Campaign Toybox
Story: As the Terran Consortium expanded, it discovered many planets. Around one bright blue star they named the Thulian system, with planets Loki, Odin, Thor, Baldur, Midgard, Freya and Fenris. Around the gas giant Midgard is a moon with an erratic orbit that the space pirates call the Serpent’s Eye. The locals call it Freemoon.
And they call it that because it’s outside the Consortium’s reach, and it’s not part of the Barbarian Marches, or the Letan Empire, or the Tusker Conquest. It was founded by pirates and the pirate spirit of freedom from all kinds of tyranny. When the golden age of piracy waned, it became a commercial hub instead – a place where anything can be purchased, and commerce is king. In such a place, secrets become their own currency, secrets both political – and alien. There are ancient secrets beneath Freemoon, and they are coming to the surface.
Style and Structure: This doesn’t have to be a remodel of Freeport, of course - although if you can get your hands on it, you should, because it’s awesome, and space pirates are maybe the best kind of pirates. The remote, neutral island of Freeport also lets you define the rest of the world as you go, as you need to. This not only makes things easier, it helps things be more organic. The world gets revealed just as it does in a story, and the players get some control over that, and they don’t have to hear all about the Tusker Conquest is they don’t give a damn about playing one.
Rebranding D&D works just as well with 3E (or 3.5) as it does with 4, and the In Spaaaaace! branding is probably the most fun of all. Space gives you all the options of fantasy, although as always you need to be careful that it doesn’t end up just feeling like fantasy only with space in front of it (“my space-knight attacks the moon-dragon with his laser-sword!”). Look for some kind of SF explanation for everything, even if it is a very soft one. No hand-waving magic as alien tech when it can instead have a full super-science explanation. Make spells psychic powers (or use Complete Psychic and cut out magic altogether), get robots from Eberron, find a reason for lasguns to work like powder weapons (slow recharge will do) and people prefer blades (they don’t run out of batteries). This is another reason why pirates are better than just standard D&D – they upgrade to space a lot better than knights and wizards.
PCs and NPCs: Most of the D&D races and monsters have fairly obvious space opera analogues. Orcs become something like the Klingons (I called them the Tuskers), the elves the graceful, psychically-gifted Letans, and the Gnomes can turn into the Tinkers, to borrow a race from the rather brilliant Buck Rogers rules TSR did in the early 90s. A lot of classes come over fine, too: a Fighter is a Fighter in any world, although picking a new name can help hammer home the new setting – make them corsairs, or bravos, or mercs. Rangers can be Scouts or Explorers, Barbarians can be Primitives or Feral-Worlders, and of course Rogues can be Scoundrels. The trickiest switch is turning Clerics into Medics, but relabelling the more iconic D&D elements is the most fun: Cure Light Wounds become nanobot healing bombs, and turn undead becomes an aerosol antidote to the Necrosis Plague. Getting the Artificer from Eberron will help immensely with turning magic into tech, although again, don’t be afraid to turn all magic into psychic powers or some strange Gift. Religion is the hardest of all – I made the Paladins into uberwarriors with an alien heritage called Legendaries, but your imagination may go elsewhere.
Don’t be afraid to mix and match either: we had trouble deciding how to switch the druid to a class in our game so we made it a race in itself: a shapechanging blob alien that could also detach part of itself as its “companion”. Paladins and faith-based Clerics could come from their own space empire, where their tech runs on religion. And with genetic modification, monster templates could be jumped in and out of like classes. That may over-power your PCs but it could also be great fun – and NPCs can do it too.
Speaking of NPCs a lot of D&D monsters still work, as mentioned: kobolds are little lizard-like aliens, orcs are the belligerent Tuskers, mindflayers, rust monsters and beholders already look like something out of space, the Necrosis Plague will take care of the undead and space dragons do have their own kind of majesty. Some of the planes and elements might not work so well but if you pick and choose and use names well, the space feel will come.
Plots and Villains: If you’re going with Freeport, the adventures have already been written, and there are buckets of plot hooks and foes in the core setting book (now systemless, so useful everywhere) and its companion supplements, Buccaneers of Freeport and Cults of Freeport, the latter of which everyone really, really needs to own. Lacking those, however, piratical adventures aren’t always that easy to write – pirates tend to be poor protagonists because they are massively free and motivated by little other than profit. But pirates with a conscience (Han Solo) or a secret (Serenity’s crew) or a cause (Blake’s Seven) or a quest (Captain Jack) – now they lead to good stories. Make sure your pirates have one or more of these and the plots will come. And pirates attract enemies, from both sides of the law, like a corpse attracts flies.
Sources: Space pirates are a space opera staple, and often the parallels are overt. The episode of Futurama “Godfellas” hits all the key elements, and the absolutely lovely Disney film Treasure Planet is the bible for this kind of thing. The original Treasure Island will also serve you well, in all of its film versions, including the Muppets’ take on it. Ocean pirate media is everywhere these days of course, and it doesn’t take a genius to sit down and turn the Caribbean trilogy into a space opera (indeed, some critics have pointed out the similarities to Star Wars already, particularly in the three chief protagonists). Star Wars is a good lesson on adapting fantasy elements (and Old West, and pulp) into space, so is worth watching again with that eye and learning how Lucas did it. Space pirates also appear prominently in the strange but fun eighties movie Ice Pirates and the hugely cheesy 1980s TV show Buck Rogers, and they seem to turn up a lot in the Superfriends (and indeed both Marvel and DC Silver Age comics). We’ve already mentioned Blake’s Seven and Firefly, but they can always be mentioned again (and again and again…) and the latter also reminds us of Alien: Resurrection, a tragically flawed film full of good ideas, not least of which are a prototype Serenity-like crew of good old fashioned space pirates, right down to the crazy dwarf, the muscled brawler and the twin-pistol-wielding acrobat.
RPGs: Thankfully, Serenity got an RPG, as has Star Wars (and there’s a Blake’s Seven one out there from the 80s that somebody has surely scanned in by now), but for space pirates it begins and ends with Traveller. Any edition will do but it’s just been re-released by Mongoose and is firing on all cylinders once more. This idea began with Freemoon of course, and as mentioned, it’s useful in pretty much any setting or genre. For any kind of pirates, Skull and Bones is a fantastic resource. It’s got D20 stats but its content is so good it could peel paint. And D&D is also something most gamers should at least try, in some edition, and re-wiring it is a great way to bring life back to a game you’ve left behind or dismissed. D&D even rewired itself into space many times, in Buck Rogers and SpellJammer and DragonStar and D20 Space, so there’s plenty to work if you don’t want to do too much work yourself. Or you can also rewire any pirate game of your choice: Savage World’s 50 Fathoms will move to space very easily, and indeed, there are already Savage World sky-pirates in the wonderful Sundered Skies.
