I'm going to be running a game for my players soon, where they'll be exploring a derelict spaceship. The spaceship will be a dreadnought class ship. The ship was active during the fall and once it's was finished bombarding Titian's and anything else deemed a treat, it took on refuges. The ship was last seen moving away from Earth after it took on as many refuges as it could. Now it has reappear years later. So what I'm looking for is ideas for what random stuff players would find as they move about the ship. Could be old earth relics, traps, exsurgents, etc.
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What would players find on a derelict spaceship?
Tue, 2014-12-16 13:21
#1
What would players find on a derelict spaceship?
Tue, 2014-12-16 14:11
#2
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Check this out:
http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/2012/11/genre/horror/eclips...
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Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
Tue, 2014-12-16 14:19
#3
Depending on how it died, you
Depending on how it died, you might look at Dead Space for inspirations on the kind of torn-apart sections, bodies, blood, debris floating in microgravity, etc. If it got cored by projectiles, large parts of it are going to be open to hard vacuum, twisted and mangled beyond all recognition. Metal would be slagged and the whole thing would probably be tumbling all over the place, making navigating it damn hard. And that's assuming nothing causes the reactors to blow -- depending on what's fueling it, it could be a radioactive nightmare even ten years later.
If you want a more mysterious route, finding no one aboard at all would be creepy. Sort of a space-age Roanoke colony. Possibly have the players come across an impropmtu cold-storage chamber where the unfortunate crew did everything they could to preserve their biomorphs as supplies ran out, so a sterilized chamber with all these plastic-wrapped bodies, or sealed vacsuits, tethered together with whatever the crew could find while they sleeved into something else.
Prolonged isolation combined with desperation is not good for the mind, and I'd actually recommend, if the ship isn't a destroyed hulk, coming up with a few key players from the erstwhile crew and rolling to see, organically, if and how their sanity eroded. You might start seeing mutinies out of desperation, murders because of misunderstanding...hell, just drawing from the most famous example, Donner Party In SPAAAAAAAAAACE. Figuring out how, if at all, they managed to or tried to manage to entertain themselves, seeing factions arise, all that sort of thing would be a good way to tell a story. That's also where you'd find traps being set. I forget which Fallout game it was, but one had a Vault that had either deliberately been or ended up being split into two "sides" and as things got worse and worse, you started seeing dangerous traps being set for "them," which work just fine against PC groups.
Relics are...well, I want to say unlikely, but someone discovering that one of their fellow refugees smuggled something aboard when the world was ending would easily incite conflict and violence. Especially if, with all the grief and stress from the Fall, people make the leap to the conclusion that by doing so, the smuggler doomed other people to death. To really twist the knife, the relics might even be fakes or comparatively worthless now.
One final thought is the idea of a TITAN cyberwarfare AI still being aboard, dormant, having done whatever it intended with its toys...and waiting with the infinite patience of an ascendant being.
EDIT: One other consideration. If it's been missing and not spotted for ten years, there's a good chance it's gone cold. An active heat signature the side of a refugee ship would be pretty hard to miss over the course of ten years in a near-Earth-Sol orbit.
Thu, 2014-12-18 10:44
#4
Step 1: Watch "Event Horizon". Step 2: Feel Shame.
I'd like to +1 what jKaiser said; it really depends on the derelict's story.
If you want to go with the idea that TITAN-spawn got on board, then might I suggest looking at the classic thread "Your Favorite TITAN Artifact", source of the famous Buddy Brick, and most of the suggestions from "Brak Kodel and other Horrors" could be modified to fit.
Also, someone [Nonchalance Subroutines Activated!] has written up a couple of monsters which would be appropriate: the "Exenter deathbot" and the "Ungauss Exsurgent".
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In the past we've had to compensate for weaknesses, finding quick solutions that only benefit a few.
But what if we never need to feel weak or morally conflicted again?