Coming back to Palladium- with a space campaign

[Bill]

The GM forum is a low traffic area. Opinions will be offered, but it may take a couple days. I think Aliens Unlimited might be useful for you. It includes a lot of detailed profiles for different aliens that could show up on your creature feature.

[burgler81]

I would recommend Aliens Unlimited and the Aliens Unlimited Galexy Guide. Mutants in Orbit could also give you some ideas.

[Lord Z]

This description does an excellent job of describing the events which constitute the game, but I am wondering about the tone.

Is this game Space Opera? If so, the explorers will likely have access to powerful weapons and great technology, all in gleaming new condition. The new Robotech books or the old Macross II books would suit this well, or possibly Phase World books. Or you could go a completely different way, and have the explorers use biotechnology instead of mechanical technology, thus Splicers would be the book to use. The zombies would be more of an occasional danger when something goes wrong or when an NPC betrays the team. The big threats are the aliens (or evil humans) who overran the medical space station and introduced the z-virus to the planet. Mostly the zombies are there to give the PCs something to blow up with particle beam cannons.

Is this game Survival Horror with sci-fi undercurrent (like in the Aliens movies)? If so, you don't need any technology books because the stuff is breaking down or won't be helpful anyway. Even minor threats are always major threats to these characters. Emphasis is placed on scavenging or resources and safe houses. Rifts Madhaven and Systems Failure come to mind. A good collection of maps will be more important.

If you are shooting for some type of middle ground, like an Urban Fantasy, I recommend The Rifter Issue #45. It has an alternate version of the Dead Reign setting with demons. These demons are often smarter and more dangerous than the zombies but all have zombie-centric themes, a good match for your spaceborn heroes. There is even a great demon with god-like powers who might be waging a war against a series of planets. To help pump up the explorers, they could have access to the stuff from your Chaos Earth book (with no more than one Glitterboy suit or a squad of Glitterboy suits which are all breaking down) including psionics and a few low-level spells. Or, you could use Heroes Unlimited for variety and let the players justify how their characters get the powers & stuff (quantum mechanics makes for a good explanation of just about any superpower, see the anime Noein for examples).

The truth is that you already have plenty of books to run this game. Good luck and let us know how it turns out.

[Spinachcat]

Sounds like a fun campaign!

You could buy a lot of books, or you could just use what you have just fine for a couple dozen sessions of great gaming.

Chaos Earth gives you plenty of hardware. Mercs gives you some more OCCs and more gear. Dead Reign gives you lots of zombies.

It may be an interesting campaign where the Covenant ship decides to reclaim a planet for themselves, wiping out the zombies. Of course, this would be a lengthy process. But maybe, they don't have the manpower, aka each planet has billions of zombies and maybe there are only 10,000 humans left on the Covenant ship.

So instead, teams have to go down to the zombie infested planets, grab a bunch of info, supplies,

My suggestion would be to use Chaos Earth gear as Covenant issue and Rifts Mercs gear as stuff they find on planet. I like the idea of how the humans killed off the aliens in their prior wars of conquest because that does allow you the chance to introduce weird alien tech. You could pick up the Atlantis or Splynn Dimensional Market book or just make it up and make it really weird.

I don't know if you need a Big Villain Organization. The Covenant ship is in trouble and they need to find a home. The first planet will give them info about other human planets and some history about the great war and the post-war crisis. Then the ship can leapfrog from planet to planet learning more about who the humans were, what they did and what went wrong.

Perhaps at some point, they will meet up with human (or alien) survivors...

BTW, how are you going to do the SDC / MDC conversion?

[Spinachcat]

The sdc/mdc conversion could be a problem.

I guess it depends on the lethality you want. If you want their armor to last forever, then 1:10 is a fine ratio. If you want the game to be dangerous, do a 1:1.

Mechanoids Homeworld had a cool little rule about weapon penetration. Essentially, some weapons just didn't have the umph to do any damage to certain armors. AKA, 9mm bullets and stun guns and some low power lasers were meaningless to Mechanoid armor and really, any decent human armor as well.

It would be easy enough to rule that reinforced hulls of robots are immune to zombie attacks, making the robot pilots even more valuable in a fight. But perhaps there are zombie aliens whose claws are like the Alien or a Genestealer and capable of sheering titanium.

one of the scary parts about the zombie planet will be the fact that the zombies are not human. this will be their first encounter with alien "life" and it is already dead.

Very cool.

[Spinachcat]

If I am piloting a Bulldog Robot from Chaos Earth and wading into a horde of zombies, am I in any danger?

How would that work in your Chaos Earth + Dead Reign campaign?

[drewkitty ~..~]

HU GG
HU AU
RDB PW
RDB 3
RDB FotG
ATB Mutants in Orbit
Scrapers
and All the other space books books that PB makes, no matter what setting.

[Erinoth]

you could have thinker zombies pilot pa, or zombies with mdc armor on from before death.alien mdc zombies