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The Lost Universe: NASA's Tabletop Role-Playing Game Adventure
- Nzen 3y agotl;dr this links to a pdf that provides guidance and world-building for a role-playing game master/referee to run a one-shot adventure that involves an astronomy puzzle, maybe. (I've not read too closely, to avoid spoiling for myself.) The text largely eschews any stats so people can adapt it to their system of choice. The initial conceit seems to involve the literal players astrally projecting into the characters they create, who are denizens of some exoplanet imbued with magic. The players traveled there after our Hubble Telescope disappeared.
- BryantD 3y agoExcellent summary. The adventure is clearly written with D&D in mind and would be harder to adapt to other systems, although it's certainly possible.
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- RIMR 3y agoMy first thought that was D&D wouldn't be a great system, because you have to put the Hubble Space Telescope into the universe, and that really ruins the fantasy world vibe. With a little effort, you could work this into a Cyberpunk campaign, as Night City is set in the United States after all. Or you could just create a more story appropriate version of Hubble in the world of your choice. I read through the campaign, and it seems fun enough if done right.
- jonathankoren 3y agoThe problem of fitting the Hubble Telescope into your fantasy setting is one of storytelling. You simply don't refer to it as the Hubble Telescope. It’s a bizarre artifact. The fantasy world is already full of bizarre artifacts, so that’s fine. It’s not magical, yet constructed using techniques and materials unknown to any artificer or wizard. To anyone in the world, it’s just a giant tube with a curved mirror in it and some thin sapphire plates on the side. Does it say “NASA” in giant letters on its side? Yes, but no one in the game knows that. It’s just some indecipherable script that literally no one, regardless of level, can decipher because not only does NASA not exist as a word, the Latin alphabet doesn’t exist. The real world and fantasy world interacting is a trope that has existed for centuries. A friend of mine played a D&D game where the party got sent to real world Earth. None of their magic worked. After they killed the first cop that stopped them, the half-orc barbarian promptly accident shot himself and died while examining the dead cop’s gun. My friend said the adventure was hilarious.
- ultimafan 3y agoThis, I also feel like pop culture has forgotten overtime just how much inspiration (and in many cases ripping it out of the source material 1:1) early D&D took from science fiction / fantasy mashup classics like Jack Vance's Dying Earth. There's not much difference to a common denizen of a fantasy world between a wand that shoots bolts of lightning and polished chrome laser pistol tube, or between a flying carpet and hover car. It's all the same to them, and the whole "our ancestral civilizations were so knowledgeable in the lost occult arts that they could shape magic into common objects" when it's really just forgotten high tech sciences is always a fun bit of world building. This kind of material absolutely belongs in fantasy and I really hope that someday sci-fantasy makes a big comeback, some of my favorite reading books and inspiration for tabletop material have come out of them.
- spc476 3y agoI put a train engine in my D&D campaign, the Santa Fe. The paladin asked for a translation of the text on the side, and the wizard cast the "Read Language" spell. I actually looked up the meaning of Santa Fe, which is "Holy Faith" and the paladin took it as a sign.
- msh 3y agoThere was several OG fantasy D&D adventures by Gary gygax that involved the adventures exploring a crashed spaceship.
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoThere's like 3 things in that whole PDF that have "stats" associated at all (recommended levels, chance of getting hit by some arrows, some damage dice.) Those stats are mostly basic numbers. If you can't convert that to a different system then maybe it's worth learning one RPG system well.
- BryantD 3y agoMy favorite roleplaying game involves a bunch of Hong Kong action heroes fighting global conspiracies and occasionally traveling through time. The adventure doesn’t fit the genre well, although I certainly could convert it.
- voidUpdate 3y agoIt does specifically ask for a "Perception check" at one point, and makes heavy use of easy, medium and hard DC checks, neither of which translate over to a system like Mothership very well and are very DND-centric
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoNot really. GURPS has a Perception stat that's derived differently than D&D and can differ per sense if a character has specialized in better hearing, sight, etc. Perception checks are very much a part of GURPS. Savage Worlds has a Notice skill that acts almost 1:1 to Perception. GURPS and Savage Worlds (and lots of other games besides) both also have the concepts of "easy", "medium", and "hard" checks. That there are some systems that do not have a Perception style mechanism does not mean that the adventure is "DND-centric", that just means you're running a system that probably doesn't act as a simple translation target for the adventure.
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- BryantD 3y agoPerhaps also of interest: https://itch.io/jam/indie-nasa-adventures https://itch.io/jam/indie-nasa-adventures This is a tabletop game jam sparked by the NASA release. It is mildly snarky about D&D. The challenge is to write a TTRPG adventure that centers at least one NASA image. itch.io tabletop game jams often produce some cool stuff so I think it's worth watching.
- Waterluvian 3y ago> that Centers at Least One NASA* Image What does that mean? Or is it just a grammar thing and they mean centres on, focuses on, is built around…
- danparsonson 3y agoNo, it's a game about CSS
- andruc 3y agoCenter. Verb. to direct one's attention on something.
- kadoban 3y agoI checked several dictionaries and none had that usage. It's at _best_ very awkwardly worded. It's probably just a mistake.
- edflsafoiewq 3y agoIt is not. Other examples of this "center" from around the web > A Major Museum’s Attempt to Center Native American Voices > Yet, the story of man’s redemption, the gospel, is one that always centers God
- davorak 3y agoAs a native USA, english speaker, I come across this usage enough that it was familiar and not out of place. The second noun definition[1] and first verb definition[2], but only after expansion, google gave me[3] match. The second verb definition[4] on merriam-webster.com, similar on dictionary.com, second noun definition on cambridge.org, but mostly missing, in an example but not definition for some reason, in the verb section. [1] the point from which an activity or process is directed, or on which it is focused. "the city was a center of discontent" [2]occur mainly in or around (a specified place). "the mercantile association was centered in northern Germany" have or cause to have (a specified concern or theme). "the case centers around the couple's adopted children" [3] https://www.google.com/search?q=define+center https://www.google.com/search?q=define+center [4] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/center#dictionary-entry-2 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/center#dictionary... to give a central focus or basis centers her hopes on her son the plot was centered on espionage
- Supermancho 3y ago[flagged]
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- ChikkaChiChi 3y agoTime to put on my robe and wizard hat.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoGasp. Is bash.org dead? Internet archive is showing no mirrors in a long time.
- Daneel_ 3y agoSadly, yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38950721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38950721
- simonjgreen 3y agoIt goes for periods of time, and often re-emerges again later
- avereveard 3y agoan attempt to run it trough a GPTs if you need an external master and want to keep some mistery about the world for the first playtrough: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-gVJOtGzZZ-the-lost-universe https://chat.openai.com/g/g-gVJOtGzZZ-the-lost-universe uses the booklet a knowledge base and a python script to roll checks
- ajr0 3y agoI'm interested in how you came up with this, do you have a blog post or something I can peruse?
- avereveard 3y agoI came up with this fairly early around gpt 3.5 release, I started working at a narratie based game, but basically gpt will let people do whatever, see this zero shot adventure example: https://chat.openai.com/share/8b59bbb9-f6a3-42a9-a14e-76619528b318 https://chat.openai.com/share/8b59bbb9-f6a3-42a9-a14e-766195... to control for that I had this general idea to have a grounded hidden truth to anchor the llm, things like having the scenario written and ground all player outcomes to the hidden secnario. that worked well in terms of pushback, but gpt are far too optimistic - i.e. it was impossible to lose a game, or to even die or have permanent wounds. gpt also allowed any kind of problem solving if narrated well enough - common sample, you can just keep drinking healing potion regardless of whatever situation you are in and just reset the game. next step was to keep track of item consumption outside of the gpt, so I built a database and a few shot instructions system. gpt still doesn't push back on a player trying to cheat, but there's nothing much I can do there. also, I needed to lead gpt into negative outcomes, so I outsurced skill rolls. that eventually led to a massive engine to run the game, with llm just describing outcomes, where the pipeline is natural input > llm convert to structured json describing the action > engine ask for an action for every npc in the zone > llm map structure to game rules > engine executes the rules and update game world state > llm pick output and describe the result to the player - and the world is in a hierarchical structure, so only few npc get executed but the world state is tracked as the player explore and return to past locations now, this is not it. this is a smaller engine that just take the skill roll and a simpler version of the item tracking, and instead of being the game controller, is referenced from a gpt for most of the game. as I said this approach is a fair bit weaker, but can provide a good enough result, if you are compliant with the narrative (i.e. willing and honest participant to the game) and will absolutely break apart if you challenge it too much this is the originating gpt to which I added the nasa context: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-bLhy3K71r-gpt-and-paper https://chat.openai.com/g/g-bLhy3K71r-gpt-and-paper and this is the engine, in all it's semplicity: https://pastebin.com/GQuJtEqf https://pastebin.com/GQuJtEqf