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Ever run an epic campaign onboard a gigantic space station?

Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2023 9:16 pm
by Shorty Lickens
I'm talking miles or even hundred of miles across.
Was it deserted or abandoned? Or did you treat it like a small planet, with different populations and cultures and political strife?
Did your characters spend their whole lives there or eventually move on the rest of the three galaxies?

I've got a few campaign ideas for colossal space stations. One is they are explorers or refugees/evacuees/emigrants and they happen across a huge space station orbiting a dead planet. Or possibly living breathing planet with some sort of issue that makes habitation at this time non-viable. In any case they arrive at the station and need to explore its secrets, which may or may not be related to the planet below. Station appears to be uninhabited and unpowered, at first....

Other idea was running a mega space campaign from a gargantuation station like it was a planet. Can either be orbiting some massive body or free roaming the galaxy.

You?

Re: Ever run an epic campaign onboard a gigantic space stati

Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2023 11:25 pm
by Grazzik
I have not run such a campaign.

However, a few years ago I tried designing a game with the setting being a giant space station that was a prison where people from different worlds had their consciousnesses uploaded to rapidly grown avatars. A play on the trope of dumping bad apples to be forgotten and left to their own devices. PCs would generate in different "birthing" chambers and the avatars would last only a cycle. Minor criminals would live a single avatar cycle, while permanent residents would be "rebirthed" over and over. If you died before the end of the cycle, you would be rebirthed for a whole new cycle. So, some unfortunates might have been caught stealing a car, but find themselves in circumstances where they never get released.

Kept the environment and resources pretty sparse - open halls with corridors and ramps connecting sectors. The only resources are what are on hand - whatever can be pried from the station or made from dead avatars until the biomaterial broke down at the end of the cycle. Different sectors would have different philosophies / traditions / rules, etc. Points of interest, such as food dispensaries or birthing chambers, would usually see constant struggle for dominance. There would be the truly inhumane and those that sought redemption.

Lots of story hooks:
- how the station's AI Warden would prevent damage, effect repairs, or defend its systems from the inmates
- PCs adjusting to an avatar that might be radically different from their own body
- how long timers would seek to gain and keep control over others while short timers might bring new ideas into the mix from outside
- for permanent residents, what it would mean to be effectively immortal but forever incarcerated
- what it would mean to be a short timer who is a repeat offender returned to the prison, etc.

Never finished it, as real life has a way of interfering.

Re: Ever run an epic campaign onboard a gigantic space stati

Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2023 3:57 pm
by The Beast
No, none of my groups have played the PB equivalent of ST:DS9.