The Hierarchy of Science Fiction RPGs by Discovery and Exploration

Like D&D and other fantasy games, science fiction games have their own hierarchy as well. Unlike fantasy, there is no single SF game that casts a long shadow over the rest of the genre, and for purposes of this overview we are only looking at actual SF games which encompass space travel, visiting other worlds, and exploration of the future of humanity and/or it's dominion of space. Sorry post-apoc games, you'll get your own post soon!

The hierarchy of SF games doesn't suffer under the presence of Traveller, despite the ubiquity of the first truly authentic SF game on the market. Rather, SF RPGs tend to reflect a style focus. Rather than try to identify the style in context of subgenres (space opera, hard SF, soft SF, exploration, war, etc.) I wanted to identify how game systems tend to focus their rules on types of play, creating distinctly different narrative/game experiences through the discovery and exploration mechanics.

For example: you are actively encouraged to role up new worlds and explore new hexes on the subsector map in a Traveller game, often with very little prep from the GM, but a game with any of the many Star Wars RPGs tends to focus on specific settings and locales defined by the Star Wars universe in its various incarnations, and new worlds operate on rule of cool rather than any sort of logical design system. So with that said....here's how SF games tend to fall in the catalog of Discovery and Exploration:

1. Procedural Exploration Games

Traveller is clearly a fine example of this. You're game is focused on exploration, and the rules support a mechanism to facilitate going to places and locales without necessarily having to know what is around the corner in advance. Such systems are often very old school in feel, and they focus heavily on procedurally generated content, and may even offer settings that still nonetheless require more rolls and design to flesh out as they are explored.

Traveller is the poster child, but other OSR games such as White Star offer soft science variants on generating worlds and systems to explore. Other games which offer this approach include GURPS Space (though it definitely works better as a type 4 below), and just about any system or sourcebook with a dedicated set of charts and mechanisms to create explorable content (often even on the fly).

2. Defined Setting Games

A large number of SF RPGs fall in this category. Star Trek, Coriolis, Infinity, Cold & Dark, Fading Suns, Alternity's Star Drive, Shatterzone, Burning Empires, The Last Parsec and many more all have tightly defined universes and even if they offer some rules on procedural content generation, it's usually eclipsed by the tightly defined worlds of the campaign that are often elaborated on in great depth and design. These are games not so much about SF for its own sake, but SF of the type and flavor of the specific universes under scrutiny in the game's setting itself.

3. Rule of Cool "Experience" Games 

Most Rule of cool games actually work as defined setting games, too. The difference is that these games tend to eschew consistency of setting or scientific principles in favor of "worlds that are cool to explore." A common trait is that space exploration is easy, and most worlds you visit tend to be the kind you can survive because it's really about blasting your way in to the evil empire's secret base. Soft SF or space fantasy fits here really well. The many Star Wars RPGs, Starfinder, possibly Warhammer 40K RPGs, Hard Nova, Star Frontiers, most Savage Worlds settings (Flash Gordon and Slipstream in particular) and Firefly tend to fit this style of experience. A common trait of these games is that the world design often favors planets that may improbably have earthlike atmosphere despite being volcano worlds, or ice worlds, or "insert single terrain type here" planets. These games could be called "Pulp" Games as much as "Rule of Cool."

4. Scientifically Accurate Games

This is the most neglected corner of the experience mostly because it requires the most effort to work with. You can run games with a large enough toolbox from other categories here if they are designed to support a wide array of experiences....Traveller, for example, can be played fairly straight as a scientifically accurate game with minimal tweaking. GURPS Space is the poster child for this sort of game experience. Some games focused on near future cyberpunk and transhumanism fit here nicely, including Transhuman Space, Mindjammer, and Eclpse Phase. An irony of post-singularity games like the aforementioned titles is that they feel really "out there" yet tend to be tightly focused on logical extrapolations of a near future technological explosion in AI, transgenics and other technology that could fundamentallyc change the landscape of the future. And of course, a common trope of the scientifically accurate game is a tendency to eschew FTL drives, or to provide some sort of semi-realistic explanation for getting around it.

Dark stars XVI: Starport Curiosity-796 and Relic

14 Curiosity-796

The otherwise mundane starport of Curiosity-796 is orbiting the moon Relic, another Spacer catalog anomaly. Evidence of a prolific civilization is defied by the fact that no living sentient remains to tell a tale of what happened when their entire civilization was seemingly extinguished—or kidnapped—twenty thousand years ago. Relic is favored by tomb hunters who love the place, but colony efforts have been troubled as the moon is saturated bio and nanotech which is debilitating to humans.

Curiosity-796 is actually part of the remnants of the Human Commonwealth, the vast independent disaspora of man that was shattered when the Void Lords arrived in the Milky Way. The station is one of a handful that still function in the Netherspace Sector, and it is protected by a loose picket fleet of independent privateers handled by self-appointed Commodore Andrej Markov, who vigorously defends the stations ostensibly libertarian open-door government.

Relic proper has a large Toho Megacorp colony called Osaka-Prime. Toho has been doing extensive nanotech research on the nanoviruses at Curiosity 796, which while note related to the Von  Neuman Plague directly may provide evidence on how to quell the well-known plague virus in other systems. For this reason Curiosity 796 and Relic both have no-entry quarantine requirements for ships that may have or been in contact with the virus….fear it gets loose on Relic and mutates are too great.

Encounters/Events:

1.       The Goliani prospector Tearson who was entrusted with Cargo Hold 779’s contents by Tesla Dane

2.       Cargo Hold 779 contains the Mind Core of a Dark Star!!!! Just needs power and a body.

3.       The Chilopteroid Warlord Gadastron, brother to Chiron, is docked at the station for R and R. 

4.       Tesla Dane has enemies….and they know the ship. The Furies are the three sisters of darkness…..void knights who were turned star knights that have been hunting her; their spy, Emon Gloricam, a gray, will report the arrival of her ship and they will appear with an attack fleet in 48 hours.

5.       Port Governor Gav Tollis has news of Tesla Dane….she’s contacted him as recently as a month ago, from subsector 12, where the “missing system” of Arborea is located. Her transcript was brief: “Gav, tell them to find the idol of the Icumonitrox; they’ll find what they need there.” He assumes the crew of her former ship is the “they” she referred to.

(the following edited to avoid spoilers for my players...don't scroll over the redacted parts!)

6.       While in port, a stealthy cruiser from the Makamian Empire containing six assassins arrives, commandeered by Special Inquisitor Horus, specifically to assassinate the crew and uncover the mystery of Tesla Dane. They are here to protect the emperor from his original request to Captain Lars….as it turns out, Emperor Solvaros has been elevated by the Dark Stars and now controls dark energy as an immortal. His ascendance is what they seek to protect; they know Solvaros summoned Tesla Dane because he learned of her quest to answer the truth of the relationship between the Dark stars and the Void Lords, and they fear the answers (in truth,  Horus knows the answer: that the Dark Stars created the first Void Lords to be the original Star Knights, and that all Star Knights, given time, evolve into Void Lords….the young cull the ancient, essentially, in a never-ending war; they want the emperor to ascend and command both the Dark stars and the Void Lords!)

Dark Stars XV: Netherspace Sector Survey Report 6

This time around was spent more or less entirely in spaceport Curiosity-796, orbiting the moon called Relic, in an otherwise dead star system. Relic has evidence of a vast civilization which wiped itself out 20,000 years ago...yet another victim of the Netherspace Sector curse.

The crew in summary had the following events take place:

1. Most of the crew ran out to find ways to spend money, then realized they needed to "call home" to the empire to get their stipend and pay updated. It turns out that the spaceport, a fringe of the surviving remnants of the Human Commonwealth, has a 2:1 exchange ratio for local Commonwealth Credits (CCR) and Imperial Credits (ICR) in the PC's favor. Yay. Interstellar Communications still take days to travel so they have a wait for their credits to arrive.

2. 101010 discovered the glorious robotic emporium. I've been modding cybernetics rules to give robots more stuff to toy with, and also extended his leveling chart indefinitely....White Star needs a robust robotics supplement for robotic PCs.

3. Tamralese hatched from her chrysallis, now made of strange matter from another dimension. Recovers memories....can tell something is wrong (she can feel the elctromagnetic bonds of force holding matter together, and nothing feels "normal" enymore), tries to get a pheremone implant and poor chopshop is blown up in the process when they try to graft normal matter to her body. Boom.

4. A grumpy alien with a mysterious key to Cargo Hold 779 brings it by...he recognizes the ship, says Tesla Dane wants the key to return to the ship, and leaves. Also, an envoy from the Station Governor arrives, explaining he needs speak with the crew leader. Group sets an appointment.

5. Crew eventually spends money wisely on actual ship repairs and equipment then waits for extra funds for frivolous spending. Meanwhile heads off to check out Cargo Hold 779.

6. Along the way a trio of chilopteroids looking to collect a bounty unleash an Energy Eater on them. Fight ensues....it's a tough fight! But the group wins.

7. Group kicks chilopteroid ass.

8. Group opens cargo hold 779. They find an immense crate, almost too large to store in their own ship's hold, and lots of additional crates of ship supplies. When they discern how to open the master crate it reveals a structure of crystal, silver, gold and platinum with an immense orb at the center. Dyvinil figures out how to feed it dark energy to power it up. It's a Mind Core to a Dark Star! And there's a notebook from Tesla Dane in the crate, too....she indicates her next quest goal: find a body for the mind core, leave it on this station for safe keeping in the interim.

9. The mind core reveals it is weak, and needs a proper body and power source, but imparts some data on what it is. Apparenly the Dark Stars created the first star knights...the first ascended species imbued with the power to manipulate dark energy. Those beings eventually mutated and became the Void Lords. The new generation of the star knights was created to destroy their predecessors. This mind core was a concientous objector....it turns out that such objectors are not appreciated, and the mind core was cast out in the area of the Serpent Nebula, a fate almost akin to death. Tesla Dane found the entity and recovered it.

10. Amidst this discovery, six Special Inquisitors of the Emperor himself show up and attempt to requisition the mind core. The group is suspicious, and a fight breaks out (except Tamralese, who leaves under orders of the inquisitors and heads to their ship like a good citizen). Sam pops ALL the grenades. The group survives but it was a tough battle.

11. Group heads back to ship. They manage to get the mind core stowed in their cargo hold. There are many mysteries to be answered:
--Why did the special inquisitors of the emperor show up and act so strange?
--What does the station governor want?
--Why did the Dark Stars exile this member of their species to the Serpent Nebula?

Stay tuned for more!!!