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So I have made a RPG with one of the key goals to be immerser and emotionally provocative. What I mean is that when your characters see something that in real life would make you freak out, I want you to freak out. If spooky stuff happens I want the players to be scared. So I made a game with a simple system with a fairly gritty advanced sci-fi setting.

I left out Aliens so when the story teller decides to put them in the players will have a more realistic reaction to them.

Do you think this is a mistake and to neglect to feature aliens or common play FTL misses the fun of Sci-fi and/or space opera?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/g3ml9l3zrlm6fuz/1%20Quadrant%2003.01.16.doc?dl=0 <- Rulebook

BattleTech's been going strong for 30-ish years and has not an alien in sight*. It can work pretty well.






*Far Country was in-universe fiction!

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
BattleTech's been going strong for 30-ish years and has not an alien in sight*. It can work pretty well.

Good point well made!

Blade Runner as an RPG sounds pretty fun to me!

An in system/non-FTL SCIFI sounds fun. I can see the amount of time travelling from one place to another could cause personal issues with the characters. Sort of like the classic Ren & Stimpy episode "Space Madness"

Was Firefly FTL? I thought they were all in a single star system with multiple planets/moons. Or maybe I remember it wrong.

Anyway, there is a Firefly RPG.

 kronk wrote:
Was Firefly FTL? I thought they were all in a single star system with multiple planets/moons. Or maybe I remember it wrong.

It was a collection of stars in whole big massive mess of a system.

Anyway if you want to do SciFi without FTL, better to just set in our future earth/solar system or some werid post-exodus setup.

Given the distance between even close stars and the sheer amount of nothing interesting in between them, there are no great stories to tell about sub-light interstellar travel. Unless you wanna go full into relationship drama and dealing with boredom, or some kind of supernatural stuff. Space is seriously empty, seriously dull, and takes a seriously long time to traverse.

Imagine a story set on a boat at sea, only there are no storms, no sea monsters, no pirates and the journey takes 1000 years.

A generation ship would be a good setting for a Paranoia style game.

 Chongara wrote:

 kronk wrote:
Was Firefly FTL? I thought they were all in a single star system with multiple planets/moons. Or maybe I remember it wrong.

It was a collection of stars in whole big massive mess of a system.

Anyway if you want to do SciFi without FTL, better to just set in our future earth/solar system or some werid post-exodus setup.

Given the distance between even close stars and the sheer amount of nothing interesting in between them, there are no great stories to tell about sub-light interstellar travel. Unless you wanna go full into relationship drama and dealing with boredom, or some kind of supernatural stuff. Space is seriously empty, seriously dull, and takes a seriously long time to traverse.

Imagine a story set on a boat at sea, only there are no storms, no sea monsters, no pirates and the journey takes 1000 years.

Read Ben Bova's Exiles trilogy for an example of generations long starship travels.

While interesting, I think it would be limiting as an RPG.

 Chongara wrote:

 kronk wrote:
Was Firefly FTL? I thought they were all in a single star system with multiple planets/moons. Or maybe I remember it wrong.

It was a collection of stars in whole big massive mess of a system.

Anyway if you want to do SciFi without FTL, better to just set in our future earth/solar system or some werid post-exodus setup.

Given the distance between even close stars and the sheer amount of nothing interesting in between them, there are no great stories to tell about sub-light interstellar travel. Unless you wanna go full into relationship drama and dealing with boredom, or some kind of supernatural stuff. Space is seriously empty, seriously dull, and takes a seriously long time to traverse.

Imagine a story set on a boat at sea, only there are no storms, no sea monsters, no pirates and the journey takes 1000 years.

How about this, that the crew is on a huge cryo ark to a new system. It will take 1000 years to get there and there is a 100 complete crews in cryo sleep. Every 10 years a new crew is awaken to replace the old current one. We are not talking like 10 people but enough for a small community. So there would be mutinies, accidents, people going psychopathic, etc... You know all the worst parts of humanity all with the same mission to get the 100000 colonists to their new home.

Just imagine a security detail coming around and finding a dead crew member missing his liver and there is a empty can of beans and a broken bottle of wine.

Check out Eclipse Phase. While it technically has FTL (the Pandora Gates), nobody knows how they work and the single alien race encountered is incredibly alien (sentient slime molds is the best description) and seems to be rather paranoid about the mere existence of the Gates, let alone their use.

 Pipboy101 wrote:

 Chongara wrote:

 kronk wrote:
Was Firefly FTL? I thought they were all in a single star system with multiple planets/moons. Or maybe I remember it wrong.

It was a collection of stars in whole big massive mess of a system.

Anyway if you want to do SciFi without FTL, better to just set in our future earth/solar system or some werid post-exodus setup.

Given the distance between even close stars and the sheer amount of nothing interesting in between them, there are no great stories to tell about sub-light interstellar travel. Unless you wanna go full into relationship drama and dealing with boredom, or some kind of supernatural stuff. Space is seriously empty, seriously dull, and takes a seriously long time to traverse.

Imagine a story set on a boat at sea, only there are no storms, no sea monsters, no pirates and the journey takes 1000 years.

How about this, that the crew is on a huge cryo ark to a new system. It will take 1000 years to get there and there is a 100 complete crews in cryo sleep. Every 10 years a new crew is awaken to replace the old current one. We are not talking like 10 people but enough for a small community. So there would be mutinies, accidents, people going psychopathic, etc... You know all the worst parts of humanity all with the same mission to get the 100000 colonists to their new home.

Just imagine a security detail coming around and finding a dead crew member missing his liver and there is a empty can of beans and a broken bottle of wine.

That's fine but there's nothing about that particularly unique or driven by the whole space travel thing. You'd get the exact same story if you set it it locked in an underground bunker with some secret mission, or an arctic science base in the winter. I guess I should clarify it's not that you can't tell any interesting stories stuck on a ship in the middle of space, it's just you can't tell any interesting stories about being stuck on a ship in the middle of space. At best, it's an excuse to have some small population of people locked in close quarters with each other. It's fine as window dressing but that's all it's really going to be.

 Chongara wrote:

 kronk wrote:
Was Firefly FTL? I thought they were all in a single star system with multiple planets/moons. Or maybe I remember it wrong.

It was a collection of stars in whole big massive mess of a system.

Anyway if you want to do SciFi without FTL, better to just set in our future earth/solar system or some werid post-exodus setup.

Given the distance between even close stars and the sheer amount of nothing interesting in between them, there are no great stories to tell about sub-light interstellar travel. Unless you wanna go full into relationship drama and dealing with boredom, or some kind of supernatural stuff. Space is seriously empty, seriously dull, and takes a seriously long time to traverse.

Imagine a story set on a boat at sea, only there are no storms, no sea monsters, no pirates and the journey takes 1000 years.

Alastair Reynolds would take exception to that. His Revelation Space series is "big space opera" with no FTL (but it does have aliens). In fact, a point of Chasm City is that one of the protagonists has ended up being transported to another planet by mistake, and ends up staying because she can't face getting passage back and ending up fifty years younger than her husband. In addition, the isolation of various human populations has ended up with some really weird societies.

Same with Stephen Baxter's Xeelee novels. While that does feature FTL, it takes a good long while for the humans to get hold of any. A good proportion of Ring is about the evolution of a society in a generation ship, and how it's moulded by both the lack of knowledge transfer down the generations, but also by the machinations of the mission planners.

Or, you can just do something entirely different. Iain M. Banks' Against a Dark Background is set in a star system which has plenty of interplanetary space travel, and weird cults and rayguns and the like, but no FTL. It'd make a good setting for an RPG, I think.

Lockstep by Karl Schroeder had an interesting take on non-FTL sci-fi.

While I did not like the book, his idea was that people went into a state of suspended animation to cover the travel. The planets themselves even did this as a means to conserve resources, for 30 years at a time. When they would awake, it would be for a month, and then back to sleep.

There was the Lockstep planets who all synced with each other.There was also the planets who went by their own time.
This creates an interesting dynamic since some of these planets ended up developing way differently and even genetically. So while everyone was still very much human, they appeared alien.