Tell us about your sci-fi homebrew.
Sorry, I don't do sci-fi, I do space fantasy.
>>45570573
Then tell us about your space fantasy homebrew, I suppose.
>>45570541
I'm not telling, there are way too many hard-line assholes here to make me want to share that information with you.
>>45570598
This is a judgement-free zone.
At least by OP. I can't speak for others.
>>45570584
Why would you ever need to homebrew that?Aside from edition or system conversion.
>>45570584
>tell us about your space fantasy
All the green alien chicks want human dicks.
>>45570622
This is /tg/. Everybody hates something.
There's also the HFY setting guy of course aside from the magial realmers.
The guy that gets caught up in going full autismo over the cultural intricacies of 15 different races nobody gives a fuck about.
That one guy who actually did some research and feels the need to tell everybody else that their make believe is not scientifically sound.
The guys that do space opera/fantasy telling the science guys to fuck off.
The guys drawing parallels to classical mythology and how science fiction is ultimately gonna safe humanity. Isaac Asimov said that so it's gotta be true of course.
The guy saying Asimov was a hack.
The guy starting to bas /lit/.
And the bitter asshole making fun of everybody else without contributing anything of value to the thread.Guess that's me so far.I wanted to write something up but realized that it's neither original nor fleshed out enough to be worth talking about anyway.
>>45570541
The year was 1996,I had recently been introduced to an injury system different than D&D via Shadowrun 2E, and I had been binging on Babylon 5 and The Fifth Element.
I've been meaning to scan the whole thing and post it on /tg/ for a laugh.
>>45570541
It's a mix of Privateer, Macross/mech anime, and Tenchi Muyo.
I'm working on a game where players are human consciousnesses in robot bodies SOMA style.
The game takes place in a giant urban city that goes on for thousands of miles. Various robot tribes have taken control and fighting each other for what little resources is left.
>>45570686
At least your self awareness gives you a false sense of value.
>>45570584
You know, I'm not sure what my thing actually is. I'll give a few details.
>Universe is flat, with planets as islands.
>Planets are in a body of energy that provides warmth, and also life energy to everything on the planet.
>The energy swirls with violet color, with white, constellation like patterns.
>By extension, colder climates are higher elevation.
>Nobody knows what is high above, or deep in the energy sea. People who explore the former are lost without a trace, and those who explore the latter are torn asunder by direct contact with the energy.
>Vessels can traverse the energy, but break down at a noticeable rate, making interplanetary travel a risky luxury.
>Eventually, damage to planets or materials harvested will replenish from the energy's power. Mining tunnels are made to slow the process to maintain contingency.
>Depending on the planet, laws, customs, and overall quality of living are different; essentially this leaves options for all sorts of campaigns. You could even make a planet isolated, too far from the others to reach or leave.
>Regardless of where you are, the sun appears the same size.
>>45570541
>In the relatively near future, Humanity has begun colonizing the nearer parts of the solar system, but has not invented any FTL travel options.
>Not too far off though, can theoretically make multi-lightyear trips in only a couple hundred, maybe a thousand years. Humanity decides to try it out, as they're having serious over population issues and some of those higher up are worried about human sustainability.
>Send out a couple hundred slower than light ships, either cryo-sleep or generation ships to nearby worlds that are likely habitable. Overall, a couple million Homo Sapiens are spread across the ships.
>Skip ahead to when these are now making planetfall a several centuries later. Homo Sapiens are slightly surprised to discover they almost universally have welcome parties. Either from one of the handful of large galactic governmental bodies, or the local system government at least.
>Hurray, Homo Sapiens are now part of the galactic community. All couple million of them.
>Wait, what happened to Earth? Why do you keep correcting us when we call ourselves Humanity?
>Turns out that in the interim Humanity became the first species to achieve the singularity, pre-FTL, for a variety of reasons and the post-human gestalt super-intelligences have been calling themselves Humanity for a couple hundred years now. Everyone knows them as that, not you guys.
>A lot of humans, and a few aliens, are suspicious of this story but there isn't much evidence to say it wasn't a peaceful/natural thing.
>The entire Sol system has been turned into an embassy/national park as Humanity no longer has any use for it, so you can't go back there.
>The entire Homo Sapiens species has no been reduced to a relatively and dispersed tiny nomadic population with an unfortunate reputation. You play as one of those lucky/poor souls.
I'm currently calling the setting "Last Sons of Earth", because I thought that sounded cool. Would you like to know more?
>>45570930
Sure, if you've got more. It's nice to see people switch up humanity's place in the setting.
>>45571222
What would you like to know about? The least developed parts of the setting are the current political state of the galaxy and the most of the other races besides Homo Sapiens and Humanity. Which is, admittedly, a lot. I only recently started the project.
Bump.
>>45570930
Bad premise, so long as it was in fact peaceful and willing, the transformation from individual humans into the gestalt Humanity was not an ending but a continuation of the Human race.
Gestalt Humanity are still human at their core, meaning that the few million primitive humans are not the "Last Sons of Earth".
>>45570896
>>Universe is flat
Then what's at the end of it all?
>>45573509
Eh.
http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/do-we-really-want-to-fuse-our-minds-together/
That super-intelligence could possibly not be a race but rather just one single 'person'.
>>45573570
The single being would still be human, an amalgamation of all of humanity. I don't think you'd be able to get any more human.
I wonder if such a being would get lonely.
The campaign's long since dead, but there were a few notable things
>Massive psychic space whales from alternative dimension
>Said dimension has different physics, so FTL is jumping between the two for faster travel
>Space manta rays possibly related to them, only other species that lives in the void
>Both produce/consume graviational waves that fuels FTL drives
>Manta rays are playable race, telepathic only, typically used as telemarketers around warp gates because it's expensive to block out massive psychic communication (Think paid-for adblock but for ships)
>Humans essentially extinct after war with insect race, used unrecorded mystery weapon to 'end' it
>Insect race left massively infertile after last encounter with humanity
>Humans suspiciously replaced with bio-cyborgs within 15 years, some systems didn't even notice humans that were left being 'replaced'
>Meanwhile the droid's rights revolution gains ground after first case of 'spontaneous sentience' occurs during a long-term expedition in space
More and more. I started working on a wiki but lost motivation when we had to disband. Very soft, cliche sci-fi, but it's been fun.
>>45570541
"No Man's Road"
Humanity faced a local almost-extinction event in the late two-thousands. This was brought upon them by a small terrorist organisation.
But humanity endured, and a scarred race emerged from the dark times - a race who sought to escape their planet and spread out to secure their survival.
Finally, the interest in space exploration was reignited.
But it was a slow endeavour. FTL travel, known as relativity travel, had been theoretically and perhaps practically possible for a time, but it seemed expensive and still wholly too slow to get us anywhere of importance.
But a universal error had been made. The journeys humanity had thought would take a thousand years of cryo sleep became a hundred. And the colony ships of the fleeting human race had reached two dusin system where habitable planets were thought to exist.
Only thirteen of these systems proved compatible with human life, and several needed large scale terraforming. But alas, the movement was set in motion.
The last eleven colony ships each decided to search for new goals and find hope elsewhere. Four went back to cryo sleep and let their ships carry on forwards, hoping to one day find a suitable system.
Three changed coordinations to the systems of the other colony ships.
Two turned around to make their way back to earth.
And two faced unknown fates.
In the end, humanity had found new homes and planted the seeds of their species with a meager billion people on thirteen planets, and another nine-eleven so billion people still in space.
As the years went by, the first generation of planetfall passed as their children inherited worlds somewhat colonised, and tales of a bygone home.
Non-insect and plant life was rare on all but three of the newly colonised planets. But rumours of inhuman beings on the colony ships, or in nearby systems make mankinds existence frickle and uncertain. And every once in a while anomalies were observed or unexplainable massacres occured.
>>45573688
Most of the planets have set up a relativity launcher, which allows for quick journeys to be performed, but alas no effort can be made to reach the lost colony ships.
With this, humanity's goals are as follows. Continue to carve out their new planets, and search for other systems nearby. Uncover the mysteries that have plagued the race since planetfall, or at least guard humanity against them.
In the end, the game plays much like delta green / dark heresy where the players seek out to uncover mysteries and deal with them if possible.
Cults, bandits. sporadic monsters and increasing hostiltiy between certain factions are what makes up the baddies the players can face.
>>45573722
>>45573688
And it's called No Man's Road because the players, and people like them are said to "Brave the No Man's Road." Because they often live lives of isolation amongst unknown stars.
>>45570541
I'm running a Firm Sci-Fi game under the mission "i'll show you that hard-ish science fiction can be more entertaining, grander in scope, more informative and inspiring altogether than all the Star Trek and Star Wars campaigns in the world could ever dream to be". It's going quite nicely so far. Due to the lack of Hard-SF culture of the players until then I shamelessly and very openly ripped off pretty much each and every recent major work of fiction into a not to bad melting pot.
>Revelation Space (mostly) meets Blindsight meets the Manifold Trilogy meets Schismatrix.
>Humans colonized a tiny bit of space, a few dozens of systems with very heavy 0g habitat emphasis and posthuman galore (see Schismatrix and Rev Space)), a few hundred systems properly explored and vaguely settled, at most three thousands saw humans crews or probes that brought information back.
>no FTL, interstellar travel is done with lighthuggers (Rev Space). A lot of emphasis on the evolution of the systems while the players travel for decades, borderline glacial pacing. Overall no nonsense setting, all players kinda enjoy the gigantic infodump I provide for each and every bit of sci-fi i introduce (Peter Watts would be proud). To be honest the opportunity to learn shit is half the point of the campaign.
>Players are the crew of such a lighthugger, after an introduction arc in deep space salvaging the frozen human cargo of an antique lighthugger, they visit a densely populated system (centered around a superjovian in the goldylock zone with dozens of moons and hundreds of o'neil habitats) on the verge of civil war.
>>45574155
>Megacorporations everywhere (Eve online's Caldari State) go apeshit crazy as they detect the IR signatures of a vast, slow moving alien migration/settlement wave (Manifold Trilogy hello)
>most plan for war, building giant railgun powered by the plasma torus of a supergiant, thousand of mirrors to weaponize the sun, etc. the Conjoiners prefer to try and flee, some to hide in deep space in cold cometary nucleus, etc.
>Players go to study the first migrants in the Oort Cloud of the System, it's the fucking Rorschach (Blindsight), explore the damn thing, freak the hell out, they get their ass shattered, get the fuck back coreward with half a ship
>Megacorps go to war under the assumption all the other ones were diverting resources from the defense project to gain an advantage over the others once/whe/if the migration is defeated
>players sort shit out with spy, diplomacy and terrorism, megacorps back on track
>go back in deep space to try and collec the Hell Class weapons (Rev Space), out of a derelict Conjoiner habitat, fight the Nostalgia for Infinity (Rev Space again) and steal a part of the weapons. Space Piracy fuck yeah.
>Time to go back home and kick some alien chitinous butts
>currently playing full system scale war
>Can't wait to see their faces when they discover all the migrant species are fleeing away from the Inhibitors-on-steroids coming that way from the Sagittarius Arm
>>45570541
>Humanity is one of the few species that developed FTL-capable spacecraft before developing a single unified planetary goverment
>As such several nations and organizations launched independed colony projects, hoping to be the first to reach the starts using what would later be considered to be extremely slow and shitty FTL drives
>Each of the colonies founded this way (the ones that didn't fail and die off, at least) had to be fully self-sufficient and had little to no contact with the rest of the colonies or Earth, untill cheaper and more efficient FTL drives were developed, which led to humanity being unified again
>Originally the united humanity was rules from Earth, as they were responsible of providing the colonies with the technology to build the new drives, and they considered the colonies as little more than vassal states who would provide them with resources
>The colonies wanted more independence, which eventually led to a brief civil war that resulted in a more democratic system of goverment, where each major planet would have their own representatives in the senate. The center of govement was also moved from Earth to one of the largest colonies
>Humanity is still politically split between the "Terrans" (who support a strong unified goverment, usually run from Earth) and the "Colonials" (who prefer each planet being mostly independed)
>After the civil war humanity enjoyed a long period of peace, during which they established diplomatic relations with several alien civilizatiosn they encountered. However, they eventually crossed paths with a warlike civilization known as the Demosian hierarchy who, after humanity refused their demands to become their vassals, invaded human space
>The Demosian invasion was eventually beaten back, at a great cost to both sides, and since then the two civilizations have been locked in a cold war, neighter side yet willing to attack the other
>>45570541
At the moment I've got:
>Long ago, humanity sent out shitloads of cryo/generation ships out to colonize various far flung planets,
>Part of this colonization effort involved both limited terraforming, and genemoding the humans aboard to be more adapted to new environs
>these people colonized, and over the course of the millennia, sort of forgot their extra-terrestial origins for the most part.
>Now the remains of the human homeworld have mastered FTL in two forms Mass Effect style "alter relative mass to make FTL possible" (which is used as a sort of traditional war drive), and Quantum Displacement/Entanglement relays.
>With a whole new galaxy to explore and populate, humanity having become estranged to itself, and two mysterious aliens species sharing these new worlds with us... Well, it's gonne get crazy.
Yeah, pretty barebones.
>>45570930
I like it, feel free to share.
>>45570896
interesting spacefantasy you got there.
>>45574336
Game centered around running a colony
>Humanity has a "slow ftl" called the Slide Whistle
>Built networked Von Neumann probes to map the galaxy. Once they reach a system, they spend a year or more surveying it and if there are resources, replicates itself to continue mapping. All information is transmitted to the "Stellar Archive"
>If a potential colonization planet is found, the UN sends a survey team run by the "PlanEx.Org" or Planetary Explorations Organization. Survey team determines if humanity can survive there.
>If successful, the survey team moves on to the next world and the UN builds a Colony Charter.
>The Colony Charter is sold to C&E (Colonization and Exploration Inc.) and crowd funded by potential colonists.
>Potential Colonists liquidate their entire net worth to pay for a seat
>Once the goal is met, Potential Colonists are moved to Mars for planning, where they vote on what type of government they will run, who will be doing what and what supplies to bring.
>Leftover money from the Charter purchase is used to buy supplies, rent the Colony Tug and future supply drops
>Once everything is settled, Colonists are packed into their stasis tanks and the Colony Tug tows the ship off to the destination which can take over a decade
>Once they arrive, the colony ship drops its container pylons in order. Pylon 1 has all the people and equipment to build the infrastructure and start farming. Pylon 2 has further expansion, mining equipment and so on.
>The final pylon has unskilled or young family members and luxuries.
>Once all pylons are dropped and a satellite network is deployed, the colony ship makes planetfall to be disassembled.
>The Colony Tug returns to Earth.
>If they could afford it, supply ships come in every years for the amount of drops they could afford
>The small print on the Charters say after 100 years, the colony falls into UN control.
>None of the colonies are old enough for this to happen yet
I'd like to run a sci-fi game, something between Cowboy Bebop, Alien and Rebel Galaxy. The players are gonna be in a lawless environment, either border worlds (if there is interstellar travel) or most of a Cowboy Bebop-like Sol system.
I can't decide if there's gonna be interstellar travel and/or aliens. I think I need a new point of view.
How do you prefer your sci-fi settings, /tg/? With or mithout FTL and/or alienss? And why?
>>45574704
Also living on the ship ad keeping it running is gonna be a major point of the game.
>>45570541
In the early 60s reality tears itself apart for seemingly no reason. Earth and its moon get dumped to some kind of new universe. The Earth pulls in some kind of ancient station into its gravity well. Space technology gets MASSIVE funding as the United States and the Soviet Union compete to find out what is on the station. It turns out the station was filled with FTL drives, and a bitter war begins as the two nations fight over the new technology. World War 3 starts and wipes out the Earth in the mid 70s, but the good news is that space technology has gotten advanced enough that humanity managed to escape the Earth. In 1976 somebody finally figures out how to turn on the FTL relics and humanity parts ways. It is now 2020. Our tech is both futuristic in its ability to keep us alive in space, but unfortunately pretty far behind in just about everything else. This new universe seems to be filled with various other relics, and other mysteries. Nobody really knows how the relics work, so any ship without a scavenged ftl relic installed is practically useless for travelling.
>>45570541
Kinda related this is the WIP of some pretty awesome and knowledgeable anon. pdf must be 6 months old so there might be a newer version somewhere around.
Hopefully said anon might even lurk, so consider this an attempt at invoking his presence.
>>45573526
If there is an end, it is unreachable. It is rumored to be ever-expanding, rather than infinite. It sounds like a cop-out, but it's another unknown like what's beyond the sky.
Prospector
A d6 skill-based game in which players pilot a ship owned by a mega-corp in order to mark newly discovered planets for exploitation/habitation.
Of course, competing mega-corps have their own vessels combing the expanse, ranging from other exploration vessels to secret military/pirate installations. Can your group of prospectors make their next paycheck, or die trying?
There are some science-fantasy elements interspersed throughout, but they should be VERY few and far between until a crew manages to reach "late game +". Ancient psychic relics, living metal starships, the abyss that stares back... Dr Who type shit.
Still hammering out rules and setting. So... I've got almost nothing except a brief statistical analysis of skill system mechanics.
>>45574244
What kind of aliens are these Demosians?
>>45570541
I am working on one right now, but I don't even know how to begin with the crunch. Could somebody give me the pros and cons of some dice sistems (like D20, D100, D6...)?
Been monitoring the thread from work all day. I'm currently slowly hacking up some mechanics for this in my free time by absolutely BUTCHERING THE HELL out of Legend of the Five Rings.
>Intrasystem colonies slowly develop around 2050, Earth is taking a fucking beating from climate change but hey its still better than being in space. A few nutbags consign themselves to sleeper ships to pre-empt everything going ass up in what is still a delicate dystopia.
>Cutting edge physics discovers the phenomenon that thousands of years later will be referred to as "The Flow" but at the time was considered a candidate for the explanation of both dark matter and dark energy. Initial development of machines capable of making observations about, let alone directing this unknown energy field have very mixed results.
>Eventually found to be disproportionately effective on small, complicated components satisfying components of an incredibly long chemical cipher.
>Construction by learning engine of the first nanomaterial device capable of fully satisfying the cipher to power an electromagnetic rotor made of a few nanometres of gold has unexpected consequences, but heavy study of the resulting tissue mass allows for the monumental construction of what would ultimately become the first "Dragon". The enslavement of this creature and those that followed, while short lived, propelled humanity into a new age. The neural nets of Dragonflesh drew godlike power, but had primitive and underdeveloped intelligence easily manipulated by humans who could control everything they saw from their first activation. They gave mankind its wishes for extrasolar colonies, they granted requests for material artifice and spun from raw elements the forests of earth into platforms above Jupiter. However their captors after such a short time realised their mistake. Something whispered to the Dragons that man could not hear, and without the ability to control their creations man would fall prey to them.
>>45578347
>The greatest triumph as they saw it was having an enduring gain before their brief war with the Dragons began. Sections of dragonflesh decrypted by the computing power of most of the solarsystem, approximated and played back through a protein folding program to allow genetic engineering to imbue man with powers taken from their own fledgling gods.
>As for the extermination of the Dragons, those that could be purged, were. Those that had enough specks of self-awareness to expect betrayal were capable of defending themselves from any weapon mankind could wield. They took with them whatever their personality depended on for sentiment and left an unwelcome solar system.
>For citizens, unable to do anything but watch the brief and unexciting aspects of this conflict, gene therapy for power over the flow was a big thing like no other. Wielding only miniscule fragments of dragon power, the enhanced outdid mass production in quality at similar pace. They decrypted information in means beyond that predicted by computing. They made the sick and wounded heal. While these powers were all incompatible with one another, the idea of remaining pure in view of the option of defying reason in some way, or indeed being able to fight the dragons should they swear revenge, held less and less sway.
>As the second generation proved that The Flow was now with man even into a new stone age if need be, ruthless industrial revolution left the unenhanced man behind, in the gutter, where they would never see the stars.
>The FTL journeys that the masters of the Dragons had coordinated proved tremendously difficult, but specialised navigators could, with considerable difficulty and error, replicate their method of inducing an uncertainty in position and velocity of greater magnitude than 'c' before becoming coherent once more at the target. The advance of man fit fever pitch, colonied made faster than any could have expanded.
>Then, the dark age began.
It's Stargate SG-1 but better.
>>45578676
>With little warning and far less understanding, all contact with Earth was lost. Jump routes to Earth all either failed or sent travellers to their deaths.
>It would take around a century for the infrastructure necessary to create a new jump route to Earth to be recreated by one of the colonies. Most had expected to be in trade and contact with Earth, and were stricken with their own problems, like maintaining a food supply when the food supply needed more and more breathable atmosphere on a cold dead rock.
>The solar system lay as a hellish waste, a vast asteroid belt orbiting the sun that man knew. Some small waystations orbiting pluto and neptune remained manned by the lonely children of their earlier inhabitants. Questioned, they spoke with difficulty of some kind of thing surging forth from the Earth and Mars, shredding them, and plucking from among the stars any colonies in orbit with a large human population. The resulting debris field saw to wiping clear the rest. Whatever it was, it retreated as mysteriously as it came. This is now believed to have been an extreme instance of flow manifestation event, a process where physical material from the realm of the flow interrupts realspace in response to high densities of active flow use.
>The age among the stars proceeds: All men have but one god given gift, which is shepherded to purity by the national matchmakers association lest the weaker but versatile dualbloods give way to the affront to the divine that is the mudblood. Man still travels through space chained to fission drive powered steel hulls, but crafted to exquisite perfection by hands flowing with divine power. Travel by decoherence only works on ships at high relative velocity to their surroundings, so the engine is still a fixture, and it is far too unreliable and delicate for in-system maneuvering. No man can withstand space outside a suit save the mysterious dragonbloods, descendants of those who reversed their ancestors fealty.
>>45570930
I love this. 10/10 name too. Maybe make it "children" instead of "sons", just to be inclusive.
>>45579010
>Planetary populations are kept low to prevent flow manifestation events. Ideally by mapping new jump routes, but this has become increasingly difficult. Either a quirk of the galaxy, or mankind can only follow trails blazed by dragons. Increasingly, governments weigh the merits of internal purges against petty wars.
>Machine intelligence ceased to develop when mankind unleashed the flow, but it was already plenty advanced. Most ships use mass produced Intelligence chipsets which have a limited capacity to learn, but primarily benefit human crew by their vast computing power and fast reflexes applied to problems quicker than any modern human can react with their abilities. For the truly luxurious, neural net based models can be installed in infrastructure, but such a carefully tailored solution usually requires years of calibrations to begin function after being fully plugged in.
>In the future, and in space, conventional firearms, with a few minor adjustments, work just fine. One or two of the seven recognised power types can render bullets worthless as a means of attack, and weaponised lasers are available as a precautionary measure. That said, no partplacer can lift a finger against a shell larger than themselves fired at mach 10. In war, the big guns are still king.
>>45573509
Humanity considers itself the next step in an evolutionary chain. While they call themselves and consider themselves Humanity, they don't see Earth as their home or birthplace. They came about later on, and to them it doesn't have nearly as much sentimental value as to the lost Homo Sapiens.
Also, whether or not it was a peaceful/willing transition is partially up in the air. I'm not sure if I ever want to demystify that part of the setting, because I like there being ambiguities and unanswered questions when world building. Especially when I intend to run a game in the setting.
>>45574310
One thing I've been thinking about is how cobbled together/primitive the human technology is gonna look. Because they don't really have any large scale industry of their own, and they're such an impossibly small/poor demographic, almost no major corp makes equipment or even clothes for humans to use. So it's all either scavenged/modified from alien stuff, made essentially at home, or leftover incredibly old stuff they have from their colony ships.
>>45579142I call it Sons here and Children when I'm on leddit/in person. I think Sons sounds better, but I understand the being inclusive thing.
>>45579229
>It's been like 800 fucking years to get everyone's shit back in order, by which point cultural divergence is enough that if people didn't speak different languages before, they do now.
>Main obstacles to producing something are finding a blueprint, or creating one. People are short on data about the technological base of Earth, and knowing the principal function of a thing doesn't mean being able to build one, but the Flow does mean people can precisely construct from sufficiently accurate blueprints. People are very interested in living things as well. Earth's biosphere was in the shitter when the enhanced set off, and they didn't bring much with them. Ironically, the earlier sleeper ships are mainly valuable for their seed and animal stocks but finding them in deep space is not exactly the easiest task in the world.
>People have great pride in their bloodlines, as their wellsprings of power. The underclass of mudbloods, those whose powers have been depleted through interbreeding with noncomplementaries, is a minority.
>Dragons still exist. They don't hate humans as much as everyone expects, but they have become maddened by their connection to the flow and try to evoke ancient myths of man and solicit fear. It's generally believed that while a dragon would see through immediately almost any concievable attempt on its life, if an opening presents itself, it is physically possible to kill them, and a duty to mankind to reduce the number of the capricious and otherwise unstoppable beings. The dragonblooded they have rewarded for service gain their full suite of godlike power with none of the careful practice, intellect, or even biology necessary to draw it out, leaving them usually better than a mudblood only through a small handful of specific reason defying tricks, rather than the broader but well studied abilities of the seven divine bloodtypes.
>>45579541
>This training and knowledge that dragonblooded lack is itself a precious national resource. Even if the bloodlines of the people can be maintained at full strength, that strength cannot be used for anything without the careful martial arts, calisthenics and meditative techniques that turn the action potentials of the human body into a supernatural force.
>The absolute prize for a government that CANNOT be shared, is a planet that is within terraformable range. Most interstellar mandalas are practically city states administrated from 1 or 2 such worlds. They're the sort of prize that the citizens of a nation can agree to fight and die for, in the holds of starships.
>I call it: ???I have always been terrible with names???.
For further explanation of the slightly schizophrenic setting, it is extrapolated from a Microscope session.
I'm not sure if this is really sci-fi exactly, but the premise is that in the 30's during Edwin Hubble's research he discovers that other galaxies exist outside our galaxy, but instead of noticing that the universe is expanding but something else.
essentially the physics in each galaxy are different leading to wildly different possibilities, perhaps a galaxy wide organism, or a species with FTL travel. regardless its mostly just lovecraft horror with more informed physics
>>45570541
The setting is a mix inspired loosely by Mass Effect, Babylon V, Stargate and Freelancer settingof our group. Humans are still somewhat upstarts but even the older alien races don't have the whole picture or insane power levels...most space nations are relatively small, like 4-6 main systems and there's still a lot left to explore, even in the relatively well cartographed regions of space.
The system is basically a add-on to riddle of steel that I wrote myself, basically it adds all the stuff you need for SciFi like actual firefight rules, implants, drones, computers, ground vehicles and spaceships.
The Wright brothers way back when sometime after inventing the concept of flight also invented space travel. Ever since they have been lauded as geniuses of the modern age and elevated to saint/god status. They are now in Cryo in the Arctic.
After the discovery of a new metal deep within the Earth's core (Wrightmium) by the brothers, they decided the best way to reach outer space would be to build railroads from one side of the planet to the other that at their apex would reach out past the Earth's atmosphere. This was all possible because of the amazing powers of Wrightmium with it's durability, high melting point, and abundance on our home planet.
Hundreds of years later, Space Trains are now the common form of transport through space, powered by steam engines that shoot steam out of whichever side the conductor sees fit. Now I know what you're thinking, "Wouldn't the steam just turn to ice?" Yes, yes it does. So now space is filled with ice cubes and space trains.
These conductors work some of the most difficult and dangerous jobs known to man, hopping from planet to planet with the perils of landing being enough to steer most people from the occupation. Not to mention the cargo...
Post-WWI British infantry battalion finds a device in Africa that transports them to another world. They have to defend themselves against alien creatures, unnatural weather/geography/general weird shit and the descendants of humans who have used the device before.
>>45570686
>This is /tg/. Everybody hates something.
and some people hate everything. Can't avoid em I guess.
>>45570541
Sadly I don't have anything well developed because my players aren't interested in sci-fi other than standard setting shadowrun. FML.
Two ideas I've been tossing about if I ever convince people to play something a bit more open ended sci-fi.
1
>Not too distant future, maybe 50-100 years.
>Humanity gets highly unlikely tech to work like alcubierre drive, or possibly just scaled up EM drive to putter around the solar system.
>Bioengineering and AI becoming viable technologies. Advanced nanotech is the next holy grail.
>This isn't just about humans though, it's about the highly unlikely event of aliens wanting to fuck our shit up who aren't gods to us due to technological advancement.
>Turns out, through some cosmic joke, humans are the most badass and war-like species to ever make it into space, or maybe the second most badass.
>Alien council that was leaving us alone decides to fuck our shit up, but they're too nice to just nuke us from orbit and decide to invade.
>Players either play ground forces, fighter pilots, or scientists. I'm kinda split on that. Plot would revolve around humanity initially surviving the crappy attempt at subjugation and fighting its way to a place of power to bargain from.
>Not a very serious game or setting, just something I think my group might have fun with and which would be neat to bullshit up alien race ideas for.
2.
>Pretty distant future, 100-200+ years, or an alternate timeline where humans put a lot more effort into space.
>dystopian space station society inhabits absurdly large space habitats above mostly destroyed earth. Mars is being terraformed, and earth is being restored, but that's centuries off.
>Competing factions fight each other in covert actions, to afraid to risk open war given how easy it would be to make humanity extinct.
c
They think it's a fantasy setting in an elemental plane.
It's not. It's a human generation ship that, through an accident, is stuck in hyperspace and can't pop back out to reality. It's been stuck so long that the human inhabitants have mutated over countless years into discrete species, and the golem-like nanite swarms have restructured material in strange ways due to a lack of context and looping tasks.
The engine room, at the core of everything, is still intact, although connected to nothing. If it were ever repaired and redirected, the ship would fall out of hyperspace after eons and end up in a strange galaxy far from its original destination.
And no, it doesn't look anything like a planet or a disc. If you draw the setting out, it's massive for a structure, tiny for a world, and strangely conical. There's no stable sun system for it (not that the players ever noticed) and I gave every indication that magic does not work how they are accustomed to. Because it's not magic.
>>45581571
>Rogue stations and asteroid colonies add some variety to the mix as many are simple communities trying to avoid the grasp of powerful factions, but others are strange cults and criminal operations.
>Players play either faction agents or some kind of governmental investigators.
>Goal is to develop a noir fiction vibe in a dirty run down cyber punk world where death is a short step away for most.
>Much of a game, if I ever ran one, would be inside these huge habitats, with exposure to the fact that really everyone is hurtling along in free-fall about the earth brought into play rarely but brutally.
>>45570541
There are aliens who are obsessed with humans to weeaboo levels.
They are also regular weeabos.
I like this thread. A lot of good ideas and general positive energy.
>>45581714
>>45570541
>Nationalist uprisings begin in Europe and North America as a backlash against mass immigration and multiculturalism
>Rebirth of the age of nationalism as The West seeks to insulate itself from foreigners
>Cyber-dystopian fascist regimes subsidize neocolonial resource gathering initiatives in the third world
>These companies employ PMC's to bully the local governments and combat the Chinese, and each other, creating a Machiavellian power struggle between companies and nations, seizing each others resource plots.
>This struggle expands to space as private megacorporations begin to mine asteroids for precious minerals and gain immense private wealth
>The Germanic Union between Germany and Austria is formed
>The Russian Empire, a constitutional monarchy of federated Eurasian states under the Romanovs is formed
>The Imperial Federation, a union of CANZUK is formed
>China and Japan increase their influence on the global stage, minor regional nations becoming little more than puppets to their burgeoning megacorps
>An event sunders East-West relations when a Russian backed Chinese expedition to the PRC Moonbase manages to smuggle spears disguised as science equipment past UN space disarmament inspectors
>The PRC Moonbase staff assault the American Lunar Research Base and successfully disable its communications before the American researchers are aware an attack is taking place, intending to take the researchers hostage and use them as leverage in China's negotiations for sovereignty over Taiwan and Mongolia.
>One researcher, unluckily for the Chinese, escapes and finds an unlikely weapon. Wearing it's now aged and bone white flag as a bandanna, with it's tip sharpened to an edge, John Henry returns stealthily to the Lunar Research Base during a well timed lunar eclipse. Brandishing Old Glory planted a hundred years ago in the Apollo 11 Mission, John murders eight Chinese representatives. The first incident of combat in space is an American victory
>>45581816
/tg/ threads about the firmer side of sci-fi tend to attract a certain audience. It might be a small niche but we certainly regularly have extremely thought provoking and informative discussions. I've never been more satisfied with it than the time some kind and much smarter than me anon corrected my understanding of travelling FTL via wormhole within certain limits that would not break causality as long as you don't create closed timelike curves.
The motherfucker broke a part of my setting with that, though.
>NASA makes a miraculous breakthrough in making a spaceship, which combined with the fact that Europe's and America's people have asserted themselves in the world again at the expense of the islamic and socialist countries and have, after flooding the market with all the resources acquired from a new wave of capitalist world domination, entered a golden age of industry and economy
>first FTL colony ship is constructed before 2050
>humans sent to first colonies are handpicked to be extremely loyal to their nations and domestic policies such as capitalism and free speech, so as to prevent colonial disobedience
>however, singularity due to rapid advancement of information tech occurs by 2100, turning humans on Earth to what is basically the Borg
>colonies fight a civil war against the hive-mind of Earth, trying to save themselves from what humanity has become
>in the bloody war, doomsday cults and fascist/communist organizations become common amongst the desperate people who rally around their colonial governments
>manage to destroy Earth for good with a super-weapon
>remaining human cultures are extremely fearful of technological progress, especially information technology
>doomsday cults become mainstream religions, turning them even further into fanatics
>authoritarian organizations allow the rise of populist dictators to power
>religion works hand in hand and gives divine right to the dictators
>colonists start exploring the galaxy further after recovering from the war, which they almost lost if not for the superweapon
>humanity starts exterminating all non-human life that it sees and conquering the galaxy, separated by cultures and religions which further branch off as time goes on
>robots and AI are banned, and technology is only trusted if there is a human guiding it directly
>but the Collective of Earth wasn't actually completely ahniliated
>underground remnant bases remained on moons in the solar system as well as space stations on asteroids
Cont
>>45582491
>the Collective spreads stealthily amongst the human-controlled space, constructing bases, hiding vast robot armies and starfleets of AI-operated ships
>it starts infiltrating human information nets, starting off as a series of viruses that disrupts human governments and causes massive damage
>it starts entering the social medias, brainwashing the masses with subliminal messages
>mass murders and suicide bombings even are caused by these subliminal messages brainwashing unstable people into committing these acts
>actual terrorist organizations start springing up, with many radical new-age beliefs that seem to prophecise the return of the 'Collective'
>'prophets' start preaching about it, attracting even more people to the cause
>people in vital positions are corrupted, and the Collective soon has the ability to influence politics
>Collective worshippers start pushing for less and less direct human control, and more advanced information technology, which just further increases the influence of the Collective
>however, some people (the adventurers) start putting pieces together as these actions keep repeating and with a pattern that becomes clearer
>when the Collective reveals itself, it will turn the people into zombies obedient to its cause
>these cannon fodder will be further supported by vast robotic armies and starfleets
>adventurers have to rally people against this ASAP or else it will be too late
>>45582639
>>when the Collective reveals itself, it will turn the people into zombies obedient to its cause
Meant to say cultists*
>Solar System is split into two primary factions- the Jovian Confedaracy, a group of a bunch of spacers, derelict squatters, and ultra-rich corporations in orbit around jupiter, and the United Planets Alliance, which is basically just Mars, Earth, and a few shitty moons around saturn.
>No FTL. The system is all we got. Solar power capped out at 'nowhere near as efficient as our micro hydrogen reactors', while we have two gas giants in the system that we can farm for more hydro. Provided you can pay for and assemble the city-sized Atmospheric Scoop Vessel.
>Things are tense because the UPA is being jerks to the Jovians, seeing them as beggars and criminals, while the Jovians are putting their hydro prices higher and higher because the UPA has relative lack of infrastructure. The two are in a few border skirmishes around Saturn Scoop Points.
>Things come to a head when the Skinks arrive- being silicate aliens who survive on electricity- either generated mechanically, or 'organically' by being in an earthlike atmosphere.
>Skinks had left in a colossal slower-than-light colony ship a few hundred thousand years ago due to overpopulation on their own world. They don't have the hydro or solars to survive for long. They're stuck on nuclear 'rations' right now.
>They learn english in hours, talk to both human governments, get shit on and told to 'fix your own problems'.
>They end up being forced to raid human ships, both UPA and Jovians. UPA blames the Jovians. Jovians blame the UPA. Skinks just want to survive.
The players are a group of 'Ghosts', brains-in-jars, on board an elite-speed high-tech internet satellite in the depths of space. Their corporate sugardaddy fell through and went bankrupt, meaning the Ghosts have absolutely no way to survive. When the power on the satellite dies, their life support dies. So all they can do is refurbish the parts they have to make a few mobile shells, and survive in a world that's quickly becoming more dangerous.
>>45570541
Intergalactic Road trip.
Thats it really. I've been making up shit as we go along and just adding notes to what planets we've gone to, so far. It's not serious at all but I've offered this one player who wanted to play a Gunslinger Super Eye Contacts and an Improved Wrist so he has a reason to be great at duel wielding Space Guns.
>>45574704
personally i'd be more interested in playing a hard scifi without FTL and minimal aliens, near future. first contact stories, struggling colony stories, degenerating space stations, sleeper ships, corrupt corporations / governments, equipment breaking down, etc.
on the other hand, i'm not into some political game of mars colonists vs earth corporations or whatever, with no alien anything. i want something weirder than that.
just my opinions.
i've noticed that 99% of this thread is about homebrew settings rather than homebrew systems / mechanics. what are y'all using for a system? does everyone but me already know that the best system is Eclipse Phase or GURPS or something? is everyone using homebrew systems? any interesting scifi-specific mechanics?
>>45583185
I'm planning on using GURPS for my setting (I'm OP), mostly because I'm running a game specifically to prove GURPS' viability. If my game goes well, our main game switches to GURPS.
On the other hand, I've barely even scratched the surface of working on my setting, so...
My scifi homebrew can basically be summed up as "Art Deco world with trench warfare and mecha."
Sentient black hole travelling through the universe and all the species are pointing fingers at each other while fingering their "Destroy Planet" button of their favorite flavor as fast as they can just because they are dicks.
>>45570930
I came up with similar premise of the early adopters missing boat so to speak of FTL travel and came up painfully behind. But song pointed out there is no reason they wouldn't just catch up of the STL spaceships and wake them up as soon some thing better is invented
1/2
I'm building one set a century or two in the future. the idea is that players are investigating something on a colony, city, space station ect. With team based combat centered around small unit and fire team tactics.
The players could be law enforcement, mercenary detectives, colonial marines, corporate black ops, CIA in speesss ect.
The game is mostly investigative with players obtaining information through legitimate investigation, or shit like kidnapping/torturing suspects depending on the player characters mission, background and play style ie. A group playing as local cops have legitimate authority and might get a warrant and legally detain a suspected drug dealer to search his house, and question him about this contacts. While the PMC or black ops style, undercover, player groups will break into his house and torture the suspect for info before BLAM!!ing him upon giving them what they want to hear. investigative stages are broken up by combat. Right now just firefights but I may write space combat rules later. combat would be initiated either through raids, when the players initiate combat against a hub of enemy activity, like A cartel drug lab, or BBEG's secret lair. There are also ambushes; where the enemies attack the players in an attempt to hat the investigation. This is where team build is important, teams built of players with Legitimate authority such as military or law enforcement are prone to ambushes as they may be uniformed personnel walking around asking questions but may be able to call in backup, while undercover teams are less likely to be ambushed if they don't get found out, but are on their own more often.
>>45581714
To further expand aliens treat humans like they are the kittens of the galaxy. Humans hate it. Humans have to disguise themselves from being stereotyped as cute harmless creatures.
Obviously a crack setting.
>>45570541
My TL 13 Traveller setting is loosely based off of the Silk-road region in the aftermath of the collapse of the Mongol Empire & the Great Game. The old Imperium was devastated by a three fold apocalypse. Rising tension led to a devastating 457 year, 300-way civil war sparked by Europa being flash-melted after an actually successful worker revolt. A nanoplague unleashed by hardcore neo-Leninists devastated the human population by 100 billion. The straw that broke the Imperiums back was the awakening of ancient alien conqueror-machines that ravaged known space for fifty years before retreating behind a wall of grav-disruptors and dissapeared. The space behind that wall has remained unclaimed, until ten years ago, when the first grav disruptors ceased functioning. The three empire that rose out of the Old Imperium's corpse squabble and fight over the space behind the curtain. The struggle for this space is currently split between the Ubihramian Papacy (Byzantium-equivalents that practices a hybrid of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and an Icy version of Shai-Hulud worship, culturally are Germano-Turkic), the Kingdom of Fuizhov (Arab merchant-equivalents with a very formidable navy and merchant marine, organised similarily to feudal Europe, who are descended from joint Chinese and Neo Soviet colonies) and the Sol-Centauri Imperium (The remnant of the old empire, slowly decaying and riven with civil unrest, but still somewhat powerful, fulfilling the role of China under Mongol Rule).
Pic related is the starmap. The hash marks designate areas were still dormant conqueror are predicted to exist.
>>45586942
2/2
the combat system is whats unique. The GM would have a few simple hand or computer drawn top down maps of the area with cover, concealment, and items of note being highlighted, making sure to only show only parts of the map that would be visible to the PCs. For example in a firefight in a warehouse the players would only see 1/4 of the map as the rest is beyond line of sight. They could reveal the whole map by deploying a drone or having a player climb up for a better view. Combat would be based around fire and maneuver, with each side trying to suppress the other's movement while moving into a more advantageous position to close within and kill the opposing team. For example you could have a team of four with a machine gunner, a marksman, a rifleman, and a grenadier. When combat starts, each player can do one move per turn unless they have high agility or certain perks/traits. The machine gunner uses his turn to lay down an arc of fire forcing the opponents into cover behind a pile of crates, the grenadier launches a few sticky grenades behind the opponents in an attempt to cut of their escape route while the marksman and rifleman spend the turn climbing to a better position and swing around to the left in a flanking maneuver respectfully. The enemies get a turn to either shoot, move or prep explosives/equipment, until one side is defeated or retreats. I'm still fleshing out the finer points of combat but basically its smarter to move to a better position or fall back to draw the enemy into a prepared ambush or trap like a kill zone set up for the teams sniper, a well mined corridor. I also am working in combat tech skills like hacking the sprinkler/fire foam system, or using drones/nanobot swarms in combat, as both an intel gathering and active combat role like a sniper drone or a mine layer drone. the nanobot swarms could be used to move stuff like a form of telekinesis and change the environment and move cover forward for other players.
>>45570896
That's not space anything, that's just standard fantasy.
>>45587523
See, that's what I was afraid of. Glad I posted the nutshell version, and I'm glad nobody hazed me for it.
>>45587523
Look at the OP in this thread.
Tell me where you see the word "space".
>>45587094
Shit, wrong map. Ignore the hash marks comment
OP, you should have made a word-limit for the responses.
It's really fun to do Q&A about your setting with a word allowance, like that one time. A very helpful exercise.
So far 40 page document. 5e D&D scifi conversion with Elemental Evil races included.
Each race giving one or more homeworlds but have formed a galactical congress and there are many space stations as well.
Multiple planes removed, magical plane is left and given many of their properties but is not traversable by physical entities.
Technology is based on physical, magical or biological machinery.
Space travel is pretty fast.
Civilized space about 1/3 the overall spiral shaped galaxy.
9 ship classes with combat and upgrade system included.
Gods dont appear to be real but praying and pulling from the magical plane in large groups/some times individually with a singular motive appears to manifest godlike happenstances. Some sort of floating disorganized consciousnesses in the magical plane manifest themselves in weird ways
Sandbox play, overarching lore is just basically wars between elves and dwarves and the rest of the races coming into the alliance/fold as they finally reach the stars one by one.
>>45570541
Furry Space Opera
>>45570541
I have three that I am working on.
One is space fantasy-esque that focuses on the Sol System maybe two million years into the future. Major civilizations have risen and fallen, technology is so advanced that many of its effects can be mistaken for magic, much history has been lost and humanity is just as fractured and crazy as ever. Heavily inspired by Warframe, Destiny, and Numenera.
The next is something called Earthless. Earth has been destroyed in a big war, and we're spread out and heavily reliant on technology and battlesuits as they run around in migrant fleets--or run around by themselves--as mercenaries in a galaxy that fears how warlike they were. We've added a ton of aliens from a lot of franchises we like, with some fluff changes to make them all work together in the same galaxy. It's very space-opera, with humanity taking their major inspirations from Tribes Ascend and a few other things.
The last is a more cyberpunk-based 'verse that focuses on a single arm of our galaxy and a few super-clusters that I am making up. It's a bit space-opera lite, with psionics and only a couple aliens, with lots of warfare. Taken some thematic--though not mechanical or heavy factional--inspiration from EVE Online (no immortals, but a portion of society that rests upon a foundation of the death of millions of others: life is cheap) and Shadowrun (psionics replace magic).
I use each depending on what my players would want. The first is for lots of mystery and exploration and discovery, as I can basically add whatever I want wherever I want. Keeping things close to the Sol System keeps things familiar and fun while adding a layer of mystery. How much have we done to our own system in a couple million years? The second is for blatant space opera shit. Lots of massive 40k-scale wars and species interaction. Galaxy-at-risk level shit. The last is for cyberpunk shenanigans with a higher level of worldbuilding freedom and some opportunity for space opera stuff.
>>45570541
its a 1-1copy/paste of the comic, Prophet, by Image.
>>45570541
As in system, or as in setting?
'Cause as far as system goes, it's basically a slightly modified Song of Swords/Ballad of the Laser Whales.
>>45570541
>There was a war. No one knows the details. The clans and tribes who started it are less than legend; some say they stretched for hundreds, thousands of miles and commanded the lives of millions. But they are all gone now. All that remains are the gods they built and killed, and the relics they left behind.
>The soil is burnt, the air is cursed, and crops grow badly
>Prophets decipher the scrambled words of a disconnected logic god. It needs to tell them something; if only He could be brought online...
>Caustic aether render swathes of land uninhabitable for anyone but the most determined of scavengers...
>The Bright Men wander the land as spirits, claiming to be fallen gods
>Men are driven to tech-banditry to survive -- they scavenge for scrap one day, and fight to the death to keep it another
>Huge castles scream through the skies, their immortal pilots still set to war-time orders
>Vast gouges tear the earth in zig-zag lines, filled with all the best tech -- and a thousand dead soldiers ready to be awoken at your slightest mistake
>Ancient demons from the worst parts of the war still wander the land, broken and half-mad.
>New states are rising from the dust, built on jerry-rigged tech from before the war.
Anyone know if there's a Treasure Planet RPG somewhere? Not exactly sci-fi but man I want to be a pirate corsair cruising the (sky)high seas with my alien mateys.
>>45570541
It's a shitty BattleTech ripoff involving a three-way war where Space /pol/ is being invaded by Space SJWs and Space /d/ and the Space SJWs' super-advanced robots regularly kick the asses of Space /pol/'s robots and Space /d/'s hentai monsters at every turn.
>>45592996
This sounds really cool.
>>45594643
And this sounds oddly fun.
I've never done it....but ehhhh if I did it would probably be some weird amalgamation of Brood Wars + Voltron + He-Man or something.
>>45570541
bump. Some of these are cool and sci-fi is underappreciated in the /tg/ circles I run in. Everyone wants fantasy.
