A mission idea

[Smax]

So I'm kicking together a game, and my PCs are a Generic Space Pirate (complete with robot arm and crippling addiction to anti-aging drugs), an old doctor guy with far, far more ranks in Persuade than in Medic and a ton of money and perks, and a Naval officer who was framed for a crime he didn't commit, released from prison to work on a sting operation, took the fall hard when said sting operation went as bad as it could possibly get, and finally said to hell with this and became a berzerker on a barbarian world. Plus a Hiver scout, just chilling out and observing in human territory.

At the moment it looks like the doctor's Lab Ship is going to be the PCs' boat, which raises a number of interesting points. Lab ships have plenty of room and experimenting space, but no weapons (until they install some, which is gonna be hell of pricey), so there's a limit on what can reasonably be done with one. And they're going to need missions, because the payments are going to be merciless*.

I'm thinking the first mission will be to bring some science pilgrims from the Ascendant Union to a recently-uncovered Ancient site. The Union believes that the Ancients ascended to a higher plane of existence* and that all the ruins and technology they left behind are clues to help us poor dopes stuck in this reality ascend (their methods tend to blend legitimate scientific inquiry and new-age Space Brothers mumbo jumbo). Anyway, no sooner do they get to the holy site when, whaddya know, it's swarming with tomb robbers and nogoodniks. The players have to deal with these claim jumpers while trying to make sure none of the "secrets of the Ancients" get damaged or destroyed, and also must try to corral a bunch of pie-in-the-sky types who aren't going to let scoundrels stop them from pursuing legitimate scientific inquiry (setting up "orgone detectors", determining the exact dimensions of the ruins and comparing them to the distance to the galactic core and other Important Numbers, entering drugged trances to communicate with the Ancients, etc).

I'm trying to come up with new wrinkles and oddities to toss at them, as well as memorable personalities for the pilgrims. Of course, anything else that a Lab Ship could do would be great. Any suggestions?

* Someone mentioned in a previous thread that a lab ship could be jointly-controlled with a scientific institute, corp or government, which I like. I can even justify a government lending it to the Union, as they tend to make all their findings available to friendly governments (a sort of proselytizing) and collectively have a fair sight more scientific know-how than many of the smaller confederations.

**The real Ancients, that is. The evidence of the Final War is considered to be from some other race that found the Ancients' technology and used it to wipe themselves out. Exactly which ruins qualify as "real" Ancient sites and what counts as perversions of their intent leads to very loud arguments at Union dinners. They agree on the Dyson spheres and that's about it.

 

[rinku]

Snap. My group ended up with an old doctor and a lab ship as well. We've come up with a couple of ideas:

1) A lab ship *can* operate commercially as a liner because of all the staterooms, and that unequipped lab space can easily be converted to cargo space and luxuries. Income *just* covers repayments (depending on how many ship shares), but a bit of speculative trade and the odd mission will make it workable.

2) If you want to do actual science, you'll need to either own the ship or have a patron. Just have the NPC shares held by a Megacorp, government or university, and have them hand out missions. You have two scientists proper in the group (Hivers always count ), one of whom is a ship-type anyway, plus two ship-types to run the ship, so this could work. You'd likely have a bunch of permanent NPCs in the research team, so this can work well if you want an extended but stable NPC group (i.e. a social heavy campaign).

3) Our group also rolled up a scoutship, so they always had the option of just using that. They chose to operate both, using the scout as an escort (I decided that the IISS had formally assigned the ship to the task and provided basic armaments. As with all Scout equipment, this can be taken away as needed...)

4) Our ACTUAL (player suggested) solution is that the doctor, who is a galactic class cybernetics surgeon and famous author, is going to travel from planet to planet performing expensive procedures and/or socialising with fans of his books (for a fee).

You can also mix these up a bit. As it happens, I plotted out a medical emergency to charter their ship for our shakedown session, which had them dealing with very little initial information and gradually uncovering the extent and origin of an epidemic (using the information lag of jump travel to frustrate them ). Threw in some space combat and potential firefights (one of which they triggered) as well as an espionage angle (almost all the medical team that were assigned to them were agents of different polities). During this period the charter was C100,000 per week plus fuel costs were picked up by the navy (due the urgency and quarantine all their refuelling was ship-to-ship from Gazelles sent to the affected systems. Turns out "emergency tanker" is yet another thing that class is competant at )

Oh, also - unarmed doesn't *always* mean impotent. When the Zhodani Stealth Scout attacked, the combat types and the pilot jumped into the pinnace and outflew the attacker to manage a successful boarding action. Equipping the pinnace with a fixed pulse laser only costs Cr600,000 and may be your most cost effective weapon (5G means it usually dictates range and can dodge well).

 

[zero]

I'd suggest rolling randomly for npcs using the tables in the core, you can come up with really crazy combos that way that you may not have thought of yet.

Also, I'm hoping to use an aspect of the Ancients in my games, however mine is based off the old Space Jockey from Alien.

Looking at TL 19 with bio-alloy use in most everything. I'd also like to put up remnants of other blatently alien races, like TL 1 races that just went under but whatever did it is still around on the planet (Heh, you can use that one too )

 

[Hopeless]

Ever thought of using the lab ship as a sort of space station for a new colony or one that had to flee its own system and using its ancient long out of shape drives to reach another system?

Sort of a Battlestar Galactica but done properly!

And yes I do prefer the original to the remake since at least that one kept up the pretence that they were running out of supplies and not all of a sudden having ships big enough to serve as colony craft when their starting premise all but indicated there shouldn't have been that many ships with jump drives given all of their colonies was in the same system and fifty years previously their original fleet left with the cylons who took them over leaving behind a far more primitive fleet intedned to remain under their control and not keeping any tech that would allow their ships to be subverted you know by the cylons?!

Sorry had to be said

 

[silburnl]

Holy runon sentence, Batman! That rant was hard to parse.

I think you are wrong on a number of plotpoints regarding nBSG, but unless you can clean up that last paragraph I can't be sure.

Anyway, it's all OT for the thread.

Regards
Luke

 

[Smax]

So I decided to go with this idea, more or less. The Transcendent Union have been stepped down to one of a number of different representatives of the Imperial Allied Scientific Exploratory Committee, an underfunded attempt to bridge diplomatic and technological gaps by bringing the expertise of several different worlds, empires and species. In addition to letting me introduce my players to various power groups in the setting in microcosm, it sets up a bunch of good old fashioned knock-down drag-out arguments among the representatives before they even get anywhere near the planet in question (that week-long travel time is going to be a part-ay). Plus the IASEC makes for a tempting target to anyone who doesn't dig on the notion of peaceful scientific exchange between disparate empires.

In addition to the 'Scender (A scout-turned-rogue-scientist, complete with Hawaiian shirt and loud opinions on the real deal with the Ancients), the committee at this point includes:
- A Geonee archeo/anthropologist looking to support her people's controversial viewpoint.
- A Solomani expert on Jumpspace and related paralell-physics problems
- A representative of one of the Megacorps, to fulfill or subvert the Weyland Yutani scheming corporate suit stereotype as the plot demands
- A Sword Worlder biologist, who needs a bit more fleshing out
- An Aslani chemist, who isn't really suited to field research but got signed up for the exchange anyway. Her presence here could be bureaucratic blundering, a deliberate move to satisfy her curiosity, or something even odder*.

and probably a few redshirts from the Navy, to "safeguard the mission" (and be revealed as terrorist assassins when things get too chummy).

Of course, this means a hell of a lot of NPCs to introduce and keep track of, and any advice you could give me on that score would be a phenomenal help. Also, if you want to toss names, character traits or the like onto that great gob of barely-differentiated allegiances and expertises, that'd be a huge help.

* I'm thinking in a lot of cases the various representatives of the IESAC are going to be those their respective institutes considered "non-essential, but unlikely to humiliate us".