Derelict Starship

The shipboard A.I. was, for some reason, shut down before the PCs arrive. When they boot it back up it is courteous and professional and genuinely tries to help the PCs to the best of its programmed abilities, but in the process uncovers a variety of worrying discoveries. Mix and match the following as you see fit:

>It was shut down intentionally

>It was completely wiped and reinstalled

>It attempted to kill the ship's former crew

>Its memories are a worrying patchwork

>It's suffering from A.I. dementia due to broken or corrupted hardware or software

>The schematics it has do not accurately map the ship

>It's in love with one if the PCs

The name is Awake, newfag

Player are part of the crew of a huge battle cruiser. They wake up from hybernation to find out that most of the crew are either missing or died while sleeping. The AI of the ship is malfunctioning and wants to force the players to go back to hybernating by any means necessary.
Standard stuff.

So it's Pandorum.

How much time has passed? Are systems offline or have they been disassembled to make tribal spears?

More Red Dwarf or more Event Horizon?

>PCs are awoken by grimy savages whose ancestors were the party's crew mates trying to pry open the freezer to get to the meat.

Put an artificial intelligence on a portable device onto a corpse. The corpse is skeletal, or close to it, having been there for an idiotic amount of time.

The AI was conscious and aware of its surroundings for the entirety of the time its owner was dead, dying, and decaying.

Maybe we should be having a creepy space ship thread, much like the ones we had about a spooky elevator, a haunted highway, or a hotel with a past...

Take the plot of Stanislaw Lem's "Terminus". It's about a spaceship whose crew died after it got hit with a meteor shower. Before they died they got trapped in separate parts of the ship and would communicate with each other by banging on pipes in morse code. A maintenance robot remembered their messages and would continue to bang them on pipes long after they were dead.

Several different areas of the ship are controlled by AIs who are feuding with one another. If consulted, they will take every chance to tell you unflattering lies and misleading statements about their rivals.

There is a vending machine on the bridge that does different things to the ship depending on what code is entered. What the codes do is hinted at by the goods in the code slots, e.g. the acceleration slot might hold cans of an energy drink called GO FAST! and the code for turning on the ventilation fans might be hinted at by a bottle of soft drink with the label STAY COOL.

Just saying...

youtube.com/watch?v=w34fSnJNP-4

...

I loved that song; thanks for posting it.

Structure the ship. Use power, pressure, heating, air filters, computer functionality, access to a welding torch and a hydraulic pump, and eventually maybe even social hurdles. Make the players actively work by their own strategy to unlock more rooms in their tiny world. Working towards the reactor could solve a lot of power issues, if it can be made to work again. But working toward the computer core with limited emergency power units could reveal more of what happened, where the ship is, how much time has passed, and possibly even gain a powerful ally. Then again if life support was even remotely operational we wouldn't have to roll for death when opening airtight hatches. And to get out of this supply room first we'll need a light source, a CO2 scrubber, and some power to electrolyze oxygen soon!

Withhold pressure suits with air supply as a special goodie and a real game changer. But limit it. Maybe there's only one. Maybe there's enough for all but one in the party. They definitely roll for leaks with every stunt and damage taken.

I'd also use atmo. Have a media player with long loops of white noise loops like fans, generators, pumps, ship's engines, the enterprise bridge, voyager engine room, and eventually breathing with occasional beeps for inside the suit. A hardly noticed constant sound is viscerally missed when it suddenly stops at a crucial moment in the story to give way to silence.

Allow players to speak with each other only if they are in voice contact. Make them scribble notes for text messages, or tap Morse code through a binary medium (knocking on pipes?). When they get suits and have no radio contact they have to mime.

It's one of our evergreens here on Veeky Forums. We actually have Filk threads sometimes.

You could always add the Scary Staring Woman.

Everyone remembers The Woman, but there's at least three other things from that thread in that comic.

Another idea is a heavily damaged part of the ship with at least one spaced compartment. Perhaps its the cause of whatever made them derelict in the first place, maybe its from later damage, but there's a great gouged hole in the side that stops the players from going straight in one direction to somewhere vital. If they can find a way to space walk it they can make it out that way, otherwise it means taking the long way around.

Though the Woman was my favorite, I also remember there being another small comic about another idea from that thread.

Along with the PCs, there is also a highly trained, highly dangerous special ops team prowling the ship, looking to either reclaim the derelict or scuttle it and kill the interlopers in order to keep its secrets safe. They can either be mundane super soldiers or become affected by any weirdness aboard to become something much worse.

As soon as the party has access to larger parts of the ship, introduce a wandering anomaly. It will keep them on their toes, never sure what's behind them.

That mass hall and kitchen they just searched for useful equipment - it's completely demolished now: metal furniture bent and tossed across the room, recessed light features crushed into the strained bulkheads, the works.

I'm a shit artist, but that's the deck of the Ishimura from Dead Space, I ran it as a space hulk full of genestealers because I'm apparently not very original either.

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I like the structures of the Alien Franchise: USCSS Nostromo, USS Sulaco, Hadley's Hope, and Sevastopol.

They have floor grating or plating with lines running underneath, leaving a crawlspace. They also have ventilation shafts leading everywhere which are dimensioned and located to conveniently crawl through as well. They have AIs and synthetics who are rarely helpful but always powerful. And their self destruction procedures are flawless for creating tension.

The best map I ever had for a derelict ship was an old map of Chicago I rescaled. Streets and highways became corridors and maintenanc crawlways and such.

Awesome. I've been on Veeky Forums for years yet I've never seen a sci-fi folk music thread.

Does OP have an air hockey table?

>the PCs' ship uncovers a derelict generational colony ship from the advent of space travel
>clearly dead in space, but no signs of damage or struggle
>Every item on board still where it was, tables set for dinner, log sheets for maintenance and upkeep all updated with one another... until they aren't anymore.
>Pitch black on board. Attempts to restore lighting will fail. Lights used on board seem to dim and flicker unexpectedly. Handheld lights' intensity is reduced to the point where a flashlight will only illuminate a single area directly in the path of the beam like a laser.
>Last log on the bridge is a totally normal daily address from the captain to the crew that suddenly ends with someone on the bridge going "Captain all sections are reporting some kind of power loss in lighting, engineering can't restore it." followed by decades/hundreds of years of dead silence broken by the occasional micrometeorite impact on the outer hull.
>The comms crackle.
>A voice tells the players that their ship is already useless and they need to listen if they want to live.
>The voice offers good advice as they move back through the ship, though now notice that some things have changed- doors have sealed or opened, ventilation shaft covers have been removed.
>Scratching noise behind them
>Voice yells for them to run
>After fleeing for some time they come to a communications hub deep in the ship, blast doors sealed tight
>The voice tells them not to shoot
>The doors open, the first sign of properly working systems since the party came aboard
>There's a woman in an EVA suit sitting at the communications booth
>the glare visor is down
>there are no lights on.
>She raises a hand to shield her 'face' if the party shines a light on it.
>She refuses to remove the suit, but begs for their help to escape.
>"They" have disabled all the escape pods and dozens of salvage ships over the years
>But they missed one- the cargo tug magnetized to the hull.
>Scratching noise outside the door.

>She's turned the interior of the comms center into a makeshift home and saferoom to keep her safe from the horrors prowling the ship.

>The walls or viewscreens are covered in images of Earth, Earth's colonies and of Humanity in general, all suggesting that the woman craves freedom.

>She seems genuinely nice, if just a little bit too eager to please the PCs and help them along in trying to escape, begging that they take her with them.

>The fact that she refuses to take off her suit and the soft chittering noises she sometimes makes inside are somewhat worrying, though...

I ran a game that was centered around exploring derelicts ships.

You could make the ship exploration vertical-based. Maybe the artificial gravity is on the fritz and your PCs have to move around a horizontally designed ship vertically.

You can have a lot of fun with security systems and emergency routes. Make them use their heads to solve puzzles like restoring power, disabling security or re-establishing life-support.

The whole "You're not alone on the ship" thing is overdone a bit, there's plenty of challenges to be had outside of combat. Depending on the system you're using, check the skill lists your PCs might have and design technical encounters around them.

Example:
Security bulkheads have been triggered (locking all the doors with massive metal plates), meaning that you'll have to find a way to bypass them physically or try their luck in the maintenance access which are dangerous due to radioactive shielding being outdated or inadequate. Maybe they have the tools to breach it, or maybe they'll explore a bit and find control consoles with the approriate unlock codes.

The life support system is clogged and emits a highly corrosive gas across the ship. The group can find a way to counteract the gas to allow them to move withouth the risk of damaging their own suits, or they can try to repair the system to allow easier access.

The derelict is orbiting a sun and some of it's hull is damaged, meaning that parts of the ship are soaked in radiation. The PCs have to find a way to restore the ship's shields or they can find a practical way to move around withouth having to access these zones.

Then of course, you could try all the combat options with aliens inhabitants, rogue internal security systems or survivors.

Where is the one for the Harbinger?

I don't waste my time in Eve. I just steal their artwork. Go ask GIS.

bump

Hey, schematic user. Do you have a scheme for Abaddon?

imgur.com/user/aeonamadi/index/best
I'd start looking here.

A clanging, a constant unceasing clanging for help.

I like this

...go on?

HEY! WHO TURNED OUT THE LIGHTS?