Stocking Your Sector

Not much of a post today - just a thought exercise in what "things of note" you might stick in your sector. Feel free to add a few yourself in the comments.

By the by - Almost ready to send out the first maps! Just need to add rivers to one and coastlines to a couple others. So excited to see how this works out!

I was walking through a sector of Kepler-22B and I came across ...

• Alien village
• Alien town (what would they sell in their markets)
• Explorer science camp
• Mineral deposit
• Glowing crystal deposit
• Tar pits (with or without alien beasts)
• Carvings on face of mountains
• Chasm filled with ... 
• Ruins of alien city or town
• Copse of exotic trees
• Stronghold of alien warlord
• Lake or pools with strange properties
• Wreckage of ancient astronauts
• Entrance into mythic underworld
• Caves that make strange sounds or emit weird vapors (watch out John Carter!)
• Clone fields
• Hot springs, medicinal or otherwise (perhaps an alien spa?)
• Sacred alien burial ground
• Sacred alien elephant graveyard
• Caverns dug by dholes
• Crop circles
• Alien yacht regatta
• The sleeping place of something from Beyond
• Mysterious tower
• Circle of standing stones
• Freak storm
• Radiation zone (what lies within?)
• A secluded valley where apes evolved from men!
• Alien lamaserie in the high mountains
• Domed settlements beneath the sea
• Explorer survey team
• Explorer mining camp
• Waterslides! (but who built them ... and why?)
• Hermitage
• Wreckage of explorer spaceship
• Alien simians raising an explorer child as their own
• Holes
• A black monolith
• A white monolith
• A red pyramid
• Ancient bunker (command and control for what? does it still work?)
• Alien road sign or carriage house
• Village high in the trees or buried beneath the roots
• Ancient canals or other such public works
• A functioning star-portal (or semi-functioning star-portal)
• Strange spores
• Elastic vegetation
• Ooze pits
• Force fields (that emanate from?)
• Fungal forests (but what do they feed on?)
• Light bridges
• Ancient transport tubes running through a thick rainforest
• Field of mirrors
• A transporter pad hidden beneath the underbrush
• The final resting place of a menacing super-computer
• Ancient factory maintained by nanobots
• Alien caravanserei
• A supernatural force imprisoned within a prismatic barrier
• Salt mines that run for miles underground
• Forgotten super weapon within a hollow mountain
• An alien plague
• Explorer supplies floating down a river
• Tree house of horror
• Space gods dancing atop a mountain to invisible flutes
• Camp of mutant rebels (I am Spartacus-3000!)
• Space pirate camp
• Foul smelling vegetation grazed on by beasts with exquisite coats
• Time cave (or Cave of Time, if you prefer)
• Lake of bubbling mud
• Volcano about to erupt
• Trees with giant pods in the shape of people!
• Clone of Abraham Lincoln (or maybe a statue of him being worshiped by aliens)

And much, much more ... what have you got?

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Image from Wikipedia

Map of Kepler-22B Revealed!

Well, here's the map. The sectors are laid out in a vaguely Mercator projection. You'll notice a tab above labeled MASTER MAP. This will hold the master map and a quick guide to the sectors in terms of climate and overall geography. Remember, I'll produce the hex maps so they all match fairly well, and I will be making up a great deal of the geographic details as I go, so don't worry too much right now about what a sector holds.

I'm claiming Sector C6, and since Roger Burgess asked for a random sector, I'm giving him Sector D8. I probably won't send any maps until early next week.

So - if you want to play the game and design a sector, get in touch with me here, via email or on Google + and I'll hook you up.

Welcome to Kepler-22B!

The galaxy is all abuzz at the re-discovery of Kepler-22B, a giant earth analog discovered centuries ago and then lost to all human memory. The magnetic clouds that hid it from detection have now lifted, and a brand new world has been opened up to settlement and exploration!

This blog is going to be an experiment in stocking a sci-fi planet for role playing games. The concept is simple - a map will be drawn and divided into sectors. Each sector will be assigned an overall environment and can be claimed by anyone willing to write that sector up in a manner that lends itself to gaming. Slowly but surely, the planet will be populated with new life and new (or old) civilizations.

The "rules" for participation are as follows:

1. To claim a sector, you need merely contact me (my email address is over to the right - I'm that handsome bearded fellow) and ask for a specific sector. If it is available, it is yours. I will send you a numbered hex map. You then need to provide the following to me, to be posted on this blog:

A. Provide a random event/encounter table for the sector. The table uses 2d6 (i.e. is numbered 2 to 12). Provide a description of the creatures, but no stats.

B. Detail at least 20 notable locations in your sector. These can be interesting landscapes, alien settlements, pioneer settlements, mineral, gas or energy deposits, hunting grounds for unique creatures, copses of weird trees, etc. Anything that could fit into a science-fiction setting (and that gives you a pretty broad brush). If possible, try to use these features as adventure hooks, since rpg adventures is the point of this whole exercise. Feel free to create alien civilizations as you like, but keep in mind that the native civilizations are either (A) fairly primitive or (B) remnants of high technology civilizations.

2. You will own all of your writing and creations, but you have to cede me the right to post them on the blog in perpetuity. Think of the blog as a digital fanzine.

3. The most important rule of all: YOU CANNOT USE SOMEBODY ELSE'S INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY. No Wookies (unless you happen to be G. Lucas), no Starfleet, no Aliens (as in things that want to eat Ripley), no Daleks, etc. The fun of Kepler-22B is that it will be a smorgasbord of original ideas from a disparate group of people. Be creative - have fun.

4. Final thing - if you write something that I'm not comfortable having on the blog, I'm not going to publish it.

And that's the scheme. The map will be up soon, and when it is completed interested parties can contact me to lay claim to a sector. Fair warning - I'm taking a jungle sector and I'm populating it with alien dinosaurs and ruined Preserver Domes. Consider that me "calling dibs".