Creating The Setting: The Quarantine Zone

 

From time to time the need to create or heavily modify a setting becomes a thing for anyone playing a Role Playing Game. My best advice is start simple. Ask yourself a few simple questions so let’s look at what I am up to.

I decided to create a space opera type genre adventure. I spent sometime trying to decide on my rule system first, rule system is different than setting. I looked at GURPS, StarFrontiers, Traveller Mongoose 2E (along with older versions), thought about SavageWorlds, Star Trek FASA and FrontierSpace. I considered my basic idea for starting the adventure. Ultimately I choose FrontierSpace as it has pretty easy to understand rules and the players will need to learn the rules.

Now I know each of these various games have settings, what’s wrong with those settings and resources? Absolutely nothing is wrong with those settings per se but I have an adventure idea that needs a setting that is more like 1977 Traveller yet different vs say modern Traveller. The concepts in the 1977 Traveller, like FrontierSpace or old Star Frontiers is that of a dangerous Frontier. I want definitely more dangerous space and a few other holdovers from early pulp sci-fi books, magazines, movies, tv, and radio shows. This means my setting will be drawing on many resources including various space games. I began brainstorming how my adventure ideas would fit into a bigger universe the setting. 

Once I settled on a location for the adventure a moon and the fact the base was abandoned, the question became why? Why was it abandoned? What happened? Why did no one come back? I decided to barrow an idea from Star Frontiers timeline a space plague had wrecked havoc in this little corner of the ‘Verse. This then allowed me to creep things up with naturally mummified bodies around the base. This also helped explain why no one had been back for more than a few years. The Chaos created throughout the space colonies and remote locations, even government facilities had created a sort of social collapse for awhile. 

The setting will have pirates and scavengers, mercenaries, many local planetary governments (some well organised and others very chaotic), many abandoned or destroyed colonies and has suffered from warfare. Trade is difficult but occurring, the home world(s) of the various colonies are just now beginning to head back out from their core areas to reestablish contact “rescue” and assert their sovereign rights regardless of what colonies want. I want a retro sort of feel but upgraded too, so it will be fun reworking some tech ideas. This is the sort of setting the PCs awaken to, but the devastated Frontier is more diverse than the PCs could know or the various governments human or alien now trying to reconnect, investigating what happened to their colonies and track down the source of the plague that had brought an end to colonial expansion. I haven’t decided if First Contact in the human Frontier has happened.

The game will definitely start human centric and one aspect of the game will be that when the plague hit the humans had not yet “discovered” living sentient alien cultures, however they had found evidence of the existence of such cultures at least in the past. This is significant because the government of Humaniti had instituted a colony self destruct rule in case of invasion of any colony or base to prevent aliens gaining access to human technology, cobalt bombs in the centre of every old colony and base are a potential hazard.

Interstellar Communication is by ships.

Jump Routes, Beacons, Nexuses 

How the plague started? Who spread it and why?

Was First Contact made and did it go bad or good if it did? Was it actually first contact?

Why are other humans tense and afraid of the PCs? What is the background to that?

The various questions need not be answered yet as game play may effect my decisions on the background elements to the answers. This is enough to get my adventure launched, plenty of work and will give me future hooks. In addition my Space Opera Setting using FrontierSpace’s game mechanics will develop along a unique direction if the players decide they want more. I will no doubt barrow ideas from lots of different space games and settings but again I will change things as well. 

I hope this helps folks see the process and understand you don’t need to answer every question about a setting right away. In fact you should let it develop organically as needed based on the adventures and resulting role playing by players. You just need some information outlined to create the theme and feel. 

Peace and keep on rocking your RPGs