On November 6th 2022, I participated in a megagame called Den of Wolves. A megagame is a live roleplaying game where in this case 43 players got together to play a game where a ragtag fleet had to escape the onslaught of the Wolf fleet. Den of Wolves is definitively inspired by Battlestar Galactica, where one outdated warship is tasked with defending the remnants of mankind, in the form of a ragtag fleet,  and finding the path to Earth.  The Fleet in Battlestar Galactica. (Image by NBCUniversal, fair use)

Previously I have talked about sci-fi dungeon crawls and how technology affects it. I mentioned in passing to draw inspiration from Immersive Sims, which is a genre of video games that try to present levels with interactive systems. What I want to do with this blog-post is to set the stage for discussing the design of sci-fi locations for roleplaying games. I will make up some terms, keep it system agnostic, and provide some perspectives that will hopefully be useful to you. The first three types of locations I want to bring attention to are spaceships , space stations , and surface bases . Generally, these types of locations feature complicated systems, ranging from power plants to security systems. These types of locations are inhabited, so it becomes important to also show that aspect of it. That could mean putting in a toilet and bunk beds, but it could also mean thinking about how daily life on the location works. How do people get from their beds to work? How do people pass the ...

We played the third session of Revenant’s Sector, a sci-fi sandbox campaign using the Revenant’s Hack . The characters are: Malik Zhao, a part-time ecology enthusiast.  Silas Nowak, generous bar patron.  Terry Browning, Guiney-monkey wrangler.  In the last session , they finally arrived on Taphos. With a mission to recover the Raker , the crew had decided to acquire firearms and meet up with a contact they made on the way.  Hanging around in Nara’s Outpost  The session resumed outside the general store. They had more than an hour to pass, so they decided to explore the surroundings of the outpost. Malik was curious about the ecology on Taphos, so he decided to examine the grass-like lifeforms there. To his surprise, he noticed that the “grass” was mobile, capable of retracting its tri-fork stem from the ground. They also came across younger fern trees, which were coiled up and preparing to bloom.  Back at Ryuma’s (the bar), they met with Tobias Alcantar. Th...

  We played the second session of Revenant’s Hack in the sci-fi sandbox . The characters are: Malik Zhao, script-slinger extraordinaire.  Silas Nowak, pilot and shady person.  Terry Browning, a get-away driver without a car. 

This week I got to playtest Revenant’s Hack in the sci-fi sandbox I am developing . I was joined by three players from the Free Kriegsspiel Roleplaying discord. Here is a brief recap of the events that took place. Character creation Character creation went fast for all players involved. There isn’t that much to do in Revenant’s Hack besides distributing 2 points over 3 stats. However, I also tested out a skill list which they got to distribute 4 points over. Besides the stats, I also asked them “Why did you die and wake up in a cryogenics correctional facility?” which sparked a brainstorm about why these characters were in their predicament.  It turns out that Terry died in a car crash, allegedly escaping from law enforcement. Silas apparently shot Malik, but it was unclear why this happened. Discovering their past becomes a mystery that they would like to uncover, but due to their cyberbrains being installed in new bodies, their memories are vague and unreliable.  In the co...

Last week, I made the case for writing adventures, not systems . This week, I decided to follow my own advice and continue the preparation for my sci-fi sandbox. I’ve posted before about the most important NPC in your sandbox , but I haven’t addressed the sandbox itself. So this is the entry in which I start the work on a sandbox!  Behold, the Revenant Sector! The black dots are solar systems without descriptions.

  Despite there being a lot of dungeons out there, very few of them are meant to be played with a sci-fi ruleset like Traveller or Stars Without Number. There are a number of assumptions that go out the window with the tech levels in question. In this post, I will discuss some thoughts that appeared in the #workshop channel on the OSR Discord. If you want in on this discussion, join us over at the #sci-fi-scrapyard and talk shop. Link: https://discord.gg/PRg3RWJ

I’ll be upfront - it’s about the spaceship your PCs call home. If you run a sci-fi OSR game with a spaceship like the Millennium Falcon , the Serenity, or the Rocinante , then chances are your PCs consider it a mobile home.  Having floor plans for the spaceship is great. It gives your players a sense of the vessel. Add to that, letting them “move in” by assigning crew quarters is also great for immersion and roleplaying. But as a referee, you can also go ahead and give the spaceship a sense of character .  The Raker was real fast, but its coffee machine kept breaking apart.

 How to get from A to B - interstellar edition. This post is meant to be a small write up about various sci-fi technologies that enable interstellar travel and how they influence a sci-fi campaign.