Thursday, July 7, 2011

When Worlds Collide

(or: Starfleet Wars meets D&D)
I've posted before about a campaign game involving starships and space battles, but what about adopting the Five Powers setting to another string of linked combats: a role-playing game?

While Traveller seems like the obvious choice, I think it would be fun to stat up the various starfaring species for Dungeons & Dragons.

In fact, you could derive an entire setting from the SfW background, basing the characters on already-existing classes from the B/X version of the game:
  • Terrans: 12" move; no special abilities; use fighter experience table
  • Entomalians: 9" move; two weapon attacks per round (they have four arms) + paralyzing stinger; vulnerable to smoke/poison gas; use elf experience table
  • Carnivorans: 12" move; +1 strength, +2 constitution; use dwarf experience table
  • Aquarians: 12" move (18" in water); amphibious; use magic-user experience table
  • Avarians: 15" move; +1 dexterity; use cleric experience table
Since this is a sci-fi mod, all characters are considered proficient with all weapons and armor.  To resolve spaceship combat at the individual character level (e.g., starfighter vs. starfighter), just use that character's to-hit number.

I envision exploring a world that was the scene of a massive battle decades ago; battered starship hulks litter the world, waiting for adventures to recover valuable technology (or plain ol' loot) from within ancient wrecks guarded by unsleeping automated defenses or now occupied by strange creatures from this or other worlds--a high-tech dungeon crawl. 

Would such a world be worth exploring?  What about importing some of the Five Powers to a traditional D&D setting?  I will explore that idea a little more in the coming days.

3 comments:

Jim said...

A very interesting idea. Have you seen Terminal Space?

Desert Scribe said...

Thanks, Jim. I'll have to check it out.

maxmike said...

As I mentioned somewhere else on this blog, I've been running a SFW based game for many years, combining Traveler races (and the MEKTON system) with MAATAAC ground units and Star Fleet Wars ships. My friends all played one of the races (and when friend Bob M. ran out of ships and races he created a race out of Legos!). The break down was:

Terrans= Humans
Avarians= Droyne
Carnivorians 1 =Aslan
Carnivorians 2 =Vagyr (I divided the Carnivorian fleet into two--easy since there was a real style change in Book 2.
Entimolians= Aliens from the Movie
Aquarians= Classic sci-fi lizardmen

I'll try and post the breakdown pages here as PDFs.