We are a crew on a spaceship and are trying to mine things. Not really a "build a village", more of a "give orders to crew to go to a station and press buttons"
This was something I thought of but my imagination wasn't sparked until I read this and really thought about it. I really like the idea of the characters starting out on a large space station with a hefty sum of cash. Then they buy their ship, supplies and equipment then set out in search of their fortunes.
What I really like about this is that I can petty detailed with the ships. Each one could have different methods of energy generation, propulsion, artificial gravity, cargo carrying methods, navigation, sensor equipment, ect. It could get very interesting to say the least.
I'd quite like a game where the people are boarding and repairing a derelict station, managing trade with passing traders while trying to set up some kind of profitable venture and reactivating/exploring parts of the station which have been abandoned for-who-knows-how-long and contain who-knows-what. Possibility of mad !SCIENCE! and dwarven asteroid miners.
I was thinking about the possibility of this when I wasn't sure if I should make another adventure or not. It has a lot of potential on pretty much every axis of challenge. You've got some economic stuff going on with trying to make a profit, exploration since you have a big mysterious station, combat (damn space pirates!) and political stuff since the station could be in the middle of some political shenanigans.
Or a small mining ship / slow travel ship gets to its target and the crew awakes.
Slow travel requiring cyro or people living on the thing...
I was imagining a cryo, with some kind of malfunction leading to the players having to survive in an almost empty area...and deal with whatever caused the malfunction...
I think rule number one of cryo is that nothing can ever go right. As soon as you hop in that tube you know shit is going to be going down when you get out.
I do like the idea of the crew waking up and instead of being at the next spaceport they are in orbit around a mysterious world with no idea where they are and no one in communications range. From there you can pretty much go anywhere, alien intervention? conspiracy? black magic? anything is possible!
and each player controlling a single person? Failure to post your turn means that consensus of other players direct your actions.
I've never done an adventure with multiple players. It seems like an interesting thing to do and it would lend itself to a lot of things but I've never given it a shot because my games are really image based. It'd be a real pain to have to draw 7 different panels and keep up with every player exploring stuff. Plus there is the whole issue of what players can see, if I am PMing everyone their own panel then it's pretty much like doing a bunch of games that all interact with each-other.
That said it's not that big of an issue if you are smart with your setting. If I go with something like the first suggestion I addressed I'm really tempted to have seven or so players with their own characters. I like the idea of the doctor and engineer both trying to get the captain to give them money to improve the facilities. It would be even better just in the first little section where the players have to decide what ship they want. You've got the engineer wanting the ship with the water cooled fusion engine but the ship has no weapons systems and the medical bay is in disrepair.
if we are going to be a mining ship crew I'd prefer we were on an FTL capable ship or were operating in system
I'd probably go with FTL capable. Probably a system where FTL travel isn't viable near stars so all ships have secondary methods of propulsion.
I don't know how fast FTL would be though. It's possible that cryo would be required or at least desirable.
If we need a way to be just introduced to each other it can be our first day on the new ship "Evil Lincoln"
"You all meet up in a space inn."