We’ve made it to July. Bronwen and I are planning Edinburgh in August. It’s festival season. It’s a great time, but also a challenging one, since Geek Native’s sister site is Edinburgh Reviews.
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We’ve August to plan for Geek Native, too! For Patrons, that means picking a Spotlight winner. Menagerie Press won the honour for July.
This month we offer thanks to; Chip Mosher, Sean P Kelley, Philippe Marcil, Adept Icarus, Noril of Cold River, R Waibel, Allen Varney, Kate, Paul Wilson, and Heike.
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Cosmic Weather: How to Run Space Storms in Sci-Fi RPGs
This week in the UK, heat records have been broken even while we defer making the hard choices on climate action. As a result, we’ve also had some spectacular thunder and lightning storms.
Introducing cosmic weather to sci-fi RPGs like Traveller and Starfinder transforms empty space into an active, dangerous antagonist. Space is rarely a peaceful vacuum; dropping solar flares, ion storms, and gravitational anomalies into your sector maps provides GMs with practical tools to challenge players. These hazards drain resources, force difficult piloting decisions, and raise the stakes before the crew even reaches their destination.
This article attempts to categorise several types of cosmic weather you can deploy in your game, alongside advice for integrating them into the rules. Whether you need a sudden obstacle to derail a routine hyperspace jump or a hazardous environment to complicate a ship-to-ship firefight, these storms add vital tension to any plot and prevent interstellar travel from becoming a simple loading screen.
Coronal Mass Ejections and Solar Flares
A sudden burst of radiation and plasma from a volatile star is a classic sci-fi trope. In the game, a solar flare operates as a sensory and communications blackout.
- The Threat: The intense radiation overloads sensors, blinding the ship to incoming threats, and severs all comms with nearby stations or fleet support.
- Rules Implementation: Impose heavy penalties on sensor checks and automated targeting. If the ship’s shielding is low or damaged, prompt the crew to make engineering or medical checks to prevent radiation leaks from impacting the crew’s health.
Ion Storms and Nebula Turbulence
Navigating through a dense, highly charged nebula is the space equivalent of driving through a severe blizzard.
- The Threat: Charged particles constantly bombard the hull, draining power reserves and shorting out critical systems. A nebula also provides excellent cover for pirate ambushes.
- Rules Implementation: Reduce the efficiency of the ship’s engines or energy weapons. Force the engineer to reroute power every round just to keep life support online, turning a simple transit into a frantic resource-management scenario.
Gravitational Shears
Invisible rips in spacetime, dense dark matter clusters, or the overlapping gravity wells of binary stars create hazardous, unpredictable currents.
- The Threat: The ship is physically pulled off course, and the immense pressure threatens to tear the hull apart.
- Rules Implementation: Require consecutive, high-difficulty piloting checks to manoeuvre through the shear safely. Failure results in direct hull damage or the ship being thrown far off its intended trajectory, delaying the plot and costing valuable fuel.
Hyperspace and Drift Anomalies
In sci-fantasy settings, faster-than-light travel often involves entering an alternate dimension. The weather in these spaces defies standard physics.
- The Threat: A “storm” in hyperspace might alter the flow of time, spit the ship out in uncharted territory, or allow extra-dimensional entities to board the vessel.
- Rules Implementation: Use these anomalies to trigger random encounters or unexpected survival scenarios. A failed navigation check here does not just mean damage; it means dealing with a completely unexpected boarding party or arriving at a destination weeks late.
Space weather ensures the journey is just as deadly as the destination. By treating the environment as an enemy, you encourage your players to rely on their ship’s unique specs and their own problem-solving skills rather than just their weapon loadouts.
Photo by Sam Tsonis on Unsplash
