a shipping vessel with a belly of modular compartments stuffed with rare elements and alloys.
2
a swift courier carrying information too dangerous to broadcast, on cubes of imperishable adamant.
3
a pilgrim-vessel bringing the faithful to a place of cosmic importance.
4
a once-unconquerable dreadnought outfitted with the cutting edge of its past time.
5
a terraforming vessel bubbled with microbiomes.
6
a pleasure craft which sequestered the ultra-rich in unimaginable splendour.
7
a scientific vessel measuring galactic anomalies.
8
a veteran warship bearing scars from many battles.
9
a nomadic habitat for lifelong spacers.
10
a prototype propelled by an experimental drive.
11
a cyclopean asteroid-miner, half-digested hillocks of ore still borne in its gut.
12
a cryopod carrier with a hold full of frozen colonists.
13
an explorer charting unseen frontiers.
14
a historical artifact preserved for its legacy.
15
a key minister's extravagant personal transport.
16
a troop-carrier used for planetary invasions, loaded up with drop-pods.
17
a medical vessel bringing miraculous treatments to colonies without the infrastructure for them.
18
a cycler making regular transport-rounds within one system.
19
a tug for stellar megastructures.
20
once the flagship of a now-thoroughly-discredited ideology.
D20
This derelict spaceship might be found
1
by its distress beacon’s message, garbled to an inhuman pitch.
2
by overhearing rumours in a scavengers’ den.
3
on a swiftly decaying orbit around a stormy gas giant.
4
by investigating mission logs that ended abruptly.
5
in a prodigious leak of government cover-ups.
6
in a neglected corner of space where there shouldn’t have been any traffic.
7
halfway embedded in an icy comet that should have mutually vapourized it on impact.
8
parked on the severed, skeletal arm of a spaceport.
9
based on hints in an old shipman's song.
10
by its minute occlusion of a solar system's star.
11
stuck in a Lagrange point among other interplanetary detritus.
12
by buying a drink for its deranged last survivor.
13
by the bizarre digital censor-shadow it casts on star-maps.
14
by following notes on a discarded cocktail napkin in a station's recycler-pile.
15
with a preserved, genetically-programmed blood sample drawn from a navigator-caste who was onboard it.
16
landed on a volatile-rich moonlet.
17
by stumbling into the warp-sinkhole it left behind.
18
based on the testimony of the last band of survivors to escape it.
19
based on the guilty confession of someone responsible for its disappearance.
20
by folllowing coordinates that insert themselves like a memetic virus into innocuous statements and computer code.
D20
A deadly threat present on this derelict spaceship is
1
its onboard artificial intelligence, glitched to violent paranoia with sporadic control over the ship’s systems.
2
the xenospore-infested corpses of its original crew, driven by coopted intellect to spread and fester.
3
a mercenary kill-team dispatched to cover up an oligarch’s scandal the ship is implicated in.
4
an opportunistic predator native to the void between worlds, extracting minerals and organics.
5
magnetic mines placed by a paranoid crewmember.
6
a killer robotic skeleton able to steal and wear other's flesh as a half-living disguise.
7
a deranged cannibal who's survived eating the rest of its crew.
8
a swarm of technorganic nanomachines fusing flesh and machinery like a hell-cancer across it.
9
the semi-incorporeal, ultra-terrestrial entity summoned by a cult which hid among its passengers.
10
the experimental automated spacesuits it was outfit with - now wandering husks rattling with the bones of their once-occupants.
11
an extraterrestrial knight who practices a bizarre
(from a human perspective at least) form of chivalry, using the ship as a
trial-ground.
12
a poltergeist which haunts it - the maddened gestalt of
its crews' minds torn from their flesh by some obscure electro-magnetic
phenomenon.
13
its surgery-bot, whose programming was damaged by radiation, making it obsessed with turning living creatures into art.
14
a tribe of degenerate mutant clones, meant to be emergency back-ups for dead crewmembers - gone horribly wrong.
15
a self-mummified psychic who survived the ship's
general failure via mentally-imposed torpor, seeking to lure people in
and break their will so they can take a new, healthy body.
16
that the genetically-modified plants used as a
supplementary food/oxygen source aboard it networked & gained
sentience as well as a hatred for animal life.
17
the alien from Alien, but like a bit different - maybe
it's got tentacles instead of claws and the stabby-tail, and lays eggs
in your brain that make you hallucinate, for example.
18
a great amoebic slime, hiding in the ducts and the
interstitial spaces aboard the ship - an ambush predator waiting for the
right moment to emerge and absorb.
19
a hungry gang of rival salvagers.
20
a cabal of vacuum-adapted post-humans who view the presence of their less-evolved kin as an insult.
D20
What makes this derelict spaceship difficult to navigate
1
its own brittle, decayed structure, which any solid shock risks breaking.
2
is its malfunctioning artificial gravity generator, which changes its direction unpredictably.
3
are the bulkheads separating and sealing off its
various sections, which can only be safely opened with keycards
scattered about.
4
is its fuel leaking into various sections, creating pockets of poisonous & explosive gas.
5
is that its automatic locks between pressurized and
depressurized sections aren't working properly, meaning opening the
wrong door could get you sucked out into space.
6
is its warped hyper-geometry, tesselated out by a flaw in its drive.
7
are the pools of acid which dripped out of its batteries.
8
is its unintuitive layout.
9
is that its spectrum-opaque chassis makes it impossible to scan from the outside.
10
is the disruptive radiation emanating from its reactor.
11
is the web of silk-steel alloy disaster-webbing unleashed across the ship to hold together fractured sections.
12
is that attempting to connect to its internal mapping will glitch out your system and feed you nonsense.
13
is that some immense force has bent it out of shape.
14
is that all the signs are in some language there's no publicly-available translation for.
15
is that its lighting is glitched-out, and blindingly-strobbing.
16
is that its wiring has become fucked-up, and parts that shouldn't be electrified have become electrified.
17
is the plasmatic fog which has gathered in its passages, restricting line of sight.
18
is its misleading signage, likely mistranslated.
19
are the big holes punctured through it by meteorites.
20
are the tangles of dangling wires, tubing, and flex-ducts lining its hallways.
D20
Besides the usuals, salvaging this derelict spaceship
1
will get you a lot of money, like, a lot a lot of money.
2
will earn you a hell of a lot of rep with scavengers, which you can use to make them back off claims or work with you.
3
will get you an experimental weapon which can wreck just about anything without exotic defenses.
4
will get you blueprints which can be used to greatly upgrade your own ship.
5
will grant you an intact module which you can transplant whole onto your own ship.
6
will bring you to the attention of a corrupt space-sheriff looking to shake you down.
7
will net you a contract from a corporation impressed by
your results, who want you to retrieve the important parts of one of
their own lost vessels.
8
gains you some exotic materials that would be worth some serious favours to the right buyer.
9
will get you an anomalous power-core that keeps working regardless of interference or resource draw.
10
will get you the experience you need to become an expert in dismantling spaceships with minimal risk to yourself.
11
will get you some primo blackmail material on some powerful corporation, government, or NGO.
12
can get you a handy, tanky, crab-shaped cargo-loader robot.
13
can get you a lot of goodwill and favours from the friends and family of those lost on it.
14
will get you a signal-spoof which allows you to disguise your own spaceship as the wreck to remote detection methods.
15
gets you an alien artifact that does weird shit.
16
can net you a canister of bio-nanites that can heal
just about any wound and replace limbs and organs by flowing into and
merging with your flesh.
17
provides clues that make up a sort of map to an even bigger, juicier haul.
18
can get you some cool and expensive cybernetic implants.
19
can get you a smuggled crate of good-ass space drugs.
20
will get a self-righteous squad of space-police on your ass.
This is a great micro setting / adventure setup generator!
ReplyDelete