Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.
"This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.
How's illumination situation on the ship? What about some kind of darkness themed name for the Wasteland? I'd guess most of the infrastructure, lighting included has been destroyed in the fighting and nobody bothered to rebuild it. It's kind of likely for the dwellers of the neighbouring parts of the ship to start calling the area 'that dark place nobody cares about'.
The ship's on autopilot (logically, such ships would require minimal or no input during the flight), the bridge's been sealed, security measures activated. It's an optional (meaning very hard to get into) area that will require bypassing the security measures and getting your hands on bridge officer's implants that would allow you to override previous orders.
Exploration plays a bigger role than it did in AoD, which calls for more places with multiple points of interest. Overall though, if you're listing populated places that you can visit and do some quests, other than the Habitat and the Pit, we have the mutant town, the ECLSS, and the Shuttle Bay.
Over the decades the conditions slowly worsened and by the time Ava Miller took over, most systems operated far below their capacity. The length of the voyage had exceeded the ECLSS capabilities a long time ago and it was a miracle that it was still operational.
How so? With the ship being on autopilot and the journey fully prepared, how could that not been planned for?
Seeing the brilliant concept art for the hole that leads to what once was Mission Control and considering that once humans lived there, its name is The Lost.
I am sticking to my proposition from my previous post, that it is much more logical to have gravitation generated by the ship slowly rotating around its longitudinal axis. From an engineering point of view it is much more straightforward to construct a ship in space from decks wrapping around its longitudinal axis like the concentric layers of a tree trunk, instead of dealing with a lot of edge cases, let alone the headache how to generate gravity. Its shape would be perfectly cylindrical like Arthur C. Clarke's Rama. If you leave the centre unoccupied and the ship had a radius of 6 km and the ship rotates once every two minutes, you get a gravitation of 1 g at 4.5 km distance from the centre, directed towards the ship's hull.
It's more interesting because the gravitation varies depending from your distance to the centre, it's about 0.66 g (near the unoccupied or hollow centre) at 3 km and 1.33 g close to the hull. You can account for that with stat adjustments for dexterity for example. But the more interesting aspect is that over time gravity may very well affect the evolution of lifeforms, so that people being born and living in a habitat near the hull become more sturdy, with the adverse happening in low gravity.
Logically the large shaft/tower that was mission control would extend from the 3km down to the hull, with the admin center possibly located at the decks close to 1 g.
Over the decades the conditions slowly worsened and by the time Ava Miller took over, most systems operated far below their capacity. The length of the voyage had exceeded the ECLSS capabilities a long time ago and it was a miracle that it was still operational.
The mutiny and the damage it caused (leaking reactor, poorly maintained engines and other systems) wasn't planned for. Plus,
the ship has arrived a few decades ago and been orbiting the planet ever since
I am sticking to my proposition from my previous post, that it is much more logical to have gravitation generated by the ship slowly rotating around its longitudinal axis.
Over the decades the conditions slowly worsened and by the time Ava Miller took over, most systems operated far below their capacity. The length of the voyage had exceeded the ECLSS capabilities a long time ago and it was a miracle that it was still operational.
Wow, that is a major spoiler but it is definitely bold.
Essentially, it means that the commoners on the ship have lost their ability and/or interest to track the mission's progress. Says a lot about their history and the needs of their lives. Well done!
I am sticking to my proposition from my previous post, that it is much more logical to have gravitation generated by the ship slowly rotating around its longitudinal axis.
You could still treat levels as flat. There is no change in the longitudinal direction and crosswise the decks could be built from flat plates that are 500 m wide.
If you are worried that some of the concept art would be invalidated, I don't think so. For example the concept art that shows the tunnels and a hull breach wouldn't need altering. You could easily say that the outermost decks are made out of these tunnels, and while the gravitation is directed towards the hull, so that you have a different orientation, essentially standing on the hull, the hull breach could be in a neighbouring tunnel so that you could see the same scene. For the most part, it just requires wrapping your head around these concepts. But the rewards tend to be worth it. A lot of opportunities can emerge from a more hardcore SF setting to create a more organically built ship. Interesting mechanics for roleplaying and stories/quests that make use of the environment tend to have their own inner logic and lend themselves to naturally occurring reactivity, which should make writing more straightforward.
You do realize what treasure trove the New World setting could be, don't you? It's easy to see how the dungeons could be filled with creatures that have mutated from rats, dogs, insects, spiders, snakes and so on. It only gets more interesting the more you can ground the environment in what the ship and good science fiction can provide, e.g. spiders dominating the ventilation shafts in the ruined mission control and many other creatures occupying niches that result from the hazards that come with the ship's architecture and state, like empty space, different atmospheric composition, lack of air circulation, extreme temperature ranges, radiation, special compounds emerging from the chemistry determined by the manufacturing processes originally used and much more, plus any combinations of these.
Maybe you can use these ideas for a spin-off one day.
Not the most original twist, but I suppose the reasoning behind it was that it lets your decisions have more consequences (settle planet/refuse to tell the other settlers the truth, and rule the ship with an iron fist/etc.) than if the ship was still en route.
Not the most original twist, but I suppose the reasoning behind it was that it lets your decisions have more consequences (settle planet/refuse to tell the other settlers the truth, and rule the ship with an iron fist/etc.) than if the ship was still en route.
If the ship is still on route, there isn't much you can do but pick a side. If the ship's already arrived, you instantly get two very meaningful extra options and a score of smaller ones.
I think The Wasteland is fine. But alternatively, if you're looking something that conveys the idea of a merciless and voracious hole, how about Infinitron's Greed?
gravitation generated by the ship slowly rotating around its longitudinal axis. From an engineering point of view it is much more straightforward to construct a ship in space from decks wrapping around its longitudinal axis like the concentric layers of a tree trunk, instead of dealing with a lot of edge cases, let alone the headache how to generate gravity. Its shape would be perfectly cylindrical like Arthur C. Clarke's Rama. If you leave the centre unoccupied and the ship had a radius of 6 km and the ship rotates once every two minutes, you get a gravitation of 1 g at 4.5 km distance from the centre, directed towards the ship's hull.
It's more interesting because the gravitation varies depending from your distance to the centre, it's about 0.66 g (near the unoccupied or hollow centre) at 3 km and 1.33 g close to the hull. You can account for that with stat adjustments for dexterity for example. But the more interesting aspect is that over time gravity may very well affect the evolution of lifeforms, so that people being born and living in a habitat near the hull become more sturdy, with the adverse happening in low gravity.
What if peole on the ship still using geographical names like hill, mountin, den or cleft, isle, river, stream, brook? That's everyday expressions, used in everyday life.
Imagine you are reading some short story, where characters travelling around "hill, mountin, den or cleft, isle, river, stream, brook" but you feel something is wrong - there was used wrong verb, like "mountin rang loudly under feet", and in the end everything turned out was not what it seems.
Possibly it overvomplicate writing, so it won't be used, I post it only for starting point in contemplation - what's psychology of ship's inhabitants? How they perceive the world of a ship?
Brainstorming.
I'd just call it Mission Control and have characters refer to it as the control deck or something. If you need a fancy name, something like the Crypt, the Hole, the dead deck or one of the other shorter suggestions sounds better than the Wasteland to me. Get too fancy and it starts sounding like a bad fantasy game location.
