Passengers 2016 Movie Query

[Hopeless]

So with the Passengers 2016 Movie Trailer I was wondering how you would handle this as an actual game concept?

From what I've heard there's some somewhat creepy aspects to the story, but until its released I won't know for sure!

So I've been wondering about this but don't know whether Traveller 2300 would be a good era for this to be set in?

The main problem is explaining why there's more than 1-2 player's involved.

I'm thinking how about they used substandard parts in the construction, a group of the slumbering passengers are revived to assist the repairs and maintenance, but the problems are extensive and since this is a game it will soon be clear it isn't accidental after all if you've got colony ships being sent out to various worlds that are considered potential new Earth's there will be competition for who colonises what world!

So a rival colony ship sent to the same world and both are beset by the same problems, not only rivalry with other colony ships, substandard components and eventually revealed sabotage making it difficult for their ship to reach its destination maybe forcing them to sacrifice any chance of waking up in their new home system just to make sure the others make it.

So how would you handle this?

 

[Pyromancer]

I ran this as a short campaign a few years ago. The game started with the farewell party in earth orbit. Then, the player characters woke up too early(?) and had to figure out what was going on. Some other passengers were missing, others were awake, too, but most were still asleep/frozen. The game was part exploration of the HUGE ship (it was planned to serve as home base for the first few decades for the few hundred thousand colonists) and survival, party mystery solving, part power games, intrigues, backstabbing and faction politics among the survivors, and later on horror.
Overall, it wasn't among the best campaigns I ran, but it had some really memorable highlights.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

STL Interstellar Travel is hugely expensive, the only way they could afford to do it is with sleeper ships! this is without the famous maneuver drive, the ship can reach only a few percentage points of the speed of light, it will take centuries for the ship to arrive! The "low berth" technology is flawed, there is a high chance of death. No one wants to risk death to go on this voyage, so they send passengers who are already dead, people who used this flawed low berth technology on the slim chance that they will be revived and a cure will be found upon revival, the price they pay for this is they get to go on this voyage if they survive. The PCs are the survivors, a lot of corpses have come out of the low berth chambers, but they are the lucky ones, the ship's AI administers the treatment they need to stay alive, but the ship has problems that need to be solved if they are going to survive beyond that.

How's that for a scenario?

 

[Hopeless]

Could be much worse as most of the passengers were recruited as spare parts to maintain the lives of the "elite" meaning many don't survive the trip because they were harvested as part of insuring the low berth failures don't effect the wealthiest members of the passengers...

There was a movie where the colony ships were actually designed to be combined into a much bigger vessel but the passengers were to be turned into cyborgs to serve the new order that were developing these ships so they could conquer what's left behind them.

The end of that movie had a solar reflecting dish to blast the multiple ship and a makeshift rail cannon to blast the incoming villain's ship!

Now if only I could remember the title!

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Not so bad really, if it doesn't work, they stay dead! A living person would not want to undergo this process because h could die, but if you re already dead to begin with, you have nothing to lose. This is how you introduce characters that aren't familiar with the ship's systems or its layout, because the ship was not built yet at the time they died. Basically it works like this. The doctor tells them they have no chance to live, but in the future they may have a chance, "there is this cold sleep procedure, it has a high mortality rate, but since you are going to die anyway, why not sign on the dotted line? We'll even pay your next of kin, but we want you as potential colonists in this sleeper ship of ours, consider it donating your body to science!"

The PCs start the game as survivors of the low berth process, the procedure has a 90% rate or mortality, but the players are already part of the 10% who survived, this takes place several centuries after they had died, he ship is nearing its destination, but it hasn't gotten there yet. No one knows how to operate the ship's system, there was no time to learn before they died, and the ship wasn't even built yet, so no one knew anything about it from which they could train them. The PCs are basically 21st century people. There are training manuals on the ship. The ship is also a sort of ark ship, there is a biome with a bunch of lower animals and plants. The builders of the ship didn't want to opt for a straight human Ark ship because they didn't want to risk the chance that the next generation of humans might not want to continue the mission after their parents died.