Thursday, March 11, 2010

Lost in Space

In scifi, even if you can travel between planets, systems and stars, space is huge. Even if you can travel long distances relatively fast, it doesn't take away the fact, that space is infinite. Even if humanity has found and conquered planets before unknown, there is always space never before travelled.

Space is your second home. If you are in the crew of a spaceship, space is normal for you. You don't fear it, you don't necessarily even give a thought how small you are there. You think you have travelled long distances, yet in the universe it doesn't even matter.

You know all the places humanity has discovered. You know those alien races. If you haven't visited all the planets or met all the races, you have heard of them.

But what if you get lost?

You and your shipmates travel through a Jumpgate to another location. Location well known. But when you exit the Jumpgate, what if there is nothing? No spaceships, no planet's visible. What if your radar or Thinkmachine cannot scan or recognise the place. What if your ship's database doesn't know where you are.

And what if the Jumpgate you travelled through remains shut, because you don't have the right code for this before unknown gate.

Your crew has two options. Remain still waiting Jumpgate to randomly open or die. Or start to discover, what this place is. Where you are. And most importantly, how to get back to known worlds.

You will meet planets you didn't even know excisted before. You will encounter races you have never heard of. They all speak unknown language, but with a living worm in your brain you can understand them. You and your crew haw lots of currency, but it is not valiable here. They use money you haven't ever heard of. If something costs 50k you don't know how much it is. Is it in anyone's reach, or duke's yearly income.

You encountered alien. Never seen that kind of creature before, but it seems to be friendly. He leads you to planet, what used to be a civilization but now is just a wasteland. You have a plan, try to find coordinates to the Jumpgate to get out of here back to where you belong. Or even get a map upload for your Thinkmachine to get idea where is your current location.

But there is a problem. Everything has it's cost and you don't have got any of right currency. You can buy nothing. No maps, no codes, no food. And you cannot even leave this planet. Take-off costs.

Fading Suns campaign about being lost in space. Great fun this far, and as it is totally unknown location or even universe, I can add what ever I please. Nothing is strange enough here. Everything can happen. And as you don't have any documents needed here, no passports, no ID, did you really think the great Imperial Guardianship will leave you unnoticed?

2 comments:

Sami Koponen said...

Heh. Ever thought how "lost in space" is the same as "lost in the Pacific Ocean" or "lost in Africa"?

Unknown said...

That is true. I was thinking, that in science fiction world is larger than that Earth. But in earth there is lots of places to visit, so why not another planet also? One planet could give recourses for years of games and several campaigns, like Middle-Earth for example. But what the heck, we got space ships and can travel between several planets. So lost in one is quite lame in that scale. Of course, lost anywhere is bad enough, but for science fiction people lost in entirely unknown system without a way back to known space is much worse.