I've been watching Scavengers Reign recently and I was wondering how to run a game built around the kind of biological puzzles you see in this series.
(For those who don't know, this is the original short film it's based on: https://vimeo.com/179779722 the rest of the series is basically this, but longer)
It would be easy to write a scenario along these lines, but what I'm mostly wondering is:
Would there be a way to run this as a sandbox campaign? Something like
>You find an albino Brigulax. It has the A property
>Give it Zblem to eat (property A converter), he will throw up a substance with the B property
>That substance is exactly what you needed to get the Kram (B convertor), which you found two sessions ago, to give you what you need (painkillers: which requiers compounds with the C property)
>Would there be a way to run this as a sandbox campaign? Something like
No. It's impossible.
>Sandbox is impossible
Well, alright, if the term "sandbox" triggers you, how about:
"Would it be possible to run it without having the entire crux of the scenario being pre-scripted, but instead having a system that allows the players to come up with their own combinations?"
It will require a lot of prepwork or a lot of improv. homosexual.
It should go without saying that with the right group, with the right mentality, you could have collaborative worldbuilding game where everything is alien and it turns into making up a bunch of shit and then figuring out how it all works together by puzzling out how they could combine and exploit these different ideas to accomplish goals and overcome challenges.
>Player A suggests there's large, wobbly, glowing beasts roaming around eating the orange grass
>Player B says his character found small insect-like creatures that give off a static-like shock as a defense mechanism
>Player C discovers a plant that can carry a small charge like electrical wiring
>after killing one of the wobbly beasts and capturing some zap bugs, the players realize they can create bio-torches by combining those discoveries, using zap bugs tied with plant-fibers to charge up the glow-organs harvested from the wobbly beasts
Now, if your players AREN'T into any of that and shrink away from being asked to come up with ideas of their own, you'll have to come up with all of that on your own, and then figure out ways to communicate the various properties and potential uses of those things to your players, and then hope they figure out what to do with them on their own. Or spend all session playing 20 questions until they eventually ask the right questions to get the answers they need to then make the right decisions and so on. Or they just make a bunch of dice rolls and when they succeed, you read them a property or hint about the mysterious alien thing to them, or tell them what they can do with it, I guess.
tl;dr this is going to be hard in ways you may not be prepared for.
Sandbox campaigns only work with very autistic individuals who like your setting and want to rip it apart. It also requires you have the ability to rapidly improv and keep things coherent.
>...individuals who like your setting and want to rip it apart. It also requires you have the ability to rapidly improv and keep things coherent.
No shit?
This is how you have a good ttrpg group in general. The autistic part isn't mandatory but it helps, since autists are typically better roleplayers than normies and schizophrenics.
I don't think a set of puzzles can create a beliveable ecosystem. With time every plant or creature will just become a tool or a trap with a fancy name in the eyes of a player. It all will be endless lore check fest.
This is also a very weak spot of the series. You can't predict how things work based on what you've already seen since there is no real inner logic behind it. It is all just a long "never let them know your next move" meme.
>You can't predict how things work based on what you've already seen since there is no real inner logic behind it.
Precisely, to be able to run it on tabletop you would need to present elements to the players that would allow them to figure out which element could combine to what to get which result.
How to make that palatable and fun is what I'm trying to figure out.
How about starting with real life survival?
>How about starting with real life survival?
...Keep going
True, personally I'd imagine a world like that as an abstract/analogue work of art. The sorta thing Solaris combined with the Qu might make it it were a wandering hippie world-mind intending to loop back in a few million to see how the system's developed. As to the series I'd agree though I wasn't looking for plausibility given the surreal Mobius vibe to the whole thing.
Mythic Bastionland's titular Myths might be worth a look, the gameplay for that is hexcrawl while learning local lore to interpret what threat precisely the realm faces. Make npcs denizens of the environment instead and the Myths other threats and you may be in luck!
Typical snowflake to piss and shit whenever a dude is less than a flawless übermensch. Sam struggled with some issues but was heroic through pretty much every I stand of doing so. His flaws elevated him, not cast him down.
>both mc males get fricked over>one because he didn't listen to a woman
>the other because he was a toxic chauvinist
>show ends up as a 3-way between le stronk independent wimminz
You're stupid and ignorant.
I know this is blatant rage bait because you're a pathetic loser in desperate need of attention, but I'll respond anyway because I kind of liked the show.
>one because he didn't listen to a woman
This is a complete fabrication. Sam dies because he's on a hellworld and let his guard down for a second. His character was tested and he went to his inevitable end with nobility and altruism at heart. Qualities I'm sure you'll call woke or whatever, but the best qualities of man nonetheless.
>the other because he was a toxic chauvinist
And this is bad why? Because he's a man and there's still women and Black folk to kill?
>all the men die
>all the women do awesome
>teehee it's just coincidence!
You're a blind, retared NPC.
I've heard that often, but don't know where this comes from.
The captain (don't remember the name) is a white dude and competent and based.
The female characters aren't flawless either.
Mostly, I really like the graphic style. It reminds me of the comics Aldebaran, by Leo.
You must have just started watching, the bait and switch comes soon.
No, Sam is absolutely the boss. Knows what he has to do and does it, right through to the end. The white woman acts like an evil prick and gets done in for it at the end as well so what's your moral there?
Right, you haven't even finished season 1.
What fricking show did you watch?
Typical of NPC's not to know woke trash when it slaps them in the face.
Sounds like the Mothership module Tidebreaker.
Based on the video game In Other Waters.
I almost feel like I'd want to set up some kind of tech tree, like one of those survival/base-building video games. Encountering new creatures unlocks new stuff (like how, by the time you catch up with the crew in the first episode, they're already using native life forms as gas masks).
That would require a lot of prep, though. But it could create situations where the players aren't able to access a particular area until they meet the creature that unlocks the required tech (e.g. floating islands require the gas bladder to reach, noxious fume-filled caves require finding the air filter creature, etc.). I might pair it with some kind of base-building rules and have the game be a kind of hex crawl with their crashed ship in the middle, while they mark new areas on the map and acquire new tech to access them.
Considering the pretty rare occurrences of actual NPCs in a game like this, I'd probably want pretty strong procedural rules to keep us occupied. I get the feeling that this is not a narrative game, the emphasis isn't on character interaction, it's on exploration and resource management, so I'd want some crunch.
Thinking about it, that's less of a tech tree and more of a key/lock situation, which is a lot easier to set up. I think this kind of game could be fun. I'm imagining that the base-building part would be central to it, and I'm not familiar with an RPG that fits the bill there though.
Yeah, that's the kind of stuff I'm going for.
But I was wondering how to enable the players to combine stuff to get these new tech/keys.
Especially, how to allow them to come up by themselves with original combinations.
Previously I used to do something like that:
>Player spends the day searching the area
>Finds something unusual (say... a plant that grows extremely quickly when exposed to water, or a rare animal)
>Later, sometimes way later in the campaign, they face a situation and sometimes they go
>"Hey! why not cross this chasm by throwing the plant that grows super fast in the river?"
Nothing of this is scripted, I can even improvise weird discoveries like that sometimes and a few hook/keywords are all that's needed for an item to be used in an unforeseen way.
But this system can't work for stuff like: feed this plant to that animal then wait for the animal to sleep etc...
Personally I'd veer towards more of a "managed sandbox" where there are overarching ticking threats. PCs hex crawl about finding survivors, landmarks and supplies while encountering (and hopefully recording) ecological tidbits all the while. Then you start hinting at some regional change like the cyclic emergence of mating drones + their predators or some short-lived destructive weather. It's up to them to both take cues from the wildlife and exploit their instincts to personal benefit. Of course given "sandbox" running away is an option too but they have to learn where to run too and if the overarching mission of "get off-planet" binds then to a particular region then that means they'll have to learn and master it sooner or later.
Not gonna bump but don't feel like ending the thread with some salty incel's seething either. Sounds like a strange yet compelling campaign OP. Good luck.