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 ...

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.