Let There Be Light - Creating Worlds Part 5

 The New World

“The ark ships AI systems brought the ship into geostationary orbit and prepared the deployment of the onboard space elevator. The ground engineering teams and security teams deployed via shuttle to the surface after completing detailed scans. This was the critical moment, if the space elevator failed, the whole mission could fail, humanity would be lost”.

Another way to look at sci-fi gaming is maybe attempting to run a campaign whereby you literally start from scratch.

The setting: Several ark ships built in Earths orbit have been sent to several carefully chosen planets that are earthlike.

You assume the successful deployment of a space elevator from the ark ship. Once the space elevator is successfully up and running, the first stage personnel, equipment, and supplies are sent down via the space elevator. Camps are established along with basic facilities.

What happens next is up to you.

In order to get this campaign setting up and running it may require you to set up unique events tables, or they may be available from your chosen set of rules, such as Starport Scum, No Stars In Sight, or Five Parsecs From Home, all by Nordic Weasel Games.

You will need tables for flora, fauna, and even intelligent life, such as tribal/stone age civilisations, or even medieval level civilisations that weren’t previously detected.

Is the native life hostile? Or friendly? Could they help or hinder the colonists? Does an advanced alien race turn up in orbit to what’s going on or with their own ark ship. Do they become hostile, or friendly initially? Is the ark ship destroyed by the advanced alien ship. Or does the crew on the ark ship destroy the alien ship and start a galactic war?

Does everything go well for a few years, and a large colony successfully established only for a great schism to occur, with faction breakaways?

Humans generally can only cope with forming relationships in communities to a maximum of approx. 200 people. Do things break down, with new leaders emerging with their own agendas as wannabe autocrats/dictators?

Are the colonists joy-sucking miserable puritans? Or is there a puritan sub-faction that breaks away? Do they launch a crusade against the sinful devil-worshipping possessed colonists who don’t follow THE only one true faith? Whatever that maybe!?

Maybe it’s a fight for survival by natives against the colonists? The natives maybe far less advanced but there is a lot more of them, and they know the lay of the land intimately. Do the colonists start running low on food and begin to encroach on the native’s hunting grounds and start stealing their crops etc.? Does the colony continually expand and need ever more land that they begin to take from the natives?

Is the space elevator sabotaged or fail completely beyond repair after a while and the colonists go native? Do they themselves become fractured and tribal in nature fighting each other for survival and then domination?

The world is your mollusk!