- the current campaign’s episodic/story arc structure seems to work well
- party should have access to a ship, not be stuck on a station or planet
- a mix of aliens is okay
- posthuman/transhuman elements are worth a look.
I was recommended to watch Dark Matter (party wakes up on a spaceship with no memories, the ship has a cargo of weapons and some locked doors) and the Expanse (for a greater dose of realism in space). My recommended reading to my players was Altered Carbon (FTL is only possible via uploaded minds, central protagonist is an Envoy, a type of troubleshooter trained to use whatever tools are available to solve problems). Other media recommendations are most welcome. The title of the post is from a line in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. My current go to place for insight on spaceships and SF tropes is the Atomic Rockets website.

Art from Starvation Cheap by Sine Nomine Publishing
System
- Bulldogs! (Fate based courier missions/salvage teams)
- Mindjammer (Traveller based agents for the Culture-like Commonality in a universe where thousands of years of STL colonisation happened, and FTL is only a few centuries old)
- Coriolis (Firefly meets Arabian nights, with mysticism in the dark voids of space)
- SF ports of Blades in the Dark (Apocalypse World derived system that is probably the most mind bending system I have read in the last year or two)
- Firefly (Cortex+ dice pool system)
- Edge of Empire (Star Wars dice pool system)
- Stars Without Number (old D&D in space)
- Strontium Dog (Traveller, focus on mutations and bounty hunting)
- Nova Praxis (Fate)
- Cepheus (OSR Traveller clone)
- Fading Suns (D20 decadent nobles in a declining empire)
- Rocket Age (retro 30s pulp)
- Eldritch Skies (Savage Worlds, near future with Cthulhu)
- Numenera (Cypher D20 system)
- Night Witches (okay its a WWII game powered by the Apoclaypse, but on reading it I thought its completely adaptable to a SF game where everyone is a fighter pilot on the losing side of the Great Patriotic Space War)
- Ashen Stars (Gumshoe variant, good for investigations)
- Fragged Empire (creatures created by humans after humanity’s fall)
- Polaris (a French game, looks blue)
- Corvus Belli Infinity (a 2d20 roll under Target Number game , so I have some familiarity with that from Conan, and its going to be used for the John Carter of Mars game as well).
- Earth colonised by aliens, like the British Raj, there has been some uplift, but much of the alien ways remain incomprehensible
- At least one group of aliens has mucked around with humans and enabled psionic powers (its a way to establish character exceptionalism), and the concept of a psionic gestalt could provide another reason for why the PCs are in a party together
- Several powerful alien races, and an ongoing cold war, and humans can be clients to various alien patrons, so there is background tension, espionage, boundaries that are forbidden to cross, Casablanca zones, and no one wants a war to break out with dinosaur killer level kinetic weapons
- FTL: entry into FTL space is easy, the hard part is getting out again – you need to home in on a beacon signal or specific type of variable star signature, before the heat build up inside your ship kills you.
- The characters are specialists in dealing with colony worlds where the beacons go dark, so they have a good ship and a job that gets them into trouble. They also have a license that keeps all of their high tech equipment functional, but if they go dark themselves, then it all stops working four weeks later when it realises it has not received the latest security update.
- Exploration and colonisation of the Solar System
- World War III
- Interstellar exploration and colonisation
- First contact with aliens
- The cycle of empires
- The final empire
- Humanity’s final fate (these days its likely to be some kind of singularity ascendance, in the old days it was white togas and flared shoulders for everybody).
- Present day – human princes feud among themselves, while in the background the planet begins to burn from climate change
- First contact – aliens become involved in trade with Earth, and by “divide and rule” tactics quickly establish permanent outposts
- Alien influence grows as governments outsource their core functions in exchange for trinkets and longevity
- Alien influence consolidated in corporate governance that effectively controls all taxation on most of Earth
- Human rebellion/mutiny against their alien corporate overlords is quashed
- The real alien government turns up and implements direct rule, while still trying to help the poor primitive apes to ascend the ladder of civilisation
- The Great Big Space War – humans have a choice, help their alien overlords, passive resistance, or active rebellion.
- Independence?
- spy stories are about tension, in particular, they are about middle class apprehensions, the current threats to personal comfort
- part of the tension comes from familiarity with the world – and SF worlds will inherently be unfamiliar (even if they do adopt the Consensus Cosmogony)
- there are two strategies for coping with this:
- stress glamorous, exotic locales, so in SF, ham up the alien and the weird
- focus on quotidian elements, so in SF, keep it human and current tech
- using technological Macguffins leads you into Technothriller territory (which tend to be more black/white morality than the grey quotidian novels which draw on the threat of betrayal to ramp up tension)
- in speculative fiction, “while the underlying themes may get representation in the narrative’s plot, it is harder to overlay those themes onto our real world because their relationship to our world is more oblique”
- social inequality
- automation
- 3-D printing
- the shared economy
- trading, aka spreadsheets in space
- movement between points in space, is it routine or risky
- fine tuning gear, aka more spreadsheets in space
- relationships between characters, love and hate in a tin can
- character archetypes – broad roles and competencies
- character skills – specific competencies, less niche protection
- old school character attributes (strength, charisma etc)
- character values – passions, drives, triggers.
I asked my players what they preferred to do in games. For the most part my campaigns have been old school (there have been dungeons, monsters and loot) with the addition of lots of social action with NPCs and grey morality – hopefully giving the players meaningful choices about who their friends and enemies are, and whether they are heroes or “the baddies”. I am still thinking a lot about what the core character activities in a Cold War in Space game should be.