I'm trying to come up with some random travel events for my retro sci-fi game. Just things that could happen during travel time to spice things up a bit.
I'd like a variety of tables for different types of events.
Right now I'm thinking "shipboard events", "stellar anomaly", New planet, and "Encounter"
So far for Shipbaord events I have:
- Space Sickness!
- Fight among the crew
- Broken equipment
- Stow-away!
- Infestation!
More ideas are always welcome, as developed or not as you please :)
Stellar Anomaly
1.Debris cloud. Ship takes 10d6 damage passing through.
2.Cosmic radiation! Crew members must make HT rolls or suffer minor radiation poisoning.
3.Astroid belt. Piloting checks at -2 to navigate. Failure indicates damage.
4.Nebula. Sensors limited -4. Pilot -2.
5.Nebula. Weapon ranges and Nega Barrier DR reduced by half.*
6.Worm-hole! Pilot! -4 to avoid being sucked in and transported to a random location.
Space Madness!
For no apparent reason, one of the psychologically stable stalwart crewmembers goes nuts! Expect a bloody killing spree and lots of property damage!
New Planets
1. Brasila: At the center of a planetwide jungle exists a fountain of youth question is who kills you first, your fellow explorers or the planet itself ....
2. The Toymaster Planet: Everything is possible if you're a stockholder, luckily if you have a bit of money you can buy some stocks and everything is on the stock exchange and the stock exchange never closes ....
3. Eden: Yes, this planet is the Garden of Eden problem is it's actually an sentient being who has the understanding of an 11 year old girl. A girl with a crush on at least one person in a party that happens to land on her .....just don't call her Eden because her name is Jorune.
You wake up from cold sleep to find the rest of the crew missing. Some girl is sitting in the captain's chair on the bridge. She has no eyes.
**** SPOILER ***** GM ONLY *******
You are dreaming. The effect is caused by a either a chem malfunction in your sleep couch or because of direct tampering by a crewmember.
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;547502You wake up from cold sleep to find the rest of the crew missing. Some girl is sitting in the captain's chair on the bridge. She has no eyes.
**** SPOILER ***** GM ONLY *******
You are dreaming. The effect is caused by a either a chem malfunction in your sleep couch or because of direct tampering by a crewmember.
Shipboard Event:
You wake up from coldsleep on a generational deep space world ship. The ship drive reactor is reaching critical mass the people you meet except for 2 others are insane and physically changed because of deepspace sickness or maybe deep-sea sickness .....which is it? Is it real or a dream or some of both as you further investigate.
"Alien" encounter
1. Merchant freighter
2. Pirates!
3. Distress signal
4. Orion Corporation ship.
5. Red Collective warship.
6. Pleasure yacht
00 Everything's Normal
01-99 The ship explodes
My campaigns are a bit more lethal than the norm. See also, "Rocks fall, everyone dies!", my copyrighted IRC game.
Your crew is suffering from headaches while onboard in deep space. One of the containers in the hold is giving off an electrical interference of some kind. One of the crew dies while operating the forklift to bring the crate down. A witness says they heard him screaming in pain. Then the crate hit the deck and its lid busted open. The witness' nose starts to bleed and they fall to the floor.
******** SPOILER ***********
Inside the crate is a robot in packing material. It is psionic and is malfunctioning.
Quote from: StormBringer;54750900 Everything's Normal
01-99 The ship explodes
My campaigns are a bit more lethal than the norm. See also, "Rocks fall, everyone dies!", my copyrighted IRC game.
You aren't the Bringer of Chaos for nothing, luckily I'm a cat and Mage. We like Chaos. :)
@Piestro, are those new parameters? Either way, this thread and the other one are such fun. I'm glad you came back. Also it's neat if someone uses my ideas since I can't currently. Real Life is trying to crush me. I'm trying my best to flip it the bird.:)
Quote from: Marleycat;547514@Piestro, are those new parameters? Either way, this thread and the other one are such fun. I'm glad you came back. Also it's neat if someone uses my ideas since I can't currently. Real Life is trying to crush me. I'm trying my best to flip it the bird.:)
I can't promise that I'll use everything but I can say that nearly everything that's been posted has found a home in my notes so far :)
I also need some "weird" things that can happen when the players fly through certain stellar features on the map.
Quote from: Piestrio;547529I also need some "weird" things that can happen when the players fly through certain stellar features on the map.
What are the stellar features?
(I'm assuming that you want this "soft" science fiction, right?)
Quote from: jeff37923;547531What are the stellar features?
(I'm assuming that you want this "soft" science fiction, right?)
Oh very much so, I'm going for a Forbidden Planet/Buck Rodgers/Lensman feel.
I haven't decided the exact nature of the features yet, some kind of special nebula I imagine.
In the game they basically serve as the major terrain feature on the map. Something to give the players more decisions to make (given the way I have FTL travel set up "going around" is more resource intensive.)
Crossing into/through the stellar barrier... a crewmember, eyeing their screen, notices something odd. Not sure what to make of it, he says nothing to the crew and wonders if anyone else has noticed what is happening.
******* SPOILER ************
The date stamp on the ship's computer has reset to the start time of the Big Bang. The time of the beginning of the Universe itself! A being made up of what appears to be pure energy is standing next to the captain. She and the other crewmembers do not see it. The crewmember sitting quitely, not saying anything, slowly pulls a small (what looks to be a) media player from his jacket and turns it on. He is able to see and record the being with his device. The being immediately runs over to the crewmember and electrocutes him where he sits. Then vanishes just as he appeared. The captain and the others didn't see anything or know what happened to the crewmember or how. The media player is partially melted, but can be repaired or its data can be transfered. There is other data on the device that the GM can make up for the crew to discover about their "mission".
The crewmember had been paid off to gather info and report back to his buyers.
Solar Flare!
The sun vomits up a huge volume of plasma and twisted magnetic fields which catch our intrepid heroes by surprise, knocking out all of the navigational systems (and anything else you want to be effected by EMP). Our heroes are flying blind!
The only way to navigate is by sextant, constellations, and an idea of where the plane of the ecliptic is! (Before you frown at this, it was done before in one of Clarke's short stories. So its retro.)
EDIT: I just remembered that their Electronic Brain was also fried in the story so they did all the needed calculations by abacus, which were built in the handy ship's machine shop.
The ship is transporting a evil serial killer to a maximum security prison. During a hyperspace transit the ship is attacked by hyperspace demons or creatures that attack the minds of those awake and the crew have to drop out of hyperspace in an emergency - leaving them in a random place far from home.
They have to go back in to hyperspace to return home, the trouble is everyone will have to be in deep sleep but someone has to do the necessary functions to send the ship through hyperspace as it's not automated for safety.
For some reason the serial killer's mind was not attacked, he/she is missing the part of their mind that would make them susceptible. The only way home is to let them pilot the ship...whilst the crew sleep
Man, I wished you'd asked a year ago. I've no idea where my first Derelict Delvers draft with all this stuff is at the moment.
Every 100 years a rift opens in a sector bordering human controlled space and the Xixi an alien rival but this time the first manned ship sent into the rift 7 years ago returns empty but with evidence of something horrific and unexplained by any normal scientific explanation. The Xixi are on alert because they assume humanity has come up with a weapon they're unable to defend against.
That cargo you picked up on spec from the gypsy steamer for transfer to the mining colonies just started making a funny beeping noise. Upon investigation it is revealed to be several kilos of antimatter in a jury-rigged containment vessel, which you recognise as being not dissimilar to the one ComFedSec blew up a space station trying to recover a couple of weeks back, with the loss of scores of lives.
And hey, was that a screw that just popped out the side?
---
The Dragarian Geocentrist mindwipers have been up to their old tricks, except instead of shanghai-ing innocent tourists from Plethora's purple beaches and turning them into genocidal zealots, this time they've gone and done it to your ship's AI. Unplug the droids!
---
The ablative hull plating you were sold to keep the ravages of the Mist (stellar feature?) at bay appears to have been diluted with substandard alloys.
---
A mini-nova blows out a large section of space, sending gaseous vapours flying hither and yon, revealing a previously unknown dead system of planetoids, all now scurrying randomly across space, containing hidden treasures from an ancient race of extinct aliens. Technological secrets, cultural artifacts, dangers, horrors and mysteries await those bold enough to join the scramble to explore them.
Alien spores tromped in on the boots of a stalwart crew member appear to have taken quite the liking to the ship's memory crystals.
---
Space pirates no longer use dramatic stalk and strike tactics, instead they disable a crewman in a rough port and insert one of their own as a replacement. The saboteur works from within to sow dissent, before finally staging a mutiny. Or cuts the fuel lines, whichever is handier.
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Hypervelocity needledust from a conflict millennia old whips through important sections of the hull. Sir Isaac Newton is indeed the baddest motherfucker in space.
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Zombie-creating nanobots have somehow infested the ships medbay.
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Your ship enters a mysterious gravitational anomaly some have dubbed "the dragon's coil", that appears at random for no good reason. What this does is send the ship into a literal spiral, like a gravitational slingshot around an invisible, infinitely long trail which may be a condensed dark matter formation. Before too long, the ship will rupture from the centrifugal forces, unless a means can be found to escape.
Players are encouraged to talk like their faces are being pulled off in a centrifuge.
Whispers in the dark: the ship's resident ham makes a hobby of collecting decades-old transmissions from ships and crews long gone as they make their way across the lightless void, translating and decrypting them. This time however he runs in excitedly clutching a print of something new.
---
You've accidentally wandered into a dead zone, where small scale electronics no longer work due to a quirk in the local laws of physics.
The group decides they want to deposit some of their earnings, gained after a recent adventure, in a high interest savings account. Locating the one with by far the best rates, the group sets off, but upon entering the system they discover they are being attacked by increasingly determined aggressors. Apparently someone deposited a small sum as a bounty on their heads in the banking system four hundred years ago.
This may lead to a discovery as to how the system banks can offer such attractive rates.
---
The tattoo a crew member got on the last shore leave turns out to have a viral component.
Your crew finds a ship that is adrift and boards it. On it they find humanoids (the crew and some passengers it would seem) that appear to be in suspended animation in their pods. The control consoles for them are too alien to figure out. The ship's interior looks way far advanced compared to your own ship.
****** SPOILER (maybe) **********
The humanoids are not in suspended animation. They are not cryo frozen. They are in stasis fields. Time has completely stopped for them. Further examination will reveal that they all show brain activity. As if they are dreaming, or thinking. But they can't move.
These are beings that come from a universe that has no time. They have no concept of time. Yet their active minds would make your crew think otherwise. The aliens are fine as long as their stasis fields remain on... always. They can't survive for just one wink of an eye or less of time.