So I'm working on a campaign and I'd like to get some opinions and advice on what I have so far.
It's going to be a science fiction campaign, the players will be a team of humans who's ship has crash landed on an alien planet. The planet is almost entirely inhospitable due to volcanic activity, except for the area within an extremely large crater on the planet's surface.
The basic premise and structure of the campaign will revolve around the players attempting to fix their ship and get off the planet. In order to do this they will need to explore the area inside this crater(it's large, I'm talking 50'000 square miles large). I plan on making it hex crawl in nature for the exploration. In the process of exploring the party will come across a large variety of alien cultures and also less civilized life forms living in the crater. The main thing I wanted to accomplish was having extremely alien life forms and culture. No blue human crap. I want a big focus to be how to even communicate with these cultures with each new culture being a new process of communication. How do you communicate with something that might have no face, vocal chords or apparent sight or hearing organs? All of these civilizations though will be primitive in technology, having probably just reached the iron age if that.
As well as living cultures the party will discover the remnants of old ones. Destroyed cities, abandoned hives and tunnel systems. These ruins will be where the party finds scraps of more advanced technology(still primitive to the humans, but more advanced than the natives current level). Using this technology the party will have hope of repairing their ship and give them direction as what their goal should be. In exploring these ruins the party will come to realize all of these ancient civilizations seemed to get wiped out in cycles. Every thousand or so years something happens that wipes the crater clean of life. What the party does with this information is up to them.
Now I want the environment to be hostile and alien as well. Due to volcanic nature of the planet outside the crater there would be a shit ton of ash in the atmosphere. I was thinking that during the nights the crater would be hit by heavy ash storms and during the day somehow the sky would be crystal clear and sunny. Giving the landscape an eerie stillness, like fresh fallen snow. The native civilizations would have obviously adapted and live underground or in complex structures. I imagined one species that ingests a parasite to form a symbiotic relationship and eats ash to feed the parasite, which in turn feeds the alien, however there would be some pretty horrible side effects.
Most strange of all, and a driving force of the campaign there would be a titanic creature that lives in the crater. I'm talking 600 meters tall. This leviathan would barely even be conscious, it simply wanders slowly through the crater. To the natives it's not even seen as a threat, simply a fact of life like the weather. Its wandering patterns are well known and the locals know to clear out like nomads when the creature begins to enter their territory. However the creature would be invisible. It can only be seen through the disturbances it makes in the ash storms, the winds whipping around its invisible form. During the day it is still. Now this creature, unknown to the party is actually the telekinetic projections of a species of fungus that lies in the dead center of the crater. This fungus is more like a cosmic horror if anything, and is what caused the crater in the first place. Millions of years ago a meteor containing the fungus hit the planet and the fungus sprouted inside the crater. The staggering amount of organisms also living on the meteor is how I plan to explain the crazy variety of species within the crater as opposed to natural paths of evolution. Anyway this fungus would be a telekinetic entity that feeds off radiation. This is why the crater is clear of ash during the day, it suppresses the winds that carry the ash so that the sun's rays can bask the valley and feed it. And during the night it allows the winds to resume and instead probes the crater which creates this invisible titan.
Now I'm sure you've figure out where I'm going with this by now, obviously this fungus is what has caused the disasters that wiped the crater clean of life in the past. And the reason this happens is every so often in the planets life span the volcanic activity increases in such a way that the fungus can not hold back the storms, or the storms go so high into the atmosphere that it covers the telekinetic bubble it would have created. When this happens the fungus begins to starve. Instead of feeding off the sun's radiation the fungus stretches its roots wide and deep into the planet and beings to feed off the radiation of the planets core. In doing so it also drains all the nutrients from the land inside the crater. So the land dies and there is no sun causing the eco system to collapse and all the societies within to die. The climax of the campaign will involved two alien civilizations that have reached a point of tension and are preparing for war. One of them will have found a more ancient civilization's work on some form of bomb or weapon of some sort that can cause massive devastation. They will use it and it will cause enough tectonic activity to work up the volcanoes on the outside of the crater causing the ash to cover the crater and trigger the fungus to being feeding off the planet's core. This will be very obvious, the fungus will spread all over the surface of the crater, huge tree like clusters of it will climb walls and ridges. People will have horrible psychic nightmares. It is at this point that the party needs to be ready to do whatever it is they are planning.
>>43583249
I'm passing out now, so I can't really contribute (or even read to the end of your stuff right now), but it sounds like a really fucking cool campaign scenario. Good luck with it.
I plan on there being many options open to the party to survive the campaign though. They can fix their ship and escape leaving it all behind. They could attempt to destroy the fungus and "save" the natives in the crater. They could attempt to band up with a civilization and leave the crater and maybe terraform the outside world. They could attempt to take a sample of this fungus and harness its vast physic potential, become a godlike being. They could try to lead one civilization to dominate all the others, take their food supplies and go underground to outlast this disaster and rebuild again after. More options I haven't thought of yet. They will obviously all depend on the actions and skills of the party. Some of these will require diplomacy and communication skills, others science and engineering. It depends on how they build their characters.
Anyway that pretty much sums it all up. What do you guys think?
>>43583351
Thank you. Even just encouragement is appreciated. I've been hesitant to do this for a while as I'm always nervous about sharing ideas.
>>43583249
When dealin with aliens there are two main styles the Kirk school which uses the power of hot dickings and the Emperor approved technique of burning the xenos like the filthy subhuman beasts that they are.
I personally do both in order.
>>43583249
Honestly? Not much you can really communicate through. Show off your technology and accept that you'll be accepted as gods. If they at least had math you could establish a method of communication through that but otherwise you're fucked.
>>43584638
I was thinking I would make a way for each species to communicate and then subtly give clues to the players.
Maybe one would communicate through seismic vibrations in the ground that they picked up only through a certain pad they lowered and then emitted the right vibration via a little tail or something. But it would be up to the players to figure out what exactly the species was doing when it lowered the pad and the tails picked up speed. Then the science officer or whatever would have to come up with a way to replicate it , decipher it like Morse code.
Maybe one would communicate through touch, but a form of biological communication. Enzymes that bind and give off reactions producing dopamine and other chemicals so you could read the emotion of the one you touched, that coupled with limited telepathy to give vague communication amongst its people.
Ideas like this. Where each new encounter with a species would be almost like a puzzle they needed to solve. But once they could communicate they could then learn a little of the culture and history of the race and maybe trade for some food and shelter, get some information on the area near by. Even with more advanced, easier to communicate species learn something, how to mount and ride some local wild life, maybe trade for some primitive weapons or armour if their equipment becomes damaged or they run out of ammunition.
Well I'm off to bed so I'll give the thread a bump and maybe if I'm lucky it will still be here in the morning
>>43583249
bump for OP
Holy crap its still here. Still no thoughts? If anyone wants to recommend a good system they think would work for the campaign that would be great. I'm still unsure myself.
I was thinking possibly refluffed fantasy craft or maybe Numenera. Hell maybe even starwars D20 would work if I took out any force using class.
Bump while I actually read this, now that I have a moment.
>>43583355
>What do you guys think?
It sounds really cool, but really ambitious, and therefore prone to fail unless you have a really good group. I'm not sure how much sense the it makes to have any form of higher animal arrive on the meteorite, because they would be killed on impact. The fungus maybe okay, but certainly not any kind of vertebrate. Perhaps there could be some kind of virus or other parasite that infects and drastically alters living organisms. Maybe it was even some kind of nanotech or engineered organism that has undergone fundamental change and strayed from whatever its original purpose was (perhaps creating complex life conducive for creating a healthy environment for sapients from simpler forms in part of a terraforming process). Regardless, native fungus was altered in such a way that it now resembles what you talked about, while existing animals were diversified and changed into things startlingly different from what they once had been.
Oh, and just a reminder:
meteroid -- a rock in space that's too small to be an asteroid
meteor -- a rock that has entered the atmosphere (a shooting star)
mereorite -- a rock that has hit the planet
>>43589026
>I was thinking possibly refluffed fantasy craft or maybe Numenera. Hell maybe even starwars D20 would work if I took out any force using class.
Those all sound like terrible fits to the environment you described, but I don't know what kind of game play you're shooting for. I'd lean much more towards a classless, skill-based system. For whatever reason, Traveller has never really sung to me (I've read it but never actually played it, so take that for what you will), but it strikes me as being more appropriately geared to this kind of thing.
I don't know that Basic Role-Playing has a specific science fiction setting/supplement, but the rules cover science fiction weapons and such, and the percentage dice, skill-based system would be good for this kind of thing. There was an old TSR game called Star Frontiers that was built largely around exploring strange new worlds. It was a really cool setting, but unfortunately, the mechanics were less than stellar. Still, might be worth a thumb through. Also, Savage Worlds might not be bad if you were going for something with a bit of pulp action.
BRP -- http://www.4shared.com/postDownload/WS70nSh-/basic_roleplaying__4th_edition.html
Star Frontiers:
Rules (the first two, Basic and Expanded, are the core rules) -- http://www.starfrontiers.com/Rules/
Modules (the first three form the adventure arc the game is pretty much built around) -- http://www.starfrontiers.com/Modules/
>>43590997
Perfect, thank you I will look into those systems asap. I'll admit to having next to no knowledge of sci fi based systems. My experience is in d&d, paranoia, dark heresy(technically sci fi, but certainly not fitting for this setting) and warhammer fantasy D20.
>>43590547
I have a good group in mind but even then you never really can know. Honestly at this point its become a pet project, if it fails with one group at least if I have all my planning and world building down in writing I can try it again with another group in the future. Plus I have fun with that as a DM, seeing how one group may be awful and fuck everything up shooting themselves in the foot murder hobos and then how another actually accomplishes things. The different paths and outcomes that result from that. When I tell new groups about the differences between attempts it usually makes them feel like the world is more responsive and less railroaded. Gives them some trust in me as a DM.
And sorry I wasn't very clear I didn't mean to have a higher animal arrive on the meteorite but that it would have a large amount of alien bacteria and micro organisms on it allowing for a large variety of evolutionary paths to start. Though correct me if that makes no sense or if even the bacteria would die on entry into the atmosphere, I'm not exactly an expert on that stuff. Though I do like your idea of nanotech or a virus. I'll have to think of possibilities I could do with that. Thanks.
Also yeah, again meteoroid/meteor/meteorite, nice to be reminded of some basic facts that I missed. If I want to make the setting immersive I gotta make sure I brush up on some basic knowledge.
>>43591715
You might want to glance this over, if for no other reason than to learn about planetary ejaculation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
One last bump for the thread before I let it die.
