scifi campaign thingamajig

Hey guys. I'm writing this post because well, after seeing Snarg's attempting a campaign, I felt (again) like GMing something.

What I have in mind is a military/space frontier scifi campaign using a homebrew system that should be relatively light rule-wise (I mean it this time!), and still allow for the scaling this genre sometimes asks for. I don't plan on have a huge plotline except for the one mission given at the start, and finally, it happens in it's own universe (aka not really based on any existing scifi movie/series/books, but might use elements from it).

Now, I'm not going to ask for people to setup mics or find days to be online for X hours on ventrilo. Arch ran his campaign successfully on the forums at first, so I thought it was a perfect place to do it, since we can take out time with this.

My idea is basically this:

After a long history of war and infighting, humanity unites under a single banner out of necessity, and have finally started leave the cradle that is Earth and explore space in order to survive. Great part of the humanity form the Terran Society, where the difference between military and civilians are not so clear, while the rest form smaller groups, singing their own idea of freedom, anarchy or even racial, national or theological superiority.

The Terran Society fells the need for a new fleet. This new fleet is formed by the combination of every technological advancement up to this point, imagined by the greatest scientists alive, and the best engineers around. It wouldn't be exaggeration to say that the whole fleet was thought as one single entity.

The mothership, Zenobia, was built as the central piece of the fleet and the economic and production backbone of fleet: not only it is mostly self-sufficient, it is also able to supplement the rest of the fleet with food, ammunition, energy and so on for. This is a must, as many of the other ships are much more specialized in fields, not allowing space for hydroponics and factory sections. The Zenobia is so huge that the current fleet assigned to it can successfully dock with it all at the same time, and there are still empty docks. When not in use, the dock is usually protected by huge folding doors. Many of the marines nicknamed it "The Egg" due to it's shape. And while it's not meant to be at the front lines should a battle start, it's able to defend itself with a multitude of cannons, turrets, drones and powered suits. Finally, there's are whole sections that are off-limit to 99% of the crew, the core being the main culprit.

I'll think about the rest if people show interest in this. For character placement in the setting, the main idea was the PCs can be anywhere along the chain of command, as everyone is basically part of the military for all intents and purposes. Again, there are no 'civilians' in this fleet, although most of the people's job does not involve firing weapons.

Phew... ok, I'm done. See if you guys find this interesting.

So, it's similar to Quarian communal structure except we still have a homeworld?

What about the space frontier? Couldn't there be estranged Humans trying to run criminal activity on other planets, on space colonies, etc? People must have stolen ships and resources simply to leave law-abiding society, or is it too early in the timeline for something like that? Just where exactly are we on the timeline?

Also, if they can build life-sustaining ships, does that mean that Earth was too polluted or overpopulated when Humanity was forced to start looking for solutions offworld?

Hmmm, interesting. Are you planning on using the type of system you were developing before?

Can I fly a Veritech or something similar? If so I'm up for whatever.

@Rory:
1 - I've just decided that yes, it would remind you of the Quarian society, although the law and politics would work differently. Also, there are kids and teenagers on-board the Zenobian fleet, as well as elderly people. For all intends and purposes, people are expected to live their whole lifes in the ship.
2 - It's called the space "frontier", after all, and there are enough minor factions for that kind of stuff to happen. That, and the Terran Society has only been around for about a century or so. Year is 113 TA (for Terran Awakening), that would be around 2000 in the future for us. That said, there was at least 2 times in history where the world fell into 'dark ages', and there's that time in history where a powerful nation called itself the 'magical empire', so... it's debatable just how advanced the current society really is, and if there isn't humans already living somewhere out there. Oh, no knowledge of any aliens btw.
3 - The part of humanity that joined the Terran Society launched themselves to space and never looked back, because Earth is not only polluted and overpopulated, but also stripped of natural resources to such a scale that there are colonies in all planets and great asteroids of the solar system, and they probably live better there.

@Snarg: The answer is 'kinda'. It's still based on 'conflict resolution' idea from before, but because of the scaling, I need to rethink some of the stuff.
The idea here is that macro conflicts can be solved entirely from the macro scale without all the details, but solving related problems on a smaller scale gives you a considerable bonus at the macro conflict. Yeah, I know most campaigns about anything at all work like that, but I mean it's built-in in the system, so the GM has less stuff to keep track of until the PCs try to work on it from a smaller scale.

@Kolson: Well, what do you know! A few scientists at the Awakening, the scientific vessel of the fleet, recently commissioned a new all-terrain fighter class, and they need a test pilot for the prototype.

Kolson, pilot the Mako. Take us in.

Part of the crew. Part of the ship. Part of the crew. Part of the ship.

So yeah, I'm interested, but I'm curious to see what you'll do to get PCs off the ship and exploring space. Since as you said, most people spend their whole lives on the ship. Either that, or it could become part of the story setup and some way, somehow, we all ended up on the same planet, asteroid, or derelict vessel.

It occurs to me that you wouldn't need to explore space.  A ship that size would be plenty large both in the literal sense and in the capacity for adventures to occur within.  And that's not including the fleet, which would have its own potentials.

Arch got it right in saying that there's so much space and potential in the confines of the fleet alone that I'd have to work hard to run out of stuff to do as a GM. That said, this fleet is not entirely self-sufficient, so they need to find asteroids, moons and planets to scavenge from time to time.

Now, you guys could be anywhere in the chain of command. Hell, if one of you want to be the admiral of the fleet or a important political figure, I'd allow it if I knew you could pull it out without totally screwing things up.

So there are wards, streets, housing, neighborhoods, etc?

You could set it up like the Terran Fleet is sending out probes searching for asteroids and planets of newly formed stars. Solar systems are born and die every...year? So the universe never truly runs out of resources.

And maybe a few of those probes stumble on the big reveal, or some aliens, and the government keeps it a secret. What if one of us was an operative similar to a US federal agent? Keeping secrets or stumbling upon them, and deciding how to react...or cope.

Ok, connection is being a little feisty tonight, so let's see if this works. Well, if you are reading this, it just did.

Anyways, there are wards, of course, at least in Zenobia because it's huge. No streets, but there are huge named corridors, a lot of green, a few parks, artificial lightning that emulates the sun and time of day, etc. There are a few one-seat cars, but these are for emergency by the brass. In Zenobia, you either walk in gravity-enabled areas or float when there's none. Now, there's no 'private' housing per se, and people usually live close to their home, together with your family if you are lucky enough to afford it. Oh, payment in credits is always calculated 'per work', with a fraction of it going to their retirement fund. So there are as much people that work diligently 8 hours per day as there's people that work just enough to survive as there's people that work themselves up to exhaustion in the weekends, then play for the rest of the week. Unless you are in the proper military ranks, that's it.

Another point I should have touched before is that terran technology has not reached the point where FTL travel is a good idea for anything but pure information (and you have to aim and have someone on the receiving end that know where to point their antenna at). Not only that, but the only real way to travel astronomical-significant distances are Jump Nodes. Think Mass Relays, and you get the idea, although it's not a physical object, but existing disturbances in time-space that can link their paired node by using enough energy instead, and even a jump is not instantaneous, and might take from days to even months depending on the jump node's (stream) current strength and distance between both points.

And for any other details or secret stuff... There's nothing to see here. Return to your peaceful routine, citizen. Thank you for your cooperation.

Okay. It'll be cool to see that natural phenomenon harnessed or replicated artificially, if not at the start of the campaign, then during or much later. But as far as race goes, we're all Humans? Looking forward to seeing what you'll do with character creation.

Woot. I never get to pilot things so I'm excited.

@Rory: All humans. I still need to do some writing, but soon enough, I should have enough player-safe material available so you guys can make your characters. But it's somewhat safe to say that anything you saw in a space frontier scifi series (even anime stuff) could be played, with the expected chances to fit the campaign. Off the top of my head, I can safely say no to cybernetics tho: one of the dark ages points that humanity suffered was AI-related, to the point that's the stuff you tell your children about to force them to sleep early. This version of the future is much less dependent on computers than we are today. Still use them, but there's no such thing as a 'personal' computer here.

@Kolson: thanks for the link to the Fate stuff, man. It's very interesting stuff and very open-ended, but I also feel like (based on what I read) it's a system better left for using in a chat program like ventrilo, because there's enough back and forth to make solving a scene in a forum sluggish.

That said, it has a LOT of material I can use to further simplify my own system, and solve some of the logic problems I was having with it. So, here we go man, have 4 interwebs, Kolson. You've earned them.

Ooh, that's interesting. There should definitely be a "free software/hardware" political group formed under the unified stance that computer ownership should extend to private, not just public. "Bad apples" could include people who support the idea of the return of artificial intelligence, or completely separate extremist factions who forego the political approach and go about bringing AI back in a more aggressive fashion.

"Corrupt" people in positions of political importance and/or authority could be engaging in scandalous behavior like donating to the political party(s) or activist groups, or obtaining their own personal computers.

But the use and application of advanced prosthetics is still allowed, right? The cutting edge of prosthetics today is getting pretty close to that futuristic dream. You should look that up, some pretty awesome stuff happening.

Glad I could help, man, and thanks for the interwebs and unicrons.

*insert incredibly obvious 'bad Apples' joke here*

I reserve the name "Stephen Jobs" for the campaign.

Awaiting the docs so we can dig through and starting looking at characters. I've got a couple of ideas in mind and I'll have to see if they'll fit the setting and rules system. See you later, space cowboy...

Oh you guys... lol.

Anyway, here's the system docs I'm creating at the moment (this link is comment-enabled, if you wish to do so)

I'm going to start working on the campaign-related docs now in order to speed up the character creation stuff.

How is this coming along Essoje? Is there anything you need from us?

Sorry for the late response. Now that I'm up on my feet, totally over the sudden cold weather of the past weeks and my allergies are not trying to knock me out, I'll go ahead and everyone's life easier, and make a quick and simpler version of what I had in mind initially.

I'm also going to prepare the prelude text and post it today or tomorrow, making it easier to create a character and get this thing rolling, and fill the more text-heavy information as we go.

I have finished the prelude, and am going to keep it as a google doc for now.
Here it is.
System docs here

We can start talking about creating the characters now, with me just needing to finish the system doc proper. Do read it again tho, since it has changed considerably since the last time I wrote it.

I'm gonna make an engineer. I know you're still working on fleshing out character creation, but I got a question I think shouldn't require any work.

When you say "rounded up", under Health, do you mean to the nearest even number?

I mean the nearest integer. So round up means 4 instead of 3.5, and round down meaning 3.

I was hoping to already be part of the fleet. Will that be an issue or does some time pass between this prelude and piloting the not-veritechs? I don't mind if that's the case.