Is it possible to do post-apocalyptic space opera? Like Road Warrior, but in space?

Is it possible to do post-apocalyptic space opera? Like Road Warrior, but in space?

So like Star Wars if they never left Tattooine.

Yes. Why is this even a question?

Because I don't know how to have the lack of society and resources spread across multiple planets when space travel still works.

There are 100 space ships.

You mean like 40k?

I think the solution is simple.
>There's only one star system
>There were once many but it got cut off from the rest of the old space government
>Some kind of cataclysmic event saw the system's society completely crumble
>Most planets/moons are isolated from each other, the inhabitants rarely ever seeing a spaceship let alone actually travelling in one
>the rusted bones of a galaxy-spanning civilization litter the system

Players are one of the few groups who actually have a working spaceship. This opens up millions of storytelling avenues.

>what is warhammer lore pre primarchs

Ignore what most people say:
Running a post-apo-space-opera is a weird proposition and it will require a lot more thought than it seems. The idea of an apocalypse is the stark contrast of highly populated, highly culturalized setting going ferral. It requires certain degree of infrastructure, and near-constant reminders of past human presence. A post-apo world where you aren't sufficiently faced with the contrast of what has been lost.

Doing this on galactic scale and in space, which is notoriously hard to populate - and with technologies that allow you existence among stars, which generally imply solid self-sufficience, creating post-apocalyptic feel is hard.
That is not mentioning the fact that you have to figure out an actual apocalyptic event that could reasonably explain destruction of most life/culture/infrastructure on a galaxy-wide level. It's not impossible, but it's not exactly easy.
All of these problems make it INTERESTING, and definitely not impossible, but to make it work, it will require a little more effort than most other classic trope settings.

A lot of space operas seem to have disasters that changed how things are. It's not possible to have a space faring inter galactic civilization that is also decimated and non functional at the same point in chronology.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes takes place long after Earth perished and society collapsed and was reformed by the colonies.

Dune apparently had some problem with machines or AI which is why they use drugs to travel now.

You have to decide what you want, whether there was an apocalyptic event in the past of a space empire, or whether a decimated low tech world shows hints of a fallen space empire.

>what is warhammer lore
bad

Can't think of any settings like that not at all.

We are trying to help OP. Shoo, troll.

Foundation.

Earth started a bunch of colonies and large numbers of starships were built to serve the space lanes.

Then a FTL drive experiment translated the earth to oblivion, and you've got a few million humans trying to maintain infrastructure designed to be maintained by an economy driven by 10 billion plus consumers (meaning that all anyone can manage is to not backslide, no one can afford improvements, leisure, art, expansion, or innovation) and the spacemen who were supported by colonies that haven't managed to maintain their space infrastructure must either find new patrons as unwanted refugees, accept a new life as a dirt farmer/hunter gatherer, or supply themselves through raiding.

Boom, post-apocalyptic space opera.

40k is a bad match. It's "apocalyptic" in the sense that the lore is everything is going to shit. However it's not full Mad Max all over the place (like how OP describes)

try the prophet series user. It's based on a fallen biowarfare adept human empire being put back together by the clone slave soldiers that once fought for it.

Think of it much like cars in a current day scenario. Constant search for fuel, ship is always in need of repairs, spare parts are few and far apart. You can travel to other worlds/systems, but they aren't likely to be friendly to outsiders.

No clue on what sort of catastrophe would cause this. Some sort of civilization wide AI revolt, or future version of the y2k bug (when it was hyped up), maybe.

Who said it has to be galaxy-wide? Space is really fucking big. One planetary system is already way more space than you need for a massive-scale game.

Isn't this the plot of Dark Age mini game? Also Mutant Chronicles?

Age of Strife.

The Mad Max movies were more about social collapse than anything else, especially the first and second ones. Basically just come up with a stable social system that would allow people to flourish in an interstellar community, then start pulling it apart until you get to the level of insanity and desperation you desire. Then add space bikers wearing fetish gear, I guess.

40K age of strife

There are several, yeah.

Try watching a few episodes of Trigun. Its a Western set on a distant desert planet.

You've basically just described Stars Without Numbers' setting

Stars Without Number

And check out the expansions and the alternate Other Dust.

Have fun.

Yeah Space Fuel™ is running out causing the breakdown of galactic government and society. Raiders harass galactic trade routes and psychopathic planetary warlords take over systems abandoned by the protection of the galactic government. The galactic federation becomes more militant trying to preserve its power in its core planets leading to atrocities in the name of order

How's that?

>Legend of the Galactic Heroes takes place long after Earth perished and society collapsed and was reformed by the colonies.

Skyrealms of Jorune isn't really a space opera. It's very much like Metamorphosis Alpha, on which it was originally based... but it *does* involve Earth perishing, and the survivors, generations later, trying to get along with the native life on Jorune, where *we* are the aliens!

>Dune apparently had some problem with machines or AI which is why they use drugs to travel now.

Stars Without Number (attached) posits a system in which space travel was first made possible by spacecraft using "spike drives". When human psychics began to make space travel more practical and easier to manage, spike drives fell into disuse... until a galaxy-wide psychic event known as the "Scream" killed almost all the existing psykers, or at least drove them insane. For the next six centuries, Humanity tries crawling back toward where it had been, using the few functioning spike drive ships and then building new ones to re-establish communication between Earth and the Frontier.

>You have to decide what you want, whether there was an apocalyptic event in the past of a space empire, or whether a decimated low tech world shows hints of a fallen space empire.

Sounds like a plan!

battle star galactica?
that one episode of enterprise where earth got destroyed and only 30,000 humans left?
planet of the apes?

This pretty much

I guess that's a radically different approach from what most people here expect but what about a post-apo setting created by a sci-fi cataclysm?

Warhammer 40k and even Firefly both do this basically

>the galaxy is held together loosely by a government
>the government is apathetic, incompetent or malevolent, and doesn't take active interest in any of its world's so long as they pay taxes
>every world is thus wildly different, some being Utopias some being deathly shit holes, some futuristic some q step above dark age feudalism

The biggest factor for making a post-apocalyptic space opera is that interstellar travel needs to be extremely unreliable and out of reach for the majority of people

If you were to GM with a setting, simply gaining access to a functional ship and enough supplies to make journies should be a crushing challenge in itself for your players

So destiny?

You might want to look at MegaTraveller and Traveller: The New Era for ideas.

Mass Effect kind of did it with Tuchanka. The Krogan nuked themselves into the stone-age, other aliens find them and use them as shock troopers. They get other colonies, but upon a war with them and the other aliens the Krogans colonies are stripped, leaving them on Tuchanka that only got minimal infrastructure added since.

>early steps of space colonization, maybe 50 years from now with limited bases throughout the solar system
>Earth rapidly removed from equation--perhaps a poorly thought out FTL drive test suddenly tore most of the planet off and deposited it halfway to Andromeda
>?????
>Mad Max The Martian

A post-apocalyptic space setting is just a different scale. Post-apocalyptic on earth means things are more medieval and people live in the ruins of a more advanced society, have their leftover toys, but they've been kicked down to a lower level.

When you're in space you're most likely starting off at a higher level, so falling down means everyone is scattered on stations, mining colonies on asteroids, ruined cities on planets, and there is very little travel between them, they are mostly independent where once they were each just a part of a much larger civilization.

Some fell down further, they're stuck on one place, like if their ancestors station crashed on a desert planet with no chance to reaching the stars again.

>Some fell down further, they're stuck on one place, like if their ancestors station crashed on a desert planet with no chance to reaching the stars again.

With enough grit and determination, they might yet live to set foot on Hiigara again!

There was a pretty cool book about this called Runner. The premise was that automated ships could move people between stars, but nobody knew how to maintain them anymore. Whenever a ship was lost or ceased running, those planets simply fell out of contact.