Wait, wait, wait, isn’t Dungeons and Dragons fantasy?

Yeah, Dungeons and Dragons is epic fantasy and we’re adding aliens into the mix. And not just some weird creatures from another plane, we’re adding in spaceships and craziness like that to Dungeons and Dragons, deal with it!

In all seriousness, you can turn Dungeons and Dragons into whatever game you want, and clearly I’m joking around at the top, but it isn’t something that I’ve written about before.

So how is this game going to work?

I have a couple of different ideas. The first being that there is a crashed spaceship that the players are tasked with exploring. It’s something that the people know about but no one has ever been able to get into it. The players are now tasked by some adventuring outlet to figure out a way to get into it.

That’s the point where I’d kick off the adventure. The player characters are off to get this open and dealing with getting to the inhabitable area and fighting some things like goblins or some bandits who have set-up camp around the spaceship. Once they’ve gotten it cleared out, they now have to figure out how to get in.

With getting in, get a bit meta with it. Make it something that the players would recognize, but not the player characters. Or create a puzzle for the players, not the characters. I think that can be the reason that no one has gotten into it before, because anything too obvious or too easy, why hasn’t someone gotten in before. Create a tricky set of puzzles, or create it as a challenge for the players. You can even create an in game mechanic of some sort for the players to get a more information about it, if you need to.

Once they are in two things should happen. It should still be a challenge to explore because it’s all weird and foreign to the players, and there is probably still an active defense. But, more importantly, and not known to the players, them opening up the ship has caused a distress signal to be sent, so now there are going to be aliens coming to their world. However, that’s going to take a bit as the world you’re characters are on is at the edge of the universe. I’d eventually have the player characters figure out that the message has been sent.

So now there is only a limited amount of time for the PCs to figure out how to defend against the aliens. Especially since they should already be familiar with the alien technology and how dangerous it can be. And most likely they are going to need to get the ship back into the air. You can hand wave some of the figuring out what everything is, mainly just focus on the main systems, getting weapons, getting engines, and getting it off the ground. I’d make there to be some fetch quests of sorts where the players need to either get back and put back something that was scavenged off the outside of the spaceship or something that looks similar to something on their world that is broken on the ship.

And then you get to end by turning it into a Star Wars game. Where the players have fixed up the ship and find them up against an Imperial Cruiser. Now, that is a bit absurd, but not too absurd for this game. But I’d end the campaign with a space battle. Give them a warm-up battle against a scout ship but then have to take on a small salvage fleet.

Now, that’s game one, the other one is that the alien’s have already attacked. Borrowing from Stargate SG1, it’s possible that because you’re less advanced than the aliens, you are slave labor. And you were recently taking off of one planet and you want to stop the alien slavery.

In this one it’s about escaping where ever the PC’s are. This will be some combat and a lot of stealth. The PC’s are going to need to escape and get onto a ship, but the ship isn’t something that the players should be able to figure out, so a lot of the game can be done as stealth on a ship and trying to avoid the aliens.

I’d have the players hop to the main planet at some point and get stranded there. In fact, you could plant as a plot thread that they can wipe the coordinates from a main computer or mark their planet as destroyed or some terrible event having happened to save their planet. Again, really lean into the alien nature of this for the players. Have the jail cells on the ship be pretty normal to what their fantasy culture would expect, so you get that reveal for the PC’s of what has happened.

The end game should definitely be to get back to their planet though. I think compared to the other game, this one can be run faster and run at a lower character level. You never what them to feel like they can completely go toe to toe with a large number of aliens.

Do either of these seem like fun games to play? Which one would you prefer to play or run?

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