I'm working on this for my current supers game. The characters are going to be teleported there by a Universal (think Metron of the New Gods) so they will not initially know they are on a starship.  I think this could just as easily be used for a Science fiction, or science fantasy game.

All maps are just rough sketch place holders- emphasis on rough.

There are several things going on on the ship, and there is lots of stuff to do. Only a little of that is reflected below.


0.0 Prologue.

Ghost planet Shuffle.

After searching around on the Ghost Planet for months, living off fungus and rainwater, the characters will upon entering a wasted ruin, encounter ORD of the Universals.


ORD is obsessed with order, control and classifications. He will look at the characters and grow immediately dissatisfied with their presence on the Ghost Planet. Using his Cosmic Computer, he will send them to Interphaze.

1.0 Explanations

Interphaze:

Interphaze is a huge, derelict colony ship built by humans in the 54th century.  Some centuries ago, the crew of the ship all died off under mysterious circumstances. During the chaos, the ship slipped out of real space, but the cargo remained intact. Now, Interphaze is trapped in zero space, with over 20,000 sleeping colonists on board. The ship is over 200 km long and has five distinct levels; each comprised of sublevels and sectors.  The engine has been locked in an overdrive state for centuries; soon it will over heat. The resultant explosion will destroy Interphaze- at the very least. That, as it turns out, is not the worst thing that is going on.



Zero Space:

A strange truncated shadow of real space; distances are much shorter in zero space. Ships with the proper sort of technology can drop into Zero Space and travel the stars at a much quicker rate. There are creatures and shit in Zero space and the laws of physics are not quite the same as in our universe.


The Krang:

The Krang are worm-like mind control parasites. They use other species as their arms and legs, whilst connected to them physically. Krang can join with any sort of living creature, although where they latch on differs from species type to species type. The Krang connect to humans and other vertebrates at the back of the neck and trail down the spine.

Recently a damaged Krang corvette has materialized within the Geozone of Interphaze. The small Krang crew exploring that level and the Biozone. However, the Krang have not yet determined the purpose or nature of Interphaze they think it is a world. Obviously, though, they are going to be very interested in thousands of potential hosts. Tanks and tanks full of larval tadpoles wait aboard the corvette. The highest achievement a Krang collective can make is to discover a new host species.

The current Krang host crew is comprised ten individuals of various species. A Krang collective brain makes command decisions aboard the Krang ship. The Krang crew is aggressive, but cowardly. They feel their main job at this point is to stay alive and find a new group of hosts to help repair and crew the destroyer.  Each alien host gains a super power whilst under the control of a Krang worm.


The Imae:

The Imae are small, furry humanoid creatures.. In reality they are actually genetically engineered primates of some sort, similar to a cross between an ape and a lemur (“Imae” corruption of the word primate”) Imae were originally employed as assistants to the engineers; due to their small body size and enhanced agility, they can get anywhere in the pipes and machines that make up the systems levels. Some of them still work with the maintenance robots on the systems levels and below. Over the centuries, however, others have escaped or defected. So long has this process been going on that the populations have split. Red Imae live in complex Byzantine cities located in the caves of the Geozone; Green Imae make up the savage tribal groups of the Biozone.

The Red Imae have lived in the Geozone for thousands of years. Their civilization is ancient, and it is only the most recent in a long line of cultures the remnants and relics of which are visible through out the caverns. Red Imae have shock swords and slug throwers.

Green Imae are extremely territorial and live in the in villages in the forest and mountains of the Biozone. Green Imae fight mostly from a distance with atl-atls.

The Yeti: fearsome bioengineered simians the yeti live in small mountain villages of 20-30 individuals. They are the descendants of populations originally created by the Cetaceans to destroy the Imae. This did not work out. They are, however, still employed by the Cetaceans (whom they worship as gods); their main taks is too keep travelers out of the mountains, and (unbeknown to them) to keep anyone from finding out the tru nature of the Interphaze. They have taboos about traveling too far into the mountain zones.

The Krang and the Imae:
The Krang will use the Imae if they have to but they are too small to be proper hosts and burn out after 1-4 days (i.e. die).

The Cetaceans:
Dolphins are in charge of the humans in storage.  They have been awake for the entire voyage and as with the Imae hundreds of generations have lived and died since the Interphaze left Earth. Desire to keep the humans intact, but may not be in a hurry to see the humans wake up. The Cetaceans and the Blue Imae that serve them are the only one’s that know the true nature of the Interphaze. They have (Imae) agents on every level; they are not aware of the Krang quite yet. If they become aware of the Krang they may change their mind about waking up some humans.

1.1
Over view of the levels of The Interphaze:
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Dimensions above are wrong 200 km long, 80 km wide, ~150 km height.  
 

Levels and sub levels of Interphaze:

The Biozone:
Being inside the Biozone is from the subjective point of view just like being on a planet surface. The Biozone is carefully constructed to convey this impression. it is covered with different land features and the sky is a large screen, the sky of earth is projected on to it.  It is very convincing and will not normally give itself away. There is a dead city of crew cottages on the lakeshore. Going too high into the mountains will trigger security droids. Also it will begin to snow. The mountains are the interface between the Geozone and the Biozone.

The Geozone: The Geozone is comprised of the mountains and the layer of rock that separates the Biozone from the rest of the ship. This space is riddled with vast network of caverns and tunnels. These caves resemble earthly caves and caverns. There is a great underground sea contained within this level as well several entrances to the Systems level.  The Red Imae have their strongholds here, but who knows what else lurks in the dripping darkness.

Systems Levels:
This is the world of catwalks, pipe-works and machinery that keeps the ship moving and capable of sustaining life.  Security and repair droids are common here. There are also hidden habitats, and gardens as well as aquatic tanks linked the the great underground sea. It’s a vast space and there is no way of knowing everything that is happening there.

Command and Control:
This area is shielded and it contains the control points for the weapons and guidance systems of the ship. There is also a dead city here.

Stasis Chambers:
Surrounded by a virtually indestructible stasis field, 20,000 human colonists, refugees from the war ravaged 54th century, wait to be awakened on their new world. These people are usually clustered into nuclear families. However there are at least a 100 marines kept in a separate group;  they can be woken quickly.

1.2 Mysteries and Secrets:
1. The world is a ship. The environment is artificial. Clues: the cyclic climate control malfunction; the sky is made of glass; in a few places, wire and pipe works run under the turf (the lake bottom is a massive pipe-works, for example).
2. The Krang are aboard. Clues: the skeleton; the burial of the worm in square 22 of the Biozone.
3. The Krang are riding parasites, looking for hosts.
4. The ship is a colony ship and there are 20k colonists in stasis at the bottom of the ship.
5. Ship’s security is active.
6. Throughout the ship, there are well-hidden rooms, complexes and connections to other levels, used by the crew in times past for a variety of purposes.

2.0
The Biozone:


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The scale above is incorrect- the squares are 20 km on a side- about a days walk. Also the mapped area is supposed to be an oval not a fucked up blob. I blame the weed.

2.1
Introduction: as stated above the Biozone looks like the surface of the earth.  Over the millennia, the cetaceans have created and released many creatures into the Biozone (and the Geozone as well) in order to try to wipe out the renegade Imae. Obviously this hasn’t worked, but has resulted in the proliferation of dangerous and unnatural beasts.

The weather is also funky here. Seasons can change over the course of a few hours.  In the mountains it’s usually snowing 1000 meters above the floor and higher.
Summary breakdown:
1.   The entrance point.
2.   The ruined temple.
3.   Foot hills. Night tiger.
4.   Foothills and mountains. It gets cold very quickly, here. The mountains are extremely steep here. And quickly become impassible.
5.   Broken sandy plain. Carnivorous tumbleweed.
6.   Village of huts made out of bones. It has been disertd for a long time.
7.   BSP, always a sandstorm.
8.   BSP nothing.
9.   Rocky barrens, giant snake
10.   Jungle; river
11.   Quick sand (mini adventure).
12.   Blood monkeys
13.   Jungle river. Anare- village of the Green Imae. Huts and tree houses.    A huge robotic claw sticks up out of the ground. There is an alter    around it.
14.   Jungle river, red dwarf scouts
15.   Red dwarf cliff village; access to Geozone here.  
16.   High relief woodland. Apex predator.
17.   River squid
18.   Shore snapping turtles.
19.   Crab town
20.   Zombie Island.
21.   Shoreline
22.   Island with administrative and security access. Access to Geosphere and Systems Level.
23.   Clear sailing
24.   Mountains
25.   River mouth. Danger
26.   Dome city
27.   Pipes visible all through the shallows.
28.   Mountains, dead saber tooth tiger, frozen stiff; techno wreckage.
29.   Jungle
30.   The canal
31.   Jungle swamp
32.   Mountains
33.   Jungle lots of overgrown mechanisms and junk
34.   The city of the dead.  Occupied by the naughty librarian, an artificial    being controlled by the cetaceans. The librarian resembles a really hot    chick and is mostly autonomous, but can be taken over by the    cetaceans at will.  The monorain station is also here.
35.   Jungle lair of the squid monkeys
36.   Highland rainforests.
37.   Highland rainforests.
38.   Highland rainforests.


2.1 The Monorail:
A hidden monorail runs beneath and through the entire Biozone. The are hidden stations everywhere- however without a tip off they are Virtually impossible to find. The main point of access, and the one the players are most likely to find on their own is the Central Station on the Island of the Dead.

More later...

You know, you might be the author of two of my settings. I'm DEFINITELY using this thing in my next game.

In the one I'm running now, the party was on a quest to retrieve the most powerful artifact in the universe, the Wish Fulfilling Gemstone. The last guy was Norse, and used it to summon an army and a dragon, then sacking the emerald city of bastardized Rokugan. So anyway, being a sand box, the party decided that getting the gem back is too hard and have instead started finding ways to make sure that it can't affect the people in the city they rule.

They know full well a couple of lesser demons that became powerful by practicing Shintoism and gaining magic have gone after the gem. They have pretty much said fuck it, and are letting whatever happens happen. If I decide these yaomo get the gemstone, I'm about a hair away from having them wish for the metal earth.

I'm sincerely flattered.
This one was the process of several disjointed ideas coming together at once. Eventually, I want to redo the maps the way Insufficient Metal does his.  And I need to figure out a way to map the Geozone and the Systems Level.
Anyway, I'm getting together for a four day ftf with my skype group in January, so I should have some more to say by then. I'm swamped in the interim, but who knows.

If you write more, it is great, but honestly this is pretty much everything I need and more to get my own writing going. You know designer's work never lasts five minutes with a GM anyway.

It would be weird to run something like this as I don't have much experience with super dungeons. Most of my games go back and forth between strait up combat or dungeons to RP and decision making. I love having a lot going on, with a lot of conflicted interests so that no matter what the party picks, it is somehow suboptimal... meaning that they have a lot to talk about in character. It is fodder for RP.

I guess I don't really know how to keep the RP going without having a lot to talk about.

With something like this, I suppose I could map out or at least write up big sections, each with their problems, and also put places to get reloaded and repaired in certain areas while places they need to get to in others, maybe have some timers ticking and let them decide what is worth going after.

It would be a lot to think about, at least for me writing a game.

One thing to consider, is there are likely all sorts of dangerous animals running around. The dolphins are constantly trying to get rid of the imae in the Biozone.
I was thinking of using a random dungeon generator for the systems level. Also, I think there should be a view port somewhere down there too.

I'll probably start with what I have here and wing it from there.

Awesome.

It is awesome.

That is pretty cool! I have an airship in Cosmothea I call a godship that is kind of like this in a way - in that you could travel all over it for weeks and not realize you are on a great airship created by the gods unless you find a window on an exterior wall. I haven't fully fleshed it out by a long shot. One day ... when I find time! But I'll look forward to seeing more on this ... if you do more, or at least how it goes with the heroes going through it! This also reminds me of Cathor, one of the worlds in Cosmothea (it's a ringworld with hidden areas of advanced technology, workers, subways systems, etc. that we've been running adventures on - on and off since 1979.)

Fun stuff you have there. I hope you guys have a blast!

Why just one dome?



(series intro here)

By the way, I've been eager to play a game like this since reading Bill Armintrout's article "Metamorphosis Alpha Notebook" in Space Gamer 42 in 1981.  That article was online on the Metamorphosis Alpha site but, sadly, is no longer there (not even via Wayback).

I went with one big dome as opposed to many smaller domes, because I didn't want outsiders (the players) to be able to figure out it was a construct while still on the surface. I want that revelation to come well after there get there (via teleport); I suppose, however, that there could be many big domes...

I got the bug to do something like this long ago, whilst thinking about stuff space traveling supers could do; it was reignited this summer, when I read Brain Aldis' Starship AKA Non-Stop. The idea for evil dolphins as caretakers of a bunch of humans in cyro-sleep has been in my head for about a decade, and was originally located on an early version of The Metal Earth, known as After-Earth.

As for multiple domes (which could feature very different landscapes and other themes), you could always link them via teleporters. The players might know they are walking into one, but not that it's on a space station. Just a thought.

Quote from: Aos;425811I went with one big dome as opposed to many smaller domes, because I didn't want outsiders (the players) to be able to figure out it was a construct while still on the surface. I want that revelation to come well after there get there (via teleport); I suppose, however, that there could be many big domes...

In The Starlost, the inhabitants of the domes weren't generally aware of the other domes because they had artificial skies and the doors out were locked.  There were "bounce tubes" between the domes that acted like a sort of teleporter.  The benefit of having multiple domes is that it allows you to have other environments and to run other campaigns.  The plot behind The Starlost (which probably influenced Metamorphosis Alpha) was that the ship was out of control and heading for a star so the "campaign" was to fix the ship and set it back on course.

[Not sure how the word "environments" turned into "documents".  I wonder if I have some sort of auto-correct turned on or maybe I'm just going prematurely senile.]

Yeah, I think I will go with multiple domes, maybe 5- 10 arranged in a circular fashion. Access to the other domes always has to take place beneath the surface of the Biozone or through a disguised teleport system of some sort (maybe it looks like a tunnel through the mountains or something, and I think each will be ringed by mountains as well, or some other barrier that isolates the inhabitants from the surface of the dome.

I guess that the fact that I'm doing comic book cosmic means I can throw issues with feasibility right out the window. I really need to think on this.


I don't know though, I want the players to spend some time here, but not the entirety of the campaign, so maybe one big dome is better after all. Golly, i just don't know.   Anyway, I have a copy of MA 1e here, somewhere I think I'm going to give it a read through.

So anyway, the other day something i read somewhere in some blog post or other, said you couldn't really do a super hero sandbox game- well, I guess, I kind of disagree. not only that, what we have here, if I manage to get it right will be an unholy mixture of the sandbox and the mystery.
discuss...

Quote from: Aos;426517I don't know though, I want the players to spend some time here, but not the entirety of the campaign, so maybe one big dome is better after all. Golly, i just don't know.   Anyway, I have a copy of MA 1e here, somewhere I think I'm going to give it a read through.

Make phase one the Metamorphosis Alpha campaign and The Starlost plot.  Basically, save the ship from being off course or headed for destruction and put it back on course or even take control of it.  That starts out in one dome and then turns into a scavenger hunt across all of them to do what needs to be done to fix what's wrong (see the PM I sent you -- the article I mention talks about that, too).  Or the characters can just find a way off of the ship and leave it to its destruction, the players' choice.  So the game goes cosmic either when they get the ship fixed and under their control or find a way off of the ship (finding an auxiliary shuttle, stealing a visiting alien ship, repairing a crashed alien ship, etc.).  You should be able to deal with either possibility.

Quote from: Aos;426517So anyway, the other day something i read somewhere in some blog post or other, said you couldn't really do a super hero sandbox game- well, I guess, I kind of disagree. not only that, what we have here, if I manage to get it right will be an unholy mixture of the sandbox and the mystery.
discuss...

My group has played (Champions) Hudson City pretty much like a sandbox.  For some of the games we've played in that setting, the GM had a lot of stuff happening in the city and the PCs chose what to investigate and work on and what to ignore.  There are things we never did find out.  For example, my character never did find out if mole men were responsible for the vaults being mysteriously emptied from below.

Quote from: John Morrow;426914Make phase one the Metamorphosis Alpha campaign and The Starlost plot.  Basically, save the ship from being off course or headed for destruction and put it back on course or even take control of it.  That starts out in one dome and then turns into a scavenger hunt across all of them to do what needs to be done to fix what's wrong (see the PM I sent you -- the article I mention talks about that, too).  Or the characters can just find a way off of the ship and leave it to its destruction, the players' choice.  So the game goes cosmic either when they get the ship fixed and under their control or find a way off of the ship (finding an auxiliary shuttle, stealing a visiting alien ship, repairing a crashed alien ship, etc.).  You should be able to deal with either possibility.

Well, they're super heroes, so they're probably going to feel like they have to save the thousands of colonists. I wont force them or anything, but I suspect that will be their choice. Furthermore, there are mind control parasites aboard, as well, for whom the colonist represent a whole lot of new hosts- which they desperately need.  So there is a mystery to solve; a ship to save; aliens to fight; and then they need to find a way back to Earth 1952. I can't see it taking less than 10 sessions really. Hmmm. I need to think on it.