arouetta wrote:Now I'm building the ship, and I'm having trouble with the armor. Light armor is for up to 150 tons, but medium is for 300 or more. So what about between 150-300 tons? I'm not sure whether to use light or medium.
Preference is yours. You could have a 200 tons armor be "heavy" instead of 300+ because the ship's hull is made of some hard to come material/league that is lighter than the usual plating, or go the opposite way with a 200 tons armor that is only as useful as (150 tons) light armor because the plating is a veritable nightmare of badly welded plates, recycled parts of even older ships and cheapo jury-rigging... Use what you like and then make up an excuse/plot hook out of it.
Well, what sort of game would you like to make up? Want it gritty like Aliens or Firefly, pulpy like Star Wars, Andromeda or something out of a comic, "brainy" like Star Trek or Babylon 5? A bit of either? Defining the style of story
you want to toy with will help in defining boundaries, what
does not interest you at the moment because with that in mind you'll have a much easier time in defining possibilities & limits for them and guiding their character creation where you want so no one comes with a redeemed Sith Time Lord Starship Trooper to a Space Odyssey game.
With style defined you can set up some setting background, separate some material to pilfer ideas from/for inspiration, see what kind characters your players come up with - and what extra plots, associates or trouble you can mine from their stories - and you are set to start i think.
Also, no shame in pilfering what books you
already have at hand for your adventuring needs. Don't have deckplans? Dungeonmap becomes an asteroid full of weird mutants, experimental and some aliens, the weapons lab of some lost civilization or whose owners still live but are isolated in another section. A city map from any other game can be the inside of a huge space station or a place in any world of your. Take away the weird people and Mos Eisley could be Casablanca from a WWII game or any of a number of pueblos in a western. Palaces can be mausoleums, parliaments, actual local palaces, museums, the mansions of the filthy rich or vice-versa.
It works for NPCs too if some catch your interest... those Palladium brigands? Replace bows & arrows with harpoon pistols - or porcupine-esque aliens that throw spikes, or both - instead of melee weapons use some blades of energy or some weird material that may parry blaster shots if the user is skilled or lucky enough and you have a colourful gang of spaceport thugs instead!
yes, that was a cheap and low move, but you get the idea i hope. I love Firefly and i'll be the first to say it mined the hell out of westerns all the time.
Anyway, work with what you already have so you may dedicate more time to the creative parts, relax and have some fun.
