What are some diverse rooms you might find in a huge, deserted colony ship?
Obviously stuff like the med bay, quarters for civilians and crew, bio dome, the machine room etc.
But what are some interesting kind of locations you could put into such a setting for players to explore without it feeling jarring?
Archive room
Cultural treasure room
A super market
The room where all the biomass of the former crew and passengers is being collected for assimilation.
both of these are in.
What kind of colony ship was it? Generation ship or were your guys asleep for most of the journey?
Recycling plant
Farmland
Prison
Greenhouse
Smeltery
Factory
Aquarium
Zoo
Basically any shop you think of could be a room in a ship depending on the size of the ship
A simulation room (like a Mars diorama, not using holograms or some bullshit) of the planet that the colony ship was headed for. Or possibly multiple simulation rooms!
It's a colony ship with FTL, so it should house people to colonize a planet a few year's travel away. no universal cyrosleep
good obvious ones, thanks
This is great as well
A fabrication bay, gigantic 3D printer cranking out whatever spare parts people need. Could have ran out of feedstock a long time ago though depending on how derelict it is.
Firing range depending on how hostile the planet is expected to be / for the security services to train in.
Is there artificial gravity? Not like a spinning ring, but true agrav?
If not, you should put a radiation protection chamber in a zero g part of the ship. Thick water-lined walls. Maybe combine it with the aquarium idea above? Would be a neat room
Various empty stripped rooms. Later on, the players come across a room that is blocked. A small gap between the wall and door shows that someone moved all the stuff from the stripped room to this room for an unknown purpose.
>inb4 the macguffin is in there and they have to break down the door, remove enough junk from the room to enter it, and then seek the macguffin, while the villain/monster(s) are tracking them down
I plan on having the ship be filled with all the different space-horror tropes, so suggestions like this are welcome as well!
How big a colony are we talking about, here? Hundreds of colonists? Thousands? Tens of thousands?
Gym, obviously. Probably some playing fields(squash, tennis, maybe even a full-sized field for playing baseball or whatever other team sports might be popular among the colonists) and a swimming pool as well.
Park, or at least gardens, in addition to greenhouses dedicated to food production.
A theatre or cinema.
Various meeting rooms and offices - with hundreds or thousands of people running on limited resources, you need some kind bureaucracy to keep things running smoothly.
A surveillance room for the security - there might not be cameras everywhere, but there are bound to be at least some in public and vital areas.
A chapel, memorial room or other area suitable for religious observances and funerals. Depending on the importance of religion to the colonists and the size of the ship, it could be anything from a relatively plain room with maybe an altar, suitable for when people need silence to a full-sized cathedral.
Also, some way of dealing with corpses - if people are not in cold sleep, some of them are practically guaranteed to die during the trip.
It's a long trip. There's no point in getting the colonists to their destination safely if they're going to be mad when they get there. You need to take care of their psychological needs as well as physical.
>How big a colony are we talking about, here
in the high hundreds
good suggestions all around, thanks
You might also consider multi-purpose rooms. A theatre can obviously also serve as an auditorium, when you need to gather everyone on board. A gym can serve as a basketball field or a firing range if you stow all the equipment away. A meeting room can serve many purposes. Unless we're talking about some ludicrously advanced civilization, space is going to be at a premium.
This is true, yeah. I would go through your big list of rooms and try and combine as many of them as possible OP. You'll probably still have a lot of them.
Also remember that you can get a lot of mileage out of searching individual quarters, storage cupboards and maintenance hatches. You don't have to restrict yourself to one big themed encounter per room or whatever.
A room filled with "alien" cadavers in various stages of autopsy and decay.
Preferably used in a setting without any aliens. The idea being that someone got crazy enough to use 3D printers to print out corpses of fictional aliens to dissect.
to add to this, some of the different ones could be stuff for
>finding area to put town based on nearby resources (wide, markers based on what will help them when they arrive)
>city planning
>galaxy map
Schoolroom, kindergarten/nursery. Humans being humans means you'll end up with kids around, even if they're not supposed to get pregnant during the voyage.
>humans being humans.
As a fellow human being I love that phrase and know precisely what you are talking about. Since this is totally a robot and alien free zone explain that in more detail, so we can all relatr to the great saying.
Ill go first.
As a human I woild die if I was exposed to massive radiation levels during my sleep cycles.
We humans can all agree on the above correct.
You need to read more documentaries in the comic-form. I recommend Spider-Man and Hulk.
Acclimatizing chambers. If the world they wanted to colonize isn't a perfect homeworld analogue the colonists would want to prepare themselves for the environment they are going to live in.
Which brings up another element that might help: The world the ship was meant to colonize. The reasons for going there could help you think up facilities the colony ship would have.