Naturalist campaign

[Madarin Dude]

Watching nature on PBS gave me the idea of what an amazing undertaking it would be to catalog and study all the various flora and fauna of the empires 1100 worlds. When you look at the diversity of habitats and species here on earth and then you think there are over a thousand worlds in the Imperium many of them with fully functioning ecosystems. It can go into so many layers and 2ways it can be an endless campaign of ideas but the thing is there has to be a way to keep it fresh for the players and not make it feel it is just them running directly from the game masters script.
Plenty of inspiration right here and now with coyotes and blue whales and wasps. then you think of the fossil record and all the critters from that then you multiply that.

 

[whartung]

If you have an alien ecology to study, and the campaign is learning the inter-relationships of that ecology, then it might be interesting. The question is how do you involve the players, when as essentially observers and recorders, they don't really participate in the drama. They simply learn about it.

There is the series by David Gerrold, "War against the Chtorr", which has an increasingly diverse alien ecology that we learn more and more about as the books progress. There was even a GURPs supplement laying it all out.

 

[FreeTrav]

I like the idea of this sort of campaign. When is someone going to write up the Imperial Planetographic Society and/or the Gurmashalish-Audobon Ecological Protection Foundation?

 

[Andrew M]

If you have an alien ecology to study, and the campaign is learning the inter-relationships of that ecology, then it might be interesting. The question is how do you involve the players, when as essentially observers and recorders, they don't really participate in the drama. They simply learn about it.

Hmm, even on well run well planned expeditions there are problems.

The equipment is playing up.
The wildlife decide to do their thing in hopelessly inaccessible places.
The wildlife mistakes you for prey, a preditor or a mating rival.
Someone gets ill and needs to be evacuated urgently.
If you have locals helping they can get into trouble.
The locals demand a raise halfway up the mountain.
You have a rival who cares less about science than trophy hunting.
You need to make a case for preserving this ecology, while somebody else wants to exploit it.
Somebody is using this area to grow illegal crops, and the party stumble onto their land.
Sombody decides to start a war around you.

Anything I missed?

 

[rancke]

Hmm, even on well run well planned expeditions there are problems.

[snip]

Anything I missed?

Natural disasters -- storms, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, meteor strikes.

Anything I missed?


Hans

 

[epicenter00]

* Your TL2 "low environmental impact" culture decides they want to be advanced and sophisticated and start asking nasty questions like, "Your Imperium devastated the ecologies of a hundred worlds and now you're the strongest nation in the known universe. Why do we have to sit here at TL2 because you think we're quaint and make good guides for this vast ecology? We want to chop down our trees and stripmine our resources and become advanced and wealthy, too."

And this being the Imperium, there's megacorporations and the Imperial government who are more than willing to take the native's sides.

* The highly complex and beautiful ecology of the world the players have spent so many months or even years cataloging is actually a fabrication of a few people in Rhylanor University who decided see if their theories on terraforming were correct and once the players and their foundations started poking around, they couldn't tell anyone they did something bad.

* Politics often makes very strange bedfellows. If your players are on an uninhabited world with a nice ecology, they'll probably be the ones trying to sell the world's appeal to big game hunters and so on; a few dozen amazingly wealthy nobles or megacorp heads (or what have you) using their power and influence to protect a world in exchange for a few exotic carnivores or herbivores from the world is a small price to pay. This might also pay out with pharmaceutical companies who want untouched biodiversity to discover new drugs. Of course, what do the well-meaning players do when they realize the exotic carnivores show increasing signs of being actually intelligent...?

 

[FreeTrav]

Anything I missed?

Anything I missed?

:devil: Yes... be sure not to confuse a 'naturalist' campaign with a 'naturist' campaign...

 

[Madarin Dude]

?????

:devil: Yes... be sure not to confuse a 'naturalist' campaign with a 'naturist' campaign...

Are you talking about the actual players or the characters.

 

[Madarin Dude]

Some great ideas on how to proceed on one. I have not had a chance to play but I thought if it could be done it would prove an interesting campaign. To do it right would involve a lot of prep time for the game master. You would have fauna separated into friendly, dangerous, nuisance and of little consequence. I think I would have more fun as a GM with nuisance animals like the equivalent of raccoons eating your snacks.

Plants would be another thing to think of think of with completely different ecologies there could be a chance of severe reaction to things that normally would not be poison but with such alien flora it can be deadly.

In the book JEM by Fredrick Pohl one of the characters dies as a result of an allergic reaction to alien life forms.

 

[stealth]

I have an idea for critters.

Larry Niven's Puzzle-beasts - small horse-like animals with octupus-like camoflage ability.

And then the Grendel, from Niven's book of the same name. It's like a man size T. Rex but with super-speed. Gill-like organs super-oxygenate its blood, and another organ produces short bursts of a super-adrenaline.

Also, to make it more interesting, make it kind of like "Lost" with ruins from a dieback (the planet was once inhabited).

 

[mike wightman]

Nobody mention the noble position of Imperial Planetologist yet?

Good way to hide covert operatives in plane sight

 

[Rover]

Larry Niven's Puzzle-beasts - small horse-like animals with octupus-like camoflage ability.

And then the Grendel, from Niven's book of the same name. It's like a man size T. Rex but with super-speed. Gill-like organs super-oxygenate its blood, and another organ produces short bursts of a super-adrenaline.

Also, to make it more interesting, make it kind of like "Lost" with ruins from a dieback (the planet was once inhabited).

Niven's grendel is from the books Legacy of Hereot and Beowulf's Children. (Niven, Pournel, and Barns) two of my personal favorite books.

I used it in a as a creature in an adventure I ran in T20 Traveller several years ago. I had it stated out for D20 if you are interested I'll see if I can find it for you.

Ih Heinline's tunnel in the sky also had an interesting creature. called the "stobor" or dopey joe. a relatively harmless and stupid animal that every now and then packs up and goes on a ferocious rampage. harmless when alone, deadly in the thousands.

 

[FreeTrav]

Does it matter? All I said was "be sure not to confuse..." them. Either type of campaign is fine if that's what you're into (you and your group, that is), and your group's dress code is your own business...

 

[sabredog]

for what its worth my (now 12) youngest daughter overheard me explaining my homegrown Traveller universe to my (now soon to be ex) wife while we were driving around one day. Later that night Sarah asked me if she could see (she was 10 then) my "new video game"? I told her it was really not a video game but an old-school RPG I had been running since 1977 back when you had to just have a big game of "let's pretend".

So I dragged out all my materials and explained hot to play it. She was enthralled and rolled up a scout named Lady Victoria Challenger. Because she wants to grow up to be a vet and enjoys drawing and making up animals (she now posts her drawings to her Devianart page) I decided to run her in a solo game where the plot was that Scout Vickie found a new world and explored it while cataloging all the new species on it. So Sarah would randomly roll up a creature, and we would work out together what it was like as her scout "studied" it. And example was this:

http://freelancetraveller.com/features/animals/rsrunner.html

She gave up as her attention wandered, as kids do, to other things after a few moths but I'm still writing up some of the various critters. My point is that you cold run the game as a similar adventure where the players help roll up the animals and you then feed them some info at a time as you polish what the flora/fauna are based on the rolls. A player could roll up a set of creatures and then you work on what they are fully like before the next session while working them into the ongoing adventure.

For example, "Vicky" would release several small animal capture 'bots (large enough to dart and capture a rabbit) each night and then see what they came back with the next morning. One morning one of them didn't come back and its transponder showed it was a couple of kilometers away - much, much farther than it could get to on its own. She loaded up the air/raft and set off to find it. Sarah had already rolled up some potential scary predators so I has decided one of these had snatched the 'bot up and carried off in the night as a way to get Scout Vicky out into possible danger - which is what happened. My daughter got to find out all about the stalk/capture strategies of a particularly dangerous flyer when her character had to climb up some rocks to get the 'bot.

Anyway, that whole mini-campaign helped me flesh out a good portion of a new world's ecosystem while giving Sarah a good education in how animals interact with the same. And that not every animal has to be this horrifying ripper-claw-giant teeth-killer like hers all started out as. The universe needs pigs for the above beasties to eat, too. You might consider something similar for a naturalist campaign to help reduce your workload a bit - the players roll the dice and you supply the details.

And don't forget the safari ship, elephant guns, and native bearers who scatter at the first sign of danger.

 

[scott]

Just a newbie poking my nose in here, but this is a very cool thread--lots of good ideas here. I'm a nature geek anyway, so this kind of scout/exploration campaign sounds like fun. Just thinking of all the things I've read about going wrong on scientific expeditions--not even counting the "big, scary animal" stuff--gives me ideas.