Ad Ultra: 2099

70s British SciFi rocks! I started a new solo campaign inspired by old British 70s SciFi TV shows, like Space: 1999 and UFO—and am having a blast.

Sources of Inspiration

I got the basic idea for the campaign after watching some reruns of the old British 70s SciFi show Space: 1999. I’ve always been a fan of that show, plus the show UFO since I was a kid, too. Then I came across another Gerry and Sylvia Anderson show called The Day After Tomorrow.

All of these got me thinking about a campaign like Space: 1999. I had seen a couple different supplements that had conversions for Moonbase Alpha, but I had not really thought about using them.

But now I was interested. I didn’t want to just copy Space: 1999, with the moon flying through space. But I got to thinking about an exploration ship, like in The Day After Tomorrow. So I put those together, and came up with the idea of having a ship exploring star systems near to Earth, with the British 70s flair. That meant bell bottoms, sideburns, some gonzo aliens, but with a dose of reality.

With those themes in mind, I wanted to have the ship itself be the moving base of operations, just like the Enterprise in Star Trek. The question is: what are the PCs, and who are the NPCs? I get that anyone they encounter are NPCs, but what about the crew? I’m thinking that they will all be PCs, and dealt with as such. I have not designed the ship—and the number of crew—yet, but there will probably be only 15-20 people on board. That is a large number of PCs, but I might be able to swing it.

I can also reuse the stellar data from my Far Jewel campaign. I can just strip out the historical and political info, and just reuse the real data. I would only be dealing with stars relatively close to Sol anyway, so this would also have the benefit of keeping the scale of world building pretty small.

What I Want From the Campaign

Yes—what do I want? Aside from the fun of playing in British 70s SciFi themed campaign, I want to develop a process for exploring a star system that is repeatable and fun. In a way, the star system itself is a giant dungeon, and each planet is a level (it’s a stretch, I know, but go with it…)

The idea is that each campaign in this world would be the exploration of a new star system. So I need to come up with some general rules for how long it takes to get from Earth to the target system, how long the crew takes to explore each planet, and then get back. Included in that would be some tables to generate encounters and the details of the planetary sites explored. All throughout this, I want to tailor the Zozer Games Solo rules for crew interactions.

For a ruleset, I am going to use the Quantum Starfarer rules from Stellagama Games, in conjunction with Solo. That means I want to finally nail down some solid rules for solo gaming. I have been playing around with them for a long time, but I want to see if I can come up with anything different to make them work better. We’ll see.

How It’s Going & What’s Next

That is a another great question! So far I have the star systems set up, along with the database and setting info. I have identified the Gl 229 system as the one that the crew of the ship Odyssey will explore, and have started designing the worlds there. I had the basic planetary info left over from my Far Jewel campaign, but did NOT have full details about the planets and moons, especially the habitable planet, Gl 229a.

And that is where I got hung up. Instead of doing some quick setup and moving on, I started getting wrapped up in mapping the entire surface of the planets along with their details. What I figured out is that all I need is to do is roll a random number of landing sites, with another random number of points to explore at each site.

This represents the crew surveying the planet or moon, identifying interesting sites, and then exploring them on the ground. These actions will be the core of the adventure, but I don’t have to design the entire planet or moon—I just need to come up with the details of the points of interest at each site.

I have come up with some quick tables to determine what is found at each point of interest, but I want to use them a few times to see if I can improve them. I plan to use the results for inspiration to determine what happens—and how they affect the story.

The reason I was working all through this is I was running a Gygax ’75 Challenge for the campaign. The design of the “dungeon” for the campaign is taking place in Week Three, which is where I still am. I am going to work through the landing sites and their points of interest, and then move on to Week Four. That will be the design of the “town,” which will be the ship itself.

So we’ll see how that progresses. I want to get through that hurdle and get to where I am actually gaming the exploration of the star system. That is the real challenge that I wanted to get out of this campaign anyway…

Oh yeah… I named the campaign “Ad Ultra,” meaning “to the beyond.” That is what I am saying the people call the space beyond the Solar System—the Beyond.

I’ll let everyone know how things are going…

Marc