All the interstellar Science Fiction roleplaying systems and settings I can think of rely on faster-than-light travel (generic systems like GURPs or Hero System discuss the option of forgoing it, but I don't think either devote much space to it) and fairly rapid FTL, at that. It isn't surprising; most starfaring sci-fi literature does so as well.
There are hard(er) sci-fi writers that generally adhere to a more realistic, slower than light universe, like Alistair Reynolds, Greg Egan or Charles Stross. Reynolds' star travelers enter cyrogenic "reefer sleep" to handle the years long voyages in "lighthuggers." Stross and Egan in some of their stories have digital minds broadcast across the distance as light to be reconstituted at the receiving end.
There are also works with sort of slow FTL, so that voyages still require years. Ruocchio's Sun Eater series has characters entering cryogenic fugue to pass the years. Simmons' Hyperion Cantos has FTL that still results in time dilation so ship time is less than the years than pass for observers.
It strikes me that whatever the method, space travel that takes long periods of time, and where the traveler is somehow able to personally elide the effects of so much time passing (either through cryogenics, weird time effects, or even just posthuman immortality) would make for an interesting aspect to a setting and campaign.
The PCs might set out as smugglers or free traders with valuable cargo for a 20-year voyage (from the perspective of the destination) and arrive to find the market had changed or a natural disaster had ruined their chances for making the sale. Mercenary PCs hired for a job, could find the government they were sent to defend toppled by the time they arrive or the person they were to report to succeeded by someone less friendly.
Both of these changes are bad for the PCs, but they could have just as easily been advantageous. The point is with years or decades passing, the setting should hardly stay static. I think this would have the effect of modifying PC behavior a bit. It would make them take space travel less for granted, for one thing. Trips between worlds are no longer trivial. Two, even with cryogenesis or the like, long travel times would make PC aging meaningful.
Using a series of random tables to accomplish these changes would of course include the GM in the fun of discovery. A dynamic setting is often, I think, a more alive feeling one than a static one.
2 comments:
About two decades back I did some paid proofreading work on an unfinished RPG that tackled a pure-STL scifi setting without significant personal longevity extensions by making it a generational game, faintly akin to a long Pendragon campaign. Rather than playing individual PCs cooperating in a party, the players cooperated to create an organization with sufficiently long-term goals to make interstellar voyages worthwhile, and when "crisis points" came up you'd make conventional PCs "operatives" from that organization that would deal with whatever was going on and then drift off stage as things went back to a sort of fast-forward strategic play mode. Depending on how long passed between crises you might or might not re-use any given set of operatives, aging them up appropriately if some or all of them made a return appearance. On paper it felt a little like Ars Magica conceptually, if everyone was playing extra-competent grogs all the time.
It was an odd system and maybe ahead of its time, but the version I saw was very rough and AFAIK it was never completed or even properly playtested. No idea what became of the two people writing it, I was just getting paid to turn their docs into something comprehensible enough to show to testers.
Pity, it was a pretty unique idea.
That does sound interesting!
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