ITT: ideas for sci-fi encounters and technology

*furious Endless Space shilling*

The party has been hired to deliver filtration systems and several gigatons of cometary ice to a colony on a desert world. Corrupt local officials and businessmen who maintain power and wealth by artificially limiting the water supply attempt to sabotage the operation.

The party encounters a resource harvesting operation: a high-tech race is draining exotic energies and cosmic matter from a pulsar.

The race is not hostile, and will tolerate the presence of the party. In fact, the middle-rank leaders of the operation will try to recruit them into doing thankless drudge work for bullshit (by their standards) payment. Meanwhile, many of the common workers will find a particular liking in provoking the party by hacking into the party comms and shittalking all day long.

You ship's life support has suffered a major malfunction and you must undertake an emergency landing on Myrmidon 7, a jovian moon undergoing terraforming. The locals live in hovering cities while monitoring the multi-century terraforming process. They are a closed society trying to build a paradise. You aren't allowed to land in their cities and they don't take kindly to visitors disrupting the developing ecosystem. You must keep your landing stealthy, taking on water and air, and then sneak into one of the cities to procure replacement parts.

The Principality of Kandora, a militant dictatorship ruling several systems, is amassing a large fleet to invade one of its neighbors. You have been hired to infiltrate their assembly yards and introduce a virus into the fleet's comms. You must pose as mercenaries or arms dealers and gain physical access to the command and control computer on one of their stations or ships.

I like it

Research station SX43189 is no longer sending updates to the Imperial Science Academy. You've been hired to investigate. the station had been setup to study the unusually coherent EM emissions from a small blue-white star designated PCR445. Turns out the star is sentient, but highly solipsistic. It finally noticed the small (by it's standards) research station and took over its computer systems while trying to communicate it.

Life support is failing, and the docking systems are offline. Can you get onboard and get the research team out before they suffocate? Can you make it out of the system before the Radiant Mind takes control of your ship's systems? Can you negotiate with a star?

Hey buddy. We can top off your He3 tanks no problem, but my diagnostic system says your AG field needs to be recalibrated. We can't fix it here, but my brother in law has a service station which can do the job.

Is that a giant dickhead with Trump's hair?

The Principality of Kandora is rebuilding their fleet from the virus which turned their ships guns on each other. The center of their efforts is a new dreadnought under construction at a high security shipyard. You've been hired to sabotage and delay the construction, but once you infiltrate the facility it turns out the ship is closer to launch than expected. You either have to overload the ship's reactor, or find a way to steal the whole vessel.

Your last few jobs paid quite well, and now it's time for some well earned R&R on one of the nicer orbital habs in the system of Michael's Joy. It's a damn shame those Kandoran agents have finallym tracked you down.

One of your least favorite contacts claims to have a lead on the Kandoran senior agent running the op to track you down. Sadly he wants to meet to hand off the info in one of the less reputable sections of the hab. Take a gun, and keep your wits about you. Even if it's not a trap, the locals might kill you for the creds in your pocket.

The lead panned out, but the news is not good. The senior agent gunning for you has pulled back to the Kandoran enclave on Samuel's Landing. It's basically a walled city with only two points of entry, and is probably the most secure area in the entire system. Bribing your way in is the easy part. Getting out after you've neutralized a senior Kandoran agent and scragged his personal datastore, that's the tricky part.

Must be 18 to browse Veeky Forums kiddo

Not the best picture capture but the new social space in Destiny 2 has helped me to imagine what a typical "village in the wild" would be like for a sci-fi setting

>pose as mercenaries or arms dealers
>pose as
you're already expecting too much from my party.

That was a pretty fun read, user.

On closer inspection, the fungi are all interdependent and frequently use specialized spores to communicate with each other. Although they are just mushrooms alone, altogether they form a rudimentary brain.

Stranded on a small planet, a group of robots forgot their origin and purpose and have set up a tribal society.

You are the reptile influencing the government of a world.

Any encounter lifted directly from D&D with the word "Space" placed next to any fantasy elements.

Not my idea, but one I spotted on Veeky Forums a long time ago:

In deep space, the players detect a large *something.* Going to investigate, they find an incredibly large, crude spaceship. Boarding, they find the thing is fucking archaic: there's barely space to move in the tiny corridors, for all the exposed piping, clunky machinery, steam valves, copper cables, etc. There's some old electrical stuff on the ship but hardly anything that could be described as a computer. There's not even any artificial gravity. In the deepest part of the ship is a burnt out [FTL device], either as rudimentary as the rest of the ship, or clearly far more advanced and crudely incorporated with the far more basic technology around it.

Dotted around the ship are a few human skeletons in ancient space suits. In the cockpit is a lone skeleton. Lying near him is a stub of pencil and a paper notepad, covered in frantic scribbles in an unknown language. Managing to translate/identify them reveals them as Russian. They're dated as being from the 20th century.

A maurauding band of Space Ogres are currently raiding the Space King's Space Village northeast of the Space Capital. His loyal legion of Space Paladins have been dispatched to deal with this threat, but no response has come back for a Space Week, not even the Space Courier. It is your job to figure out what happened!

You joke but I'd play it.

The president has been kidnapped by space ninjas.
Are you a bad enough spacedude to rescue the president?

>just the regular president
>not the space president
I'm a space adventurer, I've got far more important space things to do than bother myself with petty planetary problems.

That's pretty neato idea

Do want.

This is an episode of Doctor Who (more than one).

Also the plot of an Akira Toriyama manga and I guess Fury Road while we're at it. Been used lots of places.

"Fat cat using water supply to exert control" is a pretty basic but good plot.

Also partially the plot form Chinatown (and therefore also Rango).

Bacteria that has slight (several second) time travel properties, to respond to minute negative stimuli. Someone figures out how to coat their ships with it so if they get hit they can jump back before the hit and maneuver away

A non-spacefaring planet, completely depopulated by a brutal centuries-old nuclear war. Deep underground, some surviving bunkers are still run autonomously, and an underground train system can be re-activated.

I was just thinking of dragonball abridged "space australia" joke.

A rogue planet with a self-contained underground civilization which maintains an technological, social and cultural equilibrium for the last 5 billions years. They have automated measures against intruders which would disrupt their feat.

>Rogue planets wandering the cold depths of space far from any star are very romantic in a science fictional sort of way. However, such planets are highly unlikely to contain life, unless said life forms enjoy living at a chilly 3ｰK.
>But scientists Dan Hooper and Jason H. Steffen have an intriguing notion. One type of exotic particle (WIMPs) postulated as being behind the dark matter phenomenon would mutually annihilate other such particles, creating heat energy (i.e., WIMPs are their own anti-particle). WIMPs generally only rarely encounter each other, but they can be captured by the gravity of a planet. In the planet's core, WIMPs scooped up by the planet would quickly find other WIMPs and annihilate themselves, heating up the planet.
>Hooper and Steffen calculate that since Terra is in a WIMP poor part of the galaxy WIMP annihilation would contribute a totally negligible one megawatt to Terra's heat. By contrast, Terra absorbs 100 quadrillion watts of heat from the Sun.
>However, in the WIMP rich center of the galaxy, the heat goes up dramatically. They calculate that within 30 light-years of the galactic center, a planet with ten times Terra's mass could absorb enough WIMPs to generate 100 quadrillion watts. Thus such a rogue planet would be warm enough for life as we know it even with no sun nearby.
>For people who take the long view, this would be ideal. A planet in a WIMP high region could be kept toasty warm for trillions of years, long after all the stars in the entire universe had burnt out.

>The station shakes like a hurt living thing.
>The lights dim and fade away.
>The artificial gravity goes; the air pumps cut out
>And the bartender starts to pray.

... Okay, why is baby Cthulhu giving me bedroom eyes? S-should I call Arkham or the FBI?

I dunno... It's giving me innocent, vulnerable baby eyes, like my maternal instincts are kicking in and I should pick it up and hold it and take care of it for life and never let it go, not even when it wants to go to college or begin its reign of terror and spread darkness across the world.

That's because a mutant crab has obviously cut off the top of your skull and made a nest in your frontal lobe so it can pilot you like a fleshdroid nursemaid for otherworld horrorbabies.

So congratulations, I guess?

I love these ideas for ship/pod homes.

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> coffins
comfy name for beds I guess

What're these concept art for, anyway?

First a geta captcha for gouda butt,
and now broadway broadsword. Why are you so eloquent today, captcha?

What is up with all the general space/sci-fi stuff?
It seems like there has been a lot of it popping up on Veeky Forums.

happens once in a while, we circulate through genres sometimes

It was fan art for the cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. Beyond that, I don't know who actually created the artwork.

I AM SINISTAR
BEWARE, I LIVE

> the party has been recruited to travel to the Space Barrier Peaks from the Grand Space Duchy of Geoff, which has recently been attacked by a plague of bizarre and unspacely monsters that not even the most learned space scientists can identify. The source of the monsters is a strange hyperspace dungeon, guarded by woemholes of impenetrable quantum entanglement, that has been discovered in the Space Barrier Peaks. The party must enter the hyperspace dungeon and put a stop to this tide of abominations, and if possible find out what the space hell is going on.

The rest look okay, but the pillar of antigrav sounds like it'd be really awkward when going in and out

Marcel van Vuuren is the artist.

I agree. It's good concept art, but needed tweaking.

Shut down of combat android factory

>old combat droid factory
>seemed like a great place to loot but...
>locks on the door broken
>all dark inside, no power
>everywhere you point the meagre beam of your flashlight creates dozens of humanoid shadows all around you
>several of the androids are missing from their racks
>too late to turn back and anyway you're lost in the labyrinthian complex
>place begins to reek of death
>you come across your first, reeking bodies
>dull echoes of moaning all around you and whispered phrases like the lullabies of madmen

Is the place haunted?
Insane combat droids roaming the facility?

No, it's just a bunch of hobos living out their hobo dreams, talking to themselves, dying of exposure, and occasionally having sex with the android bodies. Not necessarily in that order, mind you, and only the most advanced in the hobo arts can do all three at the same time.

there are also a few ambling, purposeless combat androids standing around on standby. They don't do shit, because all the AR tags they need for autonomous operation have been stripped by the proprietors when the place was abandoned.

Great, thank you for the mental image of striped combots hobbling around leaking oil and hobo jizz while betting you to kill them because they "cannot self terminate"

Elephants.

IN SPACE ROOMS.

I like these. Very inspirational.

The murder hobos turn out to be murderous sex bots raping their own kind.

a stable higgsfield forms close to a very populated star system

can you help them evacuate or find a way to deal with the threat before the entire star system disappears under the cascade of oblivion?

Jesus, Ted, those weren't "murder hobos" or some kind of elite hobo infiltrator bots. You've been shooting the homeless and mentally ill, man. A LOT of the homeless and mentally ill. This is not the kind of thing that looks good on a performance review. Now get a shovel.

I've seen diaper hentai of her

>a group of antimatter molecules stop existing at the same time and place your ship does
Fixed.

Anthropomorphized homeopathy?

>constructing something that big on a planet with gravity
i don't buy it.

I wouldn't make it as Terracentric as a whale*, make it docile enough to be studied, make the player characters discover it and decipher its song language of electromagnetic pulses.

*Make it far more alien, and keep the sci-fi hard. Really think about how a living thing would evolve to live in the void of space. They'd probably have to be like giant solar sails. Hell, they'd probably be more plantlike.

This is cool except you have to walk through the bathroom to access one of the bedrooms. I actually toured a house like this when I was house hunting years ago.

>entire star system
you mean the entire universe?

>robot hobos
>hobo robots
>Hobots

>Jack, I need to leave my room
>fuck you, John, I'm shitting here!

the time bomb
it transports matter within the radius a random amount of time into the future
no physical defense or shields other than spaced armor can stop it, since any matter put up to block it will also be sent forward in time

it is especially effective on samurai

Wielding magic plasma swords?

I know it's supposed to be Neuromancer fanart, but I always have a hard time believing that the artist ever read the book.

>MFW my players think this a high fantasy D&D campaign

>spaced armor

it forces the bomb to detonate further from the hull, so less of the target gets affected

I think the idea is that by having multiple separated layers of armour, you can minimise the effect of PORTABLE AKU by having it hit the outermost layer, erase that and a few of the outer layers, while leaving the inner layers intact. Presumably, this is because having solid armour thick enough to stop it is unwieldy in-setting.

Also,
>The party beats the big bad of their high fantasy D&D campaign
>this sets off a new macguffin
>Turns out [NOTABLE GEOGRAPHIC FEATURE] was actually a crashed spaceship
>strap in losers we're going to the moon

The house I lived in as a kid was like this. Pic related; only way to the bottom level (besides going outside) was through the bathroom. I think it was maybe originally intended to be a garage, but was made into a room instead (and then my dad added a proper bedroom behind it).

What do you make of this one?

See that the child of the dead god is fully birthed to take it's rightful place as ruler of the universe.

Or to stop it.

Alternatively

"Congrats, You've been chosen to become the heart of our new god!"

Help the endangered space jellies escape poachers!

Can confirm is absolute kek.
had a "demon" on a mountaintop that exterminated the dwarves there (Rogue lictor, single hand-edly made the stout outpost extinct), mutants roamed the countryside and the only thing holding the feral world together was a crashed inquisitor ruling.
Guess who the PC's decided to depose with the help of friendly voices teaching them magic (hated and feared by all rightful thinking humans!) and telling one of them he was the "Rightful Heir", and he was "Prophesised to free the people from tyranny and bring about an age of Victory!" and other dross.
By the fourth session one of them had (Unknowingly) pledged their soul to Slaneesh and was actively working to corrupt another to Tzeentch (again, thinking he was doing what was best).
Good times.

...

Well, it's only looks 1% human, the rest of it is just a puddle.

I agree with alien, but I don't think anyone would adopt a plant. I'd go the opposite direction and have it grow up into a Gunbuster-style space kaiju, with the downside that you have to disguise it as a spaceship if you want to take it anywhere near a port or the local authorities will react like you just rode a dragon into town.

You come across The City, beware the Gravitational Beam Emitter toting bobbies on the beat.

Can I pat the smol elder god on its head?

Did that with a warhammer fantasy campaign once - the Brettonian Knight players though they were just dealing with a bunch of mutants trying to take over the throne. It was actually a genestealer cult infiltrating the kingdom, that had hatched out of pods in an ancient crashed battleship in the mountains.