All I would ask is to make sure you have a story and an arc for the ship up front. The ship came from somewhere, is going to somewhere, and is doing it with some reasoning behind it.
Whether the players can discern it in their limited contact time is orthogonal to the alien ships mission. Specifically, the alien ship is on some mission that is logical to the aliens.
Have that all worked out before first contact, as it will help guide you should the players disrupt that mission somehow. It also gives all of the robots and what not things to do. They may simply ignore the players, as long as they're not destructive etc.
But having the ships history and mission helps make the rest of the scenarios write themselves, and provides a consistent backdrop for the players to work with.
Don't worry too much about cliché's. Everything is gorged with them. They glue the interesting stuff together. When it's all cliche, when it's predictably cliche, that's when the issues come in.
But if the first thing the players see is a dark, cold corridor with something dripping, where the lights don't work, and the flashlights flicker -- heck, that's just good story telling.
I have a very arc in mind...I personally love a bit of background and a solid rationale for a major piece in a scenario/campaign myself. it isJust more fun for everyone if the setting has a little depth.
Ah, yes the standard bits and pieces sci-fi/game lovers almost expect. they can be used to advance a story, or play on suspicions, fears, and paranoia of players as well. Is that big leathery roundish thing i the middle of the room an alien egg waiting to give ya a big kiss and hug...orrrrr the alien version f a trash disposal... the plyers are gonna have their own instinctive reactions based on old tropes/plot standards...which can lead to some entertaining moments.
While the scientific discovery related to such a ship will likely stretch over years, physically exploring it is not likely to take that long unless it is a true megastructure with constraints on cutting through walls.
For comparison sake, a two-story four-anchor shopping mall runs about 20,000 to 30,000 dtons of livable volume, with potentially that much volume again in service spaces within the building.
Mapping down to personal effects and casual lootables is obnoxious regardless of ship size, but general room by room exploration mapping is only difficult if you let PCs get too far without challenges, and they feel they can roam freely beyond what you have prepared.
Every bulkhead space should be a distinct segment for exploration, and the idea of going through a new bulkhead into a completely unexplored sealed space should be both intimidating and enticing.
This is familiar territory to gaming: a Campaign Dungeon. A proper Campaign Dungeon can stand to be MUCH larger than a few hundred thousand dtons. Such things are more common in fantasy, of course, with examples like Castle Greyhawk, Rappan Athuk, Caverns of Thracia, and others, but there are SF gaming equivalents as well. Starship Warden (of Metamorphosis Alpha) comes to mind. Traveller even has one in recent memory: Hephaestus. You might pick that up and see what they suggest.
Other specific products to look at might include the GURPS Traveller book on Spaceports, which includes components and mapping advice for orbital megastructures, the similar book for Mongoose, and (if you can find it cheap) the Naval Architect book for T4 (not a terribly useful book for its stated purpose, but full of deckplan compartments that might be useful to you).
Thanks for the references I can look them over ad see how it was handled by people who know what they are doing
As I have it in my head the pods on the spine are skyscraper-sized..so I can use a little of a typical skyscraper might as a source..obvious differences but some general ideas
Sounds a bit like "Stargate Universe", but I'd buy an adventure/setting like that.
The pods on the central spine - I count four per segment and twenty segments.
The bit I find interesting is that back half is missing pods.
Questions:
are the pods ships themselves so the missing ones are off doing something else?
are the pods some sort of colonisation device or weapons system, and it has used half of them already?
are the pods actually specimen collection areas and new ones are built as the ship gathers specimens from new culture before returning home?
What are the blue spheres? Are they part of the ships power system, are they some sort of weird alien biospheres?
The big claws at the back - are they so it can anchor itself to a comet or asteroid so that it can then harvest said object?
Leave its origins a mystery - that way referees can include it as they see fit. Alternatively try to convince Marc to make this thing part of the OTU.
My thoughts about origins:
a relic from the first starfarers
one of the last relics of a long dead/evolved/transcended TL singularity culture (see T5)
a ship built by a race living in a jump dimension sent to explore our universe
Those questions would be first thing on the minds of anyone exploring the ship. Right after, okay is it full of slime dripping, face stealing mind eating aliens with shady plans for my person.
I have a couple of options I was bouncing around,
a) they had a purpose at one time but are now empty.
b) they have a purpose, what was there is still out there and might be coming back
I had an idea of crewing the ship with a lot of automatons, drones and occasionally having the ship itself react to player actions...not to the point every time they pick up a bowl up off a table sort of reactions but responding to major actions of the party/player...allthought the idea of a small drone that follows them around trying to "tidy up" after them and return items to the proper places if they move them,including a tug of war over the odd trinket they put int the specimens pack would be amusing...
The first version lacked those big claws at the back. Then I had a bit of an inspiration. It's actually one of the features that had a solid purpose materialize when I was playing around with the design.
They are multi-use objects. which may have a very direct impact on how the scenario unfolds depending on how the party interacts with the ship.
One image that played out in my head was the big ship flipping over as a Group of ships it has had a violent clash with at some point in the past approaches and it uses them to "unleash hell on the unclean."
I loved my girlfriend's response to the added pincers..she's an avid game/movie buff but not exactly a big sci-fi buff..and she looked at the printout and went.."Eww creepy"..followed by "What are the pincers for?"
so if it draws that response from someone who isn't a big starship buff I think it's a good thing
I am toying with the origins ideas, I don't want to be so specific the GM has no wiggle room, that's never fun.
What I would love to do is offer a series of options for the origin, objectives, and purpose of the ship. Let the Referee have several to pick from or make up his own.
major areas of the ship might have features that vary depending on what the purpose of the ship is...such as a chamber/section being filled with lab equipment,cargo bays, or a hanger for some wicked looking drones that have a definite military purpose, depending on which option they are using.
that approach layers on a whole new level of complexity/work. However, I think it would be a great option.
looks like a job for a party of
mega-characters. the imperium would find/reactivate the best it could and send them immediately.
along with the vargr, zhodani, and aslan, and solomani if they're in range. and perhaps a few new races following the ship trying to regain control of it, or perhaps a few new races trying to OBtain control of it ....
heh. the best characters multiple races and empires can muster, thrown at an unknown problem and at each other. now THAT would be a great game.
that would definitely be a great setup, a small highly skilled team going inside with several teams making entry at different locations as they try to plant the flag for their respective patrons.
Ya not only have t be concerned with what's native to the ship, but what,or who was on that Vargr corsair latched onto segment 12. It would also give people outside the ship something to d as more onlookers, lookieloos start to trail the ship...and of course thats dreaded "OH @#%& is that a Zodani heavy cruiser squadron that just jumped in" moment.
Definately one of my favorite BIIIGGGG ships, but so is The Even Horizon and the discovery, I like the long-stemmed hull look. I hated that they never showed more of the Lex than a few chambers, it had so much potential as a design.
A few of my favorite episodes/scenes of Atlantis and Universe were of the teams just trying to figure out hat the heck all that stuff did. No world threatening apocalyptic scenarios..just trying to figure out what was what.
Overall some of my inspirations for the scenario I am slowly forming is based on Rendezvous with Rama, Ringworld, and Event Horizon. I love that sort of scenario.
Also,I would be most inclined to adding a bit of horror/suspense/creeping horror as an option. The whole alien artifact big as a major city setting just screams for it.
Giving a dark/macabre/horror option as well to play with, as well as the straightforward sci-fi exploration and discovery angle would be something I would love to play with as a Referee myself.
