I have been talking to Cameron Corniuk about Sci-fi games recently. My position on science fiction games is that there are a lot of them, but the game you end up playing is a personal choice. There are very few “generic” sci-fi games on the market. Most have some take on the whole genre and are strongly tied to plot. Some of these games even base their rules on the background of the game. In this manner, it is very hard to play a generic style with a game designed this way. It is almost enough to test my sanity the way they play with the rules in this way! Whatever the reasoning behind this I have been awash with ideas for sci-fi games because of this discussion. I love sci-fi and would play it over fantasy if I could get a stable group.
Then it came to me in a dream…
The Sanity Drive! I am wracking my brain for a game that does this but it has not yet thought of one. It is a mash-up of Lovecraft/Sci-fi genre game. After all, many of Lovecraft’s creations were from “beyond the stars” so has this been done? Last night I woke from a dream. It was a dream of the far future where humanity has spread amongst the stars. But out there they found weirdness. Alien ideas and constructs that could drive you insane. So much so that humanity built many points of reality. These points surrounded the safe space created by their expansion. Inside it was safe. It was known as the reality space. Engineering of faster than light drives revolved around these three locations and the drives would not venture far from it. They became known as the Sanity Drive as they were built to protect those that used them from the weird.
Sanity Drive beyond reality space
There were those that were explorers though. they would seek to go beyond reality space and defy the edicts of those that ruled human space. They found that the Sanity Drive could only push so far at a time beyond reality space, but it was possible. Once beyond humanities bubble, the Sanity Drive would acclimatise to the new weirdness until it was again back to baseline and the explorers could jump deeper into weird space. What they find beyond is the stuff of nightmares and dreams.
Just my quick thoughts on a campaign
So, are there any games out there that I could use to put something like this together? I will be surprised if there is not some kind of Lovecraftian Sci-Fi game out there that someone plays. If there is not, would you play in something like this? Let me know and keep rolling!
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I would play something like this, but you’d have to figure out how to do it generically. And I think I have the solution: (provided I had time of course) to turn it into a P5: people, places, possessions, powers, and plot system (i have one free e-book I did with this system, but for westerns)
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Sounds like you could use something like FATE to do this. Id be more than willing to dive in.
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Sounds like a variation on the original Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader.
Psyker Navigators protecting ships from Chaos daemons in the warp.
A bit OTT than the more subtle Lovecraftian horror, but similarities are there.
Of course, game mechanics would be an issue.
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That reminds me of several books. Bayley’s ‘Thee Fall of Chonopolis’, Anderson’s ‘To Challenge Chaos’, and if course Lovecraft’s story where a man spends his nights working in an aluen library. I forget its name.