Campaign Toybox

N is Ninjas

Not in the sense that space travel is a secret art taught only to a select few in moutnain monasteries (although that might be awesome) but in the sense that it's hard to detect. Few settings with warp speed ever deal with the fact that if you can travel faster than light speed, you turn up long before anyone can see you coming. Potentially then, you could move an entire armada of warships into orbit around a planet with no forewarning whatsoever. What kind of universe would that create? Planets would be encased in spheres of armour, massive blockades of warhsips and gun batteries. If possible, these walls will be as far as they can be from the planet, perhaps around each system. Still, war wouldn't be avoidable, and it would now happen without warning, anywhere in the universe. That's a hell of a frightening universe – so frightening that people might let their governments do whatever they might imagine to keep them safe.

O is for Organic Only

One of the most interesting rules in the first Terminator film is that nothing metallic can travel through time. That particular film gets around that with cyborgs but there's no need for you to let your players do that. There's something incredibly primal at being the first human on an alien planet and being buck-naked, with only your biological reserves to back you up. Of course, clever scientists may have found some ways to bio-engineer some awesome solutions to this (like some kind of avatar project...), so your players can still get plenty of cool toys. Biological niches tend to be narrow too, demanding characters work together – until the apex predator gets a bit hungry, that is. Alternatively, you could foist this option on a game full of guns and tech but lacking space travel, forcing gunbunnies and riggers to suddenly come to terms with who they really are. As always, be careful with that sort of thing, but it could be awesome.

P is for Penny-Pinching

Some gamers hate keeping track of little things in detail, be it money or encumbrance. Others love it. Regardless of which they are, there's some fun stories in making space travel not as easy as pushing a button. To wit: picture a world where fuel is incredibly expensive and amazingly heavy. So much so that every gram of weight on a ship is an issue. Pick up too much plunder on a job and you may not be able to fly home. Or you might be able to fly home, as long as you're okay with not breathing for the last day or so. Or maybe you one of the crew could stop breathing... This is already done well in some SF stories (Serenity, Sunshine) and they never felt like an accounting lecture, so go forth and steal liberally.

Q is for Queueing

Most SF settings have some kind of capitalist society. But it doesn't have to be that way. Imagine a world where space travel is government controlled and there isn't enough to go around. Not that uncommon: many settings have people trading servitude for going intospace. But in those space travel is usually a one-off experience. What if getting space travel was like getting a sack of potatoes or a luxury purchase like a new DVD. Or a trip on a train or a bus – mundane, and slow at peak times. Like car travel, this doesn't get awesome until the action starts, like when the bad guy's on Mars and you need to get on the next ship there but the line is two hours long. Or you and your rival both have a map to the Forbidden Planet – now the race is who can get their ship travel license approved by customers first! Or if he gets off world, the villain will slip away forever – can you get through the crowded spaceport at the start of a holiday weekend? Pick any train or bus or airport movie, add space, and stir.

R is for Riding Horses

For the first 10,000 years or so of human transportation, we did something we now find a little odd: we travelled by animal, rather than machine. There’s no reason to suppose we won’t go back to that mode in the future. Living ships have featured in many SF works (Farscape and Lexx spring to mind instantly) but that’s hardly the limit of such things. Beasts which could travel between planets or stars would need to move very quickly, but a few inertial dampers in the chariots or saddles can solve that problem. Or perhaps there is a biological solution inside the fur or skin (or feathers or hair or whatever you can imagine) of the great beasts. The beasts need not be large, of course, and that’s really the appeal of this one: the whole field is wide open. Biology is your buffet to pick and choose your favourite ideas and build your greatest wonders. Go nuts. Fill the stars with a manifold menagerie.

S is for Seal Clubbing

Last month we talked about space travel become decidedly unfashionable. The next step up is for it to become taboo. Socially unacceptable. Possibly even illegal. There's a hilarious Next Generation episode where Picard finds out that going above warp 4 is tearing the galaxy to pieces. Something along those lines could easily make space travel forbidden or unpopular – after society had come to depend on it. Of course, there could be controversy – the People for Ethical Space Travel would protest every trip, even ones approved of by the Space Protection Association. Industry might be trying to produce space-friendly vehicles, but who knows how long they will take to get to market – and who might be resistant to the idea. Big Fusion might be willing to kill to retain control of the fuel industry. On the other hand, maybe the law is too slow, and it's up to some environmental motivated PCs to use terrorism to keep space safe. Look around the present and you'll realise this runs itself.

T is for Tracking With Hounds

Anyone who watched a prison escape movie made before The Fugitive knows the dogs are the single most important arsenal in a prison retrieval team. Back in N we talked about how hard it can be to track down a spaceship moving faster than you can see it, and even if you can see it move, space is big. Really, really big. Lose a spaceship, and you'll never find it again. Not without the dogs. Or rather, space-dwelling fusio-vores that just love to eat fuel exhaust. A bit of training can get them to lock onto specific makes or models, perhaps even precise ships. This brings up all the biological issues of R, but with out some of the more icky parts. And while it may only come up with tracking – but tracking is important in a whole variety of stories. How often are the crew of the Enterprise, the Liberator or Galactica looking for something? And how often do they need to find it before it finds them? Now it's all about who has the best dogs – or who is the best trainer. And that can add a twist to even the most formulaic space chase.

U is for Unique

You can travel in space – but only once. The damage to your body, to space, the energy required, the space gods’ gifts so fickle…something means doing it more than once is a very bad idea, if not impossible. It’s the genie situation: if you can go to just one place, where would you go? Who would you go with and what would you take? What kind of exploration of space would that cause? It might not be so different from the past: when colonists left Europe for the Americas or Australia, it was often with full knowledge that the chances of ever returning were extremely remote (and in the case of prisoners and slaves, forbidden). And what kind of technology or world would lead to such a state? Does it go even further, with the trip being to a unique destination? Mankind would find it hollow if we could touch but one star and only one, but it could be a very interesting first step into the universe.

V is for Ventriloquism

Remote operation is the future: after all, why go anywhere when an avatar (of flesh or steel) can go there instead and beam the images it collects straight into your head? The only question then is the distance the signal can travel. It does take light a few days to get to Mars but even if objects can’t break light speed, information might be able to. And then you get the question of why go to Mars (or Pluto, or wherever) when you can just beam your mind into a specially prepared body awaiting you there. Space travel is now as easy as playing World as Warcraft – and indeed, you might be able to have as many avatars as you like, on countless planets. That kind of detachment could cause some frightening consequences, with avatars not recognised as real life. Whole wars could be fought between millions of clones managed by computer simulation. And the natives are extremely confused – and probably screwed…

W is for Worship

40K may have cathedrals in space, navigated by faith, but they still have promethium engines on the back. What if faith alone was enough to lift you to the heavens, literally? This could be by thousands of monks praying and fasting to lift a single enormous ship (once its owners provide suffficient donations to the holy cause, of course) or perhaps just single individuals reaching enlightenment through suffering and humility, and then being "taken up" - again, literally. The gods are up there, on some higher plane(t) and if you truly believe, you can join them. Now the first man on Mars isn't a big-chinned astronaut or genius scientist but a humble holy man who spent twenty years working with the lepers. Why do the gods want him on Mars? Good question. Maybe they think space should only be exposed to humans who have proven themselves. Of course, not all gods have to believe in healing and humility - maybe each planet has its own God, which is why the Greeks named them like that. Choose your own particular stairway to heaven, a heaven where everybody is just like their God of choice. And THEN somebody invents space ships to fly between them...

X is for Xenu

Believing in a god or gods might be fine for some, as long as its a nice familiar religion with vicars or classical allusions, but what if it's not? What if a more oddball and cultish group got control of space travel? This could be for mystical reasons or financial - the Raelians, after all, claim to have created a living human clone in their secret island laboratory. Richard Branson says space will never be cheap enough for civilians, but what if a scary cult said otherwise? It would be terrifying for some to think that the first steps onto another planet or beyond the solar system might be made by some modern Moonies - and that they might start declaring whatever they find to be their property, a world where they can make the laws as religious as they like (a scenario not unreminicent of like some religious nuts on a boat called the Mayflower, and look what that caused). It would be terrying for others to contemplate missing out on such a journey, when all they have to do to get a chance to go is attend a seminar at a nice hotel. And maybe there is a hungry alien god behind it all. Most of the time, modern Cthulhu cultists aren't keen to publicise, but when you read anything about Scientology, the plots just seem to line up...

Y is for Yachting

Everything is always about engines. We've talked about harnessing natural creatures, the other option is using the forces of nature, like solar wind, heat, light, gravity, those kinds of things. Let's have space be conquered by ships that run on nature, because let's face it, that's much more manly. Now you can be becalmed for years if the solar wind is in the wrong place. You can be smashed to pieces by the very forces you are trying to capture. Of course, this isn't entirely new: asteroid storms have bombarded space ships since the fifties but rarely do you see sailors riding those storms in sou-westers, their rope-like muscles bulging with the effort of holding the wheel against the current. I've never seen a space movie where somebody ducked under a boom or a yard-arm as it swung. So go and write one for me.

Z is for Zap!

As anyone who has watched an episode of Star Trek has likely screamed at the screen, there just isn't enough done with their transporters, particularly in the sense of making them a weapon. And that's the idea here: what if you could point a gun at someone, pull the trigger and send them to Mars, or Alpha Centauri? Of course, they can probably go get a gun once they get there, and shoot themselves back again. That's not much of a weapon then, but it would allow for pranks and for non-lethal take-downs if you set the destination to "jail cell" (and lethal takedowns if the destination is "inside the sun"). Regardless of that, iInstantaneous transport at long range brings up the ninja problem of N again, only on a personal level now, with people leaping into your shower from six thousand light years away. You better have your own personal transporter set to "panic room" handy. And just like your PIN number, tell nobody the co-ordinates of your panic room. That's just common sense. Thank you for choosing Securo-Stay, a bank-hotel where you can truly relax. And which hardly ever gets robbed. We promise.