Heat Death

Monday night I started running a sci-fi game (working title "Heat Death"). This is an original system and the tone is supposed to be a bit of Alien + Firefly. Naturally, the players will shift the tone far more towards Ice Pirates no matter what I do... god damn players.

I don't know if this will be a project I'll publish or not. Maybe. I'm putting a decent amount of work into it. I think in the end, if nothing else, I'll put it out as a little mini-game zine or something.

Here's the intro text I provided to my players:

Life in the Main was nice. Strip malls, concert moons, a steady paycheck, and no alien robot infestations. But you don’t live on the Main anymore. You live out here in the Frontier Zones where careers (and people) come to die. Whatever you did to get cast out… was it worth it?

Now you pinch out a living doing contract gigs for the colorfully named Site Evaluation and Data Collection Agency (SEDCA), an inter-governmental department that specializes in “low-profile, moderate-risk projects for the public good”. This arrangement was part of the legal settlement that kept you out of prison.

You work for less than half what you would earn back in the Main. If you keep your nose clean, in three to five years you might get to go home.

In the meantime, it’s all about collecting soil samples, tracking lost cargo, investigating unknown transmissions, and, from time to time, “helping to peacefully contain local disputes”. Life is good if you just grin through it.

It was noted during the game that this idea borrows heavily from Star Frontiers. I can't deny this fact. Star Frontiers was the second RPG I ever owned so it has a very deep and permanent place in my inner world. I even lifted some of the items directly from SF, such as magnigoggles.

The system uses two exploding d4s for task resolution and has a Life Point system. There are no fixed stats, only Traits you can assign to your PC during play. The idea is you have a pool of Ranks (like skill points) and you assign them during play as the inspiration arises. So if you wanna be great at throwing knives, you just put Ranks into it as you describe how you throw knives at the target of the scene.

Anyway... the most important thing is the scenario. It's all set up to run scenarios, not simulate battles or space flight. This scenario has the PCs assigned the mission of investigating a rumored resource of interest on a distant and unknown moon shrouded by radioactive interference that has prevented long range study. By the end of the first session they had arrived at the moon, but were surprised to learn that a second ship was detected by the ship's systems before they dropped out of FTL travel.