Monday, July 31, 2006
RPG brainstorming: Part five
Can I just say one more time that Blue Planet kicks some serious ass? I'm about halfway through the Moderator's Guide, and I suspect I'll be finished reading that book sometime later this week. I'm currently reading a section that talks about the science around compression, decompression and what happens to humans when they go underwater. I'm really digging the hard science in the fiction. Why the hell didn't I buy this game years ago? I remember when the first edition core book could be had at Silver Snail for like ten bucks.
Oh well. At least now I've discovered the absolute coolness that is Blue Planet. Thanks to Logan's searching, both he and I now have the entire Blue Planet V2 game line. Yay! Oh yeah, and Logan, I still owe you the cash for Ancient Echoes.
As I continue to read Blue Planet, I'm visualizing a world of possibilities for short-term and long-term campaigns. Because everyone in the game would be new to Blue Planet and wouldn't even have read any of the books (except for Logan and I, that is), I think the best start for the Sunday night group would be to have everyone make up newcomers to Blue Planet. We could even start the game on Earth as they go through the hell of being processed for cryo-sleep (or whatever the techie term in BP is for it). They get loaded on like cargo and then go to sleep for months while their ship -- probably a clunky, old freighter that may or may not get them to the Serpentis System alive -- heads for the worm hole.
When they wake, maybe one of them discovers a neighbour whose tube malfunctioned during flight. Maybe this person is crippled. Maybe this person has been dead for four months, with nobody on board any the wiser. The characters could be offloaded -- again, just like cargo -- and dealt with on Prosperity Station in orbit of Poseidon. They go through the heaves that accompany waking from cryo and go through what is more-or-less a rehab/detox program for the next two weeks. And only then do they finally get to Poseidon.
Of course, at this point, the game itself could be rather open-ended, with the PCs maybe meeting on board Prosperity, becoming friends or associates, and then deciding to work together to get their new start on Poseidon after planetfall. Such an open-ended game would be difficult to run and probably not very rewarding in the end, though. If all of the characters had a solid purpose for being on Poseidon, and each of those purposes were linked somehow, then an interesting and focused story could be told. If one person is in the GEO military, another is a would-be gangster and yet another is an eco-terrorist destined to join up with the Sierra Nueva group run by Bataku, then a campaign just isn't going to work very well. If one person is a would-be gangster, another an arms dealer and another a ruined man looking for any opportunities on Poseidon, then a story could be crafted around that.
Oh well. At least now I've discovered the absolute coolness that is Blue Planet. Thanks to Logan's searching, both he and I now have the entire Blue Planet V2 game line. Yay! Oh yeah, and Logan, I still owe you the cash for Ancient Echoes.
As I continue to read Blue Planet, I'm visualizing a world of possibilities for short-term and long-term campaigns. Because everyone in the game would be new to Blue Planet and wouldn't even have read any of the books (except for Logan and I, that is), I think the best start for the Sunday night group would be to have everyone make up newcomers to Blue Planet. We could even start the game on Earth as they go through the hell of being processed for cryo-sleep (or whatever the techie term in BP is for it). They get loaded on like cargo and then go to sleep for months while their ship -- probably a clunky, old freighter that may or may not get them to the Serpentis System alive -- heads for the worm hole.
When they wake, maybe one of them discovers a neighbour whose tube malfunctioned during flight. Maybe this person is crippled. Maybe this person has been dead for four months, with nobody on board any the wiser. The characters could be offloaded -- again, just like cargo -- and dealt with on Prosperity Station in orbit of Poseidon. They go through the heaves that accompany waking from cryo and go through what is more-or-less a rehab/detox program for the next two weeks. And only then do they finally get to Poseidon.
Of course, at this point, the game itself could be rather open-ended, with the PCs maybe meeting on board Prosperity, becoming friends or associates, and then deciding to work together to get their new start on Poseidon after planetfall. Such an open-ended game would be difficult to run and probably not very rewarding in the end, though. If all of the characters had a solid purpose for being on Poseidon, and each of those purposes were linked somehow, then an interesting and focused story could be told. If one person is in the GEO military, another is a would-be gangster and yet another is an eco-terrorist destined to join up with the Sierra Nueva group run by Bataku, then a campaign just isn't going to work very well. If one person is a would-be gangster, another an arms dealer and another a ruined man looking for any opportunities on Poseidon, then a story could be crafted around that.
// posted by Chris @ 9:55 AM 
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