Campaign Toybox
The Story: Sometimes, life really is a crap-shoot. No matter how good the science, no matter how perfect the sensory equipment, no matter how strong the hunch, sometimes all you’ve got is a gigantic field of space with a one-in-a-million chance of finding the right co-ordinates. But finding those co-ordinates is really, really important because earth is dead. The mother of all meteors probably wiped out everything standing. The lucky ones – picked out of a world-wide lottery – got to go in the arks. Two million people in one hundred ships taking a generation-long journey to a new star system where they hope they will find a new green planet. Only they lucky few got to leave their doomed home, but even they don’t stand a chance in a million. Or they wouldn’t, except for one thing: The Lucky.
In the decade before the hit, scientists were able to locate and manipulate the gene responsible for luck. It didn't always work but with careful experiments they were able to produce a small group of people who were the luckiest people in the world. Amazingly, each of them picked the same destination for the fleet, and these gifted wunderkind were chosen to lead the human race to its brave new destiny. However, that was a long time ago, and the first Lucky have passed their powers - somewhat adjusted - to their children and they to their children. Now the journey seems to stretch on into eternity, the grand leaders are gone, and dark, horrible shadows seem to flit by the windows. The new generation wonders aloud about all the old beliefs, most especially the oldest of them all: are they the lucky ones, or did the lucky ones stay behind and die?
Style and Structure: Obviously, the goal here is to do a Battlestar Galactica type series only without having to make up too much alien backstory (or drowing yourself in some grand robotic agenda). You can adjust the size of the fleet and the time of the journey to however much work you'd like to do, and keep whatever aliens or enemies that lurk in space undeveloped until you need them. Likewise, the introduction of the Lucky is a helpful little macguffin that you can use to justify whatever level of superpowers you want in the game. It can even be used to justify totally mundane character abilities, giving them a whole new look and feel. A crack sniper is different from someone who blindfolds themselves and shoots randomly, even if mechanically they both just roll under the same target number. You can also tweak the nobs on how much respect the Lucky get to change how gritty or heroic your campaign feels.
The Luck powers can be difficult to adjudicate: much like psychic powers, nothing kills a mystery faster than people being able to just guess who did it and be always right. The generational factor means you can tone down luck being this reliable, and simply use it to explain general heroism. On the other hand, mysteries with new rules can be fun: you could go the Colombo rule and have the players know who did it, but then have to prove it, or you could imagine a society where a small subsection of the population can point at someone and declare them guilty, and have their word taken as the gospel truth.
PCs and NPCs: As discussed, it depends where you set the dials on this one in terms of power level, but the basic set up nicely places the PCs in the zone most suitable for storytelling. Their powers make them able to do things beyond reality, but remain mysterious and unreliable enough to not allow them to do whatever they like. Likewise, as children of the powerful Lucky, they have a fair bit of autonomy to do whatever they like, but the daily grind of an even slightly-realistic space flight means they will have plenty of duties and restrictions. It's these latter ones that will determine most of the PCs abilities and roles. The Lucky Children, as they are known, even though they are no longer children, are now organised into a loose society which allows them to use their amazing powers wherever they are needed. As GM, when you decide what kind of stories you want to tell - mysteries, gun-fights, alien invasions, military battles, political strife - you can then decide just what skills the Lucky Children will be taught from the society and thus round things off. Likewise, NPCs can be their bosses, the generals, the pilots, the techs, and everybody else keeping 100 ships in the air and - more importantly - from not killing each other or splitting up, which no doubt happens or threatens to happen all the time.
Plots and Villains: In a fleet with the population of a city, villains are everywhere. As the journey continues, crime is rampant, division is everywhere and politics is hot-blooded and frequently violent. Of course popular wisdom says that anything done against the fleet reduces everyone's chances of arriving alive but it's human nature that the more precious something is, the more people want to smash it to bits, and boy do they. With each year supplies grow shorter, more hydroponic farms give out, and panic and malaise are spreading. Criminal organisations and terrorist groups and religious cults are legion, as are your plain, everyday lunatics. And that's just the threats from within. Outside, well, pick your favourite alien race. Pick a bunch of them. Pick your favourite episode of Star Trek, too. Drifitng through space is an insanely dangerous thing to do and exposes you to an absolute corncucopia of bad things, from microcsopic space viruses that devour your mind to gigantic space-whales that devour your whole ship...
As for big bads and big arcs, the best idea for those is to return to the well of the original concept. Are there some of the original Lucky still around? Was the world really in danger? Where is the fleet heading, and what is waiting for them at the other end? Don't drag it out too long, or no ending will suffice; but a lack of an ending will be equally unsatisfying. That doesn't mean an arrival as an ending though - maybe it was all a scam to begin with. Maybe the fleet is as good as it gets, and it's up to everyone to give up on the fantasy of arrival, and make the whole thing work here and now. Or maybe there is Canaan at the end of the tunnel, and the only question then becomes whether you'll reach it alive. Either way, the quest for the unknown scenario can be come pretty grim pretty quickly, and for a lighter game, the goal might be better all-but ignored in favour of the action in the meantime.
Sources: Well, Battlestar - both versions - are excellent places to start, of course. Good sources on the whole ark concept include the film Deep Impact, Ben Elton's Stark and of course, the hilarious Golgafrinchams from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series. Beings born with enhanced luck – and the secret society that control them – appear in the terrifically creepy film Intacto. British SF comedy show Red Dwarf also had a lot of fun with the "luck virus" although I originally nicked the idea from a Asimov short story about female intuition used for deep space travel. Asimov, Clarke and everyone after will also be invaluable for flavour and for plot ideas. Sci-fi is ominpresent and multitudinous in these days and if you can't find a plot to steal you're just not trying. But for the absolute pinnacle of mysterious travel through a universe that remains mostly in shadow, check out the unstoppable brilliance that is Blake's Seven.
RPGs: Battlestar has its own RPG now, and you could always do a reversal on the show, with Earth's crew looking for the other 12 colonies that legend says were created last time something bad went down. Or just nick the system which is very appropriate, and also appeared in the Serenity RPG which is also not far off the feel this is going for. As would be the four different Star Trek RPGs out there, even if none of them are currently in print. Eden's just given us All Tomorrow's Zombies which is bursting with sci-fi goodness even if you don't want your fleet overrun with the walking dead (and who wouldn't?). GURPS has plenty of space options, including Space, Transhuman Space and their version of Blue Planet. You could use the original Blue Planet too, with Poseidon as the ship's destination, only without the wormhole to speed things up. The possibilities - like the universe - are endless.
