Sci-Fi Worldbuilding: First Steps

Sci-Fi Worldbuilding: First Steps

Two of my favorite tabletop RPG genres are high-magic fantasy and soft sci-fi. I dislike using most of the published settings for my own games, so I have no choice but to create ones myself. And I like persistent settings to play many games in, so if I create one, I should make it enjoyable for myself to GM and, hopefully, for the players to play in too. While I have a setting for TL 4 fantasy ready, I do not have one for a high TL sci-fi game. In this post I will try to explain how I start creating one.

First, I asked my usual player group about their preferences in science fiction. Receiving dissimilar responses, I compared them to my own preferences and tried to compile something average out of them.

The first parameter is the scope - most of the players said that they like large scope settings, and so do I. Thus, large scope is a given. Let's settle not on the whole galaxy, but maybe on just a large region of it, which gives us a vast number of star systems with possible empires both large and small, and large swathes of empty space to place precursor sites in.

I did not ask the players about their preferred scale, because for the setting to have more replayability I decided to make it have a variable scale. Some games could be limited to a single planet, while in others the PCs might travel across the galaxy and back.

None of the players preferred hard sci-fi over soft sci-fi. While I find hard sci-fi interesting, I think that soft sci-fi creates more possibilities for adventures, diverse characters, and fun in general.

Quite often sci-fi settings feature various alien races, some more alien than others. My favorite hard sci-fi settings - Orion's Arm - features few true aliens, but most of the more common "aliens" are actually genetically modified humans or uplifted animals or other forms of life. Most of the true aliens are so different, that they would probably be unfit for player characters in a GURPS game. Only one of my players had a strong preference on this subject - lots of alien species, both truly alien and Star Trek-like "rubber forehead" ones. My preference is the same, so there's nothing to decide.

Psionics is another topic worth considering. Not everyone likes "space magic", but I am still inclined to include it in my setting, because supernatural powers provide more fun ways to differentiate characters, species, and even technology. I will exclude Astral Projection, Biokinesis, Dream Control, Necropsi, Psychic Healing, and Psychic Vampirism to make psionics feel less fantasy-like.

One of the most difficult decisions was the TL. TL 10 looks like a good average, but I feel like limiting myself to a single TL I will miss out on many fun things of lower/higher TLs. Thus, I decided to try to make TL variable among the civilizations to cover a larger amount of possible scenarios, but use TL 10 as a baseline. For example, a player might have a character of a "low TL" species that has discovered space flight not long ago (late TL 8), a character for an advanced TL 12 species, or anything inbetween. This will make traits such as Low TL and High TL and TL-based skill penalties relevant, but will create an imbalance in combat. But if we use adjustments from this post, we will make this imbalance much less severe, as even TL 9 weapons with specialized ammunition will have a chance to penetrate TL 12 armor, while "low TL" protection will not be completely useless against high TL guns.

Not all superscience will be available, and most of it will require some special rare material. Thus, control of the material will grant some species/factions access to specific superscience technologies, and sources of such materials will grant us opportunities for adventures.

An important concept for a setting of such scale is FTL travel. To make interstellar empires possible, it must exists along with FTL radio. To make things more fun and to have worlds in the setting be more self-reliant, I decided to make FTL radio "slow" and require robust installations to send/receive. Thus, most of the messages will be carried by FTL messenger spaceships, and FTL radio will only be used on planets and huge starships, and still will be slower than sending the message with a ship. Also, I want to have multiple FTL travel methods be possible, but the exact speed, advantages/disadvantages will be provided later.

Spaceships play a big role in such settings, so I must expect the PCs to either own one, to be assigned to a ship, or at least use a liner ship occasionally. Spaceships typically are way too expensive to purchase, and spaceship combat using GURPS Spaceships is intended for more realistic scenarios (and you have to use errata). I have no idea how to make spaceship combat more space opera-ish for now, but I will think about it.

AIs also heavily features in most sci-fi settings. Will true AI exist? Are mind uploads equivalent to an AI? I think they should exist in the setting, but be ubiquitous. I want to avoid going full transhumanist, like in Orion's Arm. Spaceships still will be mostly human-operated.

Having multiple empires and species brings another issue to my attention - interstellar finances. I do not want the setting to have an ubiquitous "federation" that will use a generic credit, so the setting must have multiple currencies. This means that trade using currency will be mostly confined within a specific empire, and to trade with aliens the PCs will have to resort to barter, which I find interesting. This should create more adventure opportunities.

This is all I've got so far. My inspiration sources are going to be Heinlein novels, Orion's Arm, Master of Orion (the third game has very rich lore despite being almost unplayable). I wonder if this ends well.