deluxeloy:

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

Concept: a dungeon-crawling sci fi game, except instead of wandering space pirates, you play as a crew of legitimate salvage operators retrieving valuable goods from abandoned or evacuated cities on formerly populated planets that have been rendered uninhabitable by various civilisation-ending disasters. The different “dungeon types” would reflect whatever disaster killed that particular planet: plague, increasing solar intensity, nuclear war, continent-shattering meteor, etc. Long-dead worlds have already been picked over by your competitors, of course, so in most cases you’re going in while the world-ending catastrophe is recent – and in some cases still ongoing! – offering plenty of opportunities for potentially fatal misadventures. If you need an overarching plot, maybe you eventually discover that all of these apparently unrelated disasters have some sinister common thread.

A few of the odder fates that might befall a world, as well as salvage operators’ slang terms for such worlds:

• Deadworld: A world whose inhabitants have been rendered irretrievably non-sapient by a contagious neurological disease, parasitic fungus, basilisk meme, or other similar vector. Though in many cases their bodies are alive and kicking, they’ve been declared legally brain-dead, leaving the world open for salvage. Describing these unfortunate remnants as “zombies” is considered both unscientific and insensitive, which stops basically no-one. Sometimes an apparent deadworld turns out to actually be a nascent planetary-scale hive mind, which just gets awkward for everybody involved.

• Eight-Ball: A world that‘s experienced a hard-takeoff singularity, a sudden asymptotic acceleration of cultural and technological development that certain worlds undergo for reasons which remain unclear. Nobody’s 100% sure what happens to the inhabitants of such worlds; some believe they transform into beings of pure information, transcend to another dimension, or simply die off, their civilisation achieving its zenith, decline and extinction in a matter of hours. Whatever the truth may be, one thing’s for sure: they don’t need any of their stuff anymore. Eight-balls are highly sought after by salvage operators because of all the physics-defying Weird Shit the planet’s former owners tend to leave behind in the wake of their apotheosis, and are among the most dangerous assignments imaginable for the exact same reason.

• Locker:  One of the oddest fates that can befall a world, a temporally locked civilisation – or “locker”, for short – is literally frozen in a single moment, usually as a result of some damn fool messing around with time travel. With fewer than a dozen known cases in the whole of galactic history, lockers present a unique salvage opportunity: the retrieval not of property, but of people. No means of reversing a temporal lock exists, so the world’s inhabitants must be rescued one at a time, by crews equipped with containment suits that allow them to move about in frozen time – a task frequently contracted out to established salvage operators. Lingering on such worlds is not recommended; though there’s no scientific proof of their existence, rumours persist that temporal locks are known to draw the attention of things that live sideways in time.

(Feel free to add your own!)

• Fortress: The inhabitants of these worlds discovered or made something that they thought no living being should have access to. It is for this reason, or so the theory goes, that they collectively decided to kill off their own entire civilizations en masse. They also figured nobody else should touch whatever goodies they left behind (good reason to do exactly that) and transformed their entire planet into a fortress/death trap of automated defenses, drones, hazards, and other nasty surprises. Extremely hostile environment, so there must be something worth fetching – besides all the high-grade military hardware.
• Safari: Whether by the hand of reckless scientists or an unfortunate quirk of evolution, these planets’ sapient species were overtaken and wiped out by an excessively aggressive strain of super-predator. These beasties don’t have much use for the biological samples and valuable minerals lying about… But beware; they don’t know that.
• Reliquary: The natives’ religious beliefs somehow led to their extinction, whether by excessive sacrifices, overly strict piety or other means. While their home worlds are not that dangerous and in most cases even recolonizable, certain collectors pay good money for art objects made by the zealots. You’ll have to be quick if you want to land a contract for one of these.