Asteroid Mining

BrigadeCon is hosting the RPGaDay daily prompt throughout August, and today marks the beginning of the third week! Here's the full list of questions, if you'd like to join in:

Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: Your best source of inspiration for RPGs.

I'm not sure I can narrow it down to just one source. Anything and everything sparks ideas for settings or creatures or whatever. The source is the entirety of experienced art and life that bubbles around in my brain. I'm not sure I'd want to prioritize, say, books over TV shows, or wikipedia over a half-inaccurate childhood memory.

That said, I find that sources vary in their ability to inspire ideas versus being useful research sources. I am -heavily- influenced by pop culture, especially TV and comics, when it comes to the ideas that just pop into my head when I'm improvising. When I'm prepping for a session, however, I lean more on genre fiction and non-fiction reference (like pop history books or wikipedia or the world-building stackexchange).

Gathering sources and experiencing culture widely is something I deliberately do, though. Ideas don't come from a vacuum--you need a solid bedrock to excavate from. When I'm working on something I like to come up with my own Appendix N, as much for myself as to communicate the genre conventions to my players.

Here's one I've been working on for Xenoarchaeology, a hard sci-fi, no FTL, near solar-system setting centred around a jumpgate and space-Earth tensions:

• the Belters in Larry Niven's Known Space books
• Firefly
• Classic Traveller
• Cowboy Bebop
• Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Time
• Elite and Freelancer
• Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy
• Lucasarts game The Dig
• Ben Bova's Grand Tour and Asteroid Wars books
• the film Moon
• Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space
• EVE Online
• the Planetes anime and manga
• the Mars One project
• asteroid mining companies Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries
• the first Alien movie
• Stargate

I haven't even read/seen some of these, but the concepts and imagery are all I really need to come up with ideas.

Need A Little Space

Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: What game is your group most likely to play next. Why?

I haven't had the opportunity to either run or play in a campaign for years now. Maybe it's cause I live further away from the people I'd play with, or maybe we just don't have as much time as we used to. When we do manage to play, it's a one-shot for a special occasion (like a yearly Halloween game) or a pick-up game of some rules-lite one-pager I keep on my phone (like Lasers & Feelings).

Won't stop me from trying though! I've been cobbling together a science-fiction setting for the past several years, and I'm hoping to get at least three to six sessions out of it by the end of the year. If it takes off, it'll be using a hacked version of Fate.

I've been fascinated by Fate since discovering Spirit of the Century, and Evil Hat's successful kickstarter a few years ago gave us the enormously useful Fate System Toolkit and Fate Accelerated Edition. They are both very hackable, and using those ideas coupled with bits from Diaspora and Bulldogs!, I think I can come up with something fun and unobtrusive to use for the next game.

A sketch: it's set maybe two generations from the present. Asteroid mining is a booming business. Small colonies are established on the Moon and in specialized space stations. People leave Earth to work Up Here for a fresh start, and to escape all the problems Down Below. And of course the SpaceCorps don't mind that Earth's laws don't apply--or at least, can't be easily enforced. This is a source of some tension between Earth governments and the loose, libertarian collection of spacers, but nobody really cared. Until five years ago. When they found The Gate. Tucked away behind some rocks on a big asteroid, The Gate sends people somewhere new whenever they go through. Somewhere filled with the ruins of people who might not have been human. Pioneering explorers bring back such wonderful things--things worth a lot of money. Things that hold secrets, and power. And now everyone wants a piece of the action.

I call it Xenoarchaeology.

Sounds pretty good, right?