Interesting ideas for space opera RP...

[watervole]

 I'm helping GM a role-playing space opera game.  The six players have various factions, all the way from rats who steal everything that's not nailed down (and have a fascinating culture to go with it), to an AI whose task it is to look after a race of humanoids who have all entered virtual reality pods long ago and may/may not still be alive.

 

A major part of the game is exploration and colonisation.

What I'm after is ideas/suggestions for things they can find when they explore.  

These can be anything and everything.  The idea is that they should give several turns of activity and possibly produce something of value at the end (with a few possible duds)

We've created a number of these related to the background plot of the past history of the star cluster, but it's a large cluster and there's room for plenty more.

I want things that they can explore/analyse/learn things from/be puzzled by/etc.

What can your collective space opera brains come up with?

PS.  There might still be space for another player, if anyone is interested.  It typically involves a fair bit of in-character chatter over Discord in between the turn deadline every other week.  The role-playing from some people is brilliant (and sometimes hilarious).  We're only one turn into the game, so easy to fit someone in in an unexplored area.

 

 

Comments

[eledonecirrhosa]

How about...
Another complex full of virtual reality pods... which can be scavenged for spare parts, but may still have people in them. Just not people that your AI has a duty of care for.

Robots mining ore and building something incomprehensible for an alien race long dead... or doing a sort of Magician's Apprentice production line of widgets because there is no boss to tell them to stop.

Search for some sort of Elephants' Graveyard? Maybe the space whales' graveyard? Or giant sandworms of Dune's graveyard? With locals who revere the elephants/space whales/sandworms and don't want the PCs trespassing but ivory/whalebone/sandworm teeth are valuable.

A seemingly empty town, but the aliens who live there are simply hibernating because it is winter/aestivating because it is the dry season.

Huge complex which is actually a religious sanctuary run by an AI. Instead of passwords or ID cards or the like, it won't let you get thru doors until you recite some scripture or say a prayer or make an appropriate offering. The PCs don't know the religion in question and have to translate inscriptions, read texts, watch holograms of past ceremonies etc etc to puzzle it out.

[watervole]

We're definitely using the 'elephant's graveyard and the VR pods.

These will be encountered this turn.

May use others too! Thanks.

[eledonecirrhosa]

Glad to be of help.

[ranunculus]

Objects that attract the player for no good reason, might influence their thinking, and might, or might not be a key to the door of an ancient site. I'm thinking here of neolithic polished stone axe heads, but it could be anything appropriate.
Ditto symbiotic creatures.
Questions for the above include whether they are "good" or "bad" and how one might tell. There should be clues, though they might be a bit ambiguous at first. Does the artifact/creature boost perception/ability that the player might have otherwise not developed? Is this good, bad or can it ultimately be revealed to be neutral in and of itself, but dependent on the person who picks it up?

[watervole]

I think we'll go with Rama instead....

But thanks for making us think 'Clarke'.

[crazyscot]

Some twist on "this is not a place of honour". Something that is clearly not natural but is designed to dissuade the players from investigating further because it contains something of great danger to the civilisation that entombed it. Inside.... well, not so much nuclear waste, but suspended-animation tribbles came to mind as a comedy dud!

[watervole]

Evil Grin. that's going in there somewhere.

[murphys_lawyer]

An apparently abandoned orbital (see Ian Banks' Culture novels). Set in the Goldilocks zone of a completely uninhabited system, it's fully functional and from its size (approx. 1 million km diameter) it could comfortably house billions. The docking areas are open, but nobody's used them for a long time.

What's there? What happened?

[watervole]

Hmm. Might be viable, but there's a lot of habitable planets around that aren't occupied, so there would need to be a good reason for an orbital.

Though I like the Marie Celeste angle.

[igenlode]

A 'phone home' site -- some kind of apparently abandoned communicator setup of obscure technological origin, with no way of knowing who created it to send messages to what. Do they risk trying to fire it up to see what they can discover about its workings/its creators? If they send out a signal, intentionally or not, will they get an answer, and of what kind?

[watervole]

We've already got something very similar to this. Player found it this turn - hasn't yet tried to send a message....