Alternate History Space Race

Sometimes being a DM in the age of the internet feels like cheating.  I'm rolling the dang d30 every time behind the screen and no one notices because everyone is doing it.  I posted a while back about how the internet is a megadungeon.  My new Mars 1990 campaign idea has led me down a tunnel into some interesting caverns lately, like this amazing series of posts at alternatehistory.com which will give me some good starting points for my alternate history space race.  A real life space historian runs a simulation game with five Russians and five Americans players modeling national civilian and military space programs; they have gotten through 1973.  I am certainly not going to go to that level of detail but I do want to do a little reading up on the subject.

Heck, just looking at Wikipedia's broad outline of Cold War events in the 80's gives me a million ideas for the campaign. I have to make some big decisions.  Is George H. W. Bush going to be the President in my game?  I am also very much considering running both US and USSR groups of players through the same campaign.  I have been wanting to finally jump into Google+ gaming and this will be the perfect excuse.  I am envisioning the two parties as ultimately becoming bitter rivals in the race to unlock the secrets of the Martian megadungeons.  I will track time for both parties so that I can tell who gets where first.

Spy in a Backpack

I have gone many different directions when explaining character absences in RPGs.

Inspired by this post at the Temple of Demogorgon (all bow down to its name)

We had the classic "they were in the bag of holding" routine, as I had long since ruled that if you stuck a tube or straw out of the entrance you could draw oxygen from outside of the pocket dimension. My old 3e campaign took this to another level as two ninjas in that campaign would tie a twine around the bag of holding and attach it to an arrow they would launch from inside the mostly drawn bag, shooting themselves around like little magical fucks.  And I let them do it in the name of cool.

We had the "we don't give a fuck this if fucking Mutant Future and shit is all kinds of crazy anyway" approach.  (sorry totally unrelated link)

In my 4e game a player has been unable to attend for several months but luckily his goblin tinkerer had made an enclosed gunner's turret inside the chest cavity of Hammer the war-forged Barbarian and at the end of the last session he played he was in a trance, his consciousness exploring the dark crystal heart that Hammer's essence had been fused with.  So that dude can come back any time and literally just step out of another player character.

But in this campaign I am talking about starting up, I want players to drop in and out because of espionage.

Secret missions.  Everybody is working for one government or the other (or both) and no one is surprised if someone gets yanked from one mission to do something else for a bit.  Nor is it surprising when spies drop back in unexpectedly.  There is a home base to get back to before you run out of oxygen.

Spies in a backpack, y'all.

Campaign Idea - Alternate History Mars in 1990

Received some transmissions from the blogosphere today.  This fascinating post on an alternate U.S. space exploration history that could have been really makes me want to start a campaign on Mars.  It is the story of a proposed re-usable single stage booster which would have led to a lunar colony by 1978 and manned missions to Mars by 1986.

 I have been itching to run a Mars campaign since I read the Barsoom books a few years back in my quest to learn more about D&D's literary roots, and I have been wanting to run a Traveller campaign for some time.  I am loving the idea of a campaign set in an alternate 1990 or so, 4 years after the first manned Mars mission revealed vast underground complexes left behind (apparently) by an ancient Martian civilization.  I want to hork Travellers character generation mini-game (modified for alternate history 1980's, obviously) but use modded B/X D&D for the ruleset.  Setting it in 1990 would mean that the Soviet Union was still there, and I would propose that the alternate history would provide a new space race that would keep the Soviet Union together.  Gawd I am getting excited about this!  Megadungeon meets Mars meets Traveller meets Cold War!

I love this level of tech for a sci-fi space game.  I could use our real life tech levels of the campaign years, with the internet being a rich and never ending resource in that regard.  

I am not 100% sure if I am going to abandon the sci-fi fantasy Polynesian Islander-analog campaign that I have been working on or possibly try to do both, but I am definitely going to be putting some more thought into this idea.