weather or eaten by local wildlife
Y'know, I was never a big X-Files fan, but one thing that always stuck with me was an Indian story from the Southwest about a crashed UFO, and how no animals would touch the alien corpse. Even years later, it didn't rot (I think) because no Earth decomposers would touch it.
More recently I saw/read something where an astronaut died on an alien world, and something big tried to eat the corpse, but then immediately got sick, vomited it back up, and died from being poisoned by Earthlife.
>>47439054
>hard sf game
>setting up a colony on an alien world
Mutually exclusive, desu
>>47441147
Once you exit the solar system, there's a worm hole that's been skewing our sensor readings for decades/centuries. You do have to exit the solar system to reach it, but then you can take this galactic shortcut.
>>47439054
Thanks OP
Looked for this for years :)
>>47441203
Exiting the solar system isn't hard scifi
>>47439054
>>47441221
I disagree. Cryosleep and automated ships with ion drives could allow it. Cryosleep is theoretically possible, and the rest is definitely doable. It'd be slow as fuck, but it is within the limits of hard sci-fi. Finding an inhabited alien world where the biome is compatible with ours is much more dubious.
The thing you're going to want to think about is ecological niches and how is this going to affect your players. You could have apex predators of all types harassing them a bit, assuming they're not armed heavily, you could have all manner of nasty parasites, or symbiotic parasites. The microbiological stuff can also have a huge influence on what they're doing.
>>47442187
Perfectly doable, each journey would probably take hundreds of years even to the closest stars though. Also when they get there it would take many years for signals to reach earth, and equally many for their response to reach the new colony.
HERE, SOMEONE DID A FULL ECOSYSTEM FOR YOU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHzPEpHYtXQ
>>47441147
In Snaiad it was done by artificial gestation by machines once slow ships arrived. The first generation ended up really autistic.
https://canopy.uc.edu/bbcswebdav/users/gibsonic/Snaiad/snduterus.html
>>47439054
Throw a rival colony in that's interested in the same shit they are and pit the two against each other with the objective to not spark a full-on war, have them do shit like poisoning the opponents water supply and releasing dangerous critters within their secure perimeter.
>>47444414
> imblying there's an Earth left to signal
>>47441221
i dont think "hard sci-fi" is a yes or no thing
>>47439054
Crib plots from Terra Nova
Cancelled TV is great for plot theft
>>47439054
Look up Wayne Barlowe's Expedition.
