Ships in the Void

A while back I wrote up elements of the multiverse I plan to use for games I run, when I finally have time to run games. It’s been evolving for a while now, and I ended up writing monsters and magic items for Shadowdark out of impatience and desperation. Recently while procrastinating something else I revisited an idea of janky, primitive ships voyaging through a hostile void.

The Fiction

Between the uncounted worlds of this multiverse lies the Void Between Worlds, an empty space far harsher than the hard vacuum of outer space. The raw chaos of the Void actively erodes most matter, so unprotected exposure to the Void whittles an explorer to nothing. Within this void, however, are zones or bubbles of stable reality, wherein forms of life persist. Most of these zones are conventional vacuum, without light or gravity. Some contain fragments of destroyed Worlds and the coproliths of the giant Wyrms that eat realities.

Notablly, humanoids called Void Raiders survive these harsh conditions in part by scavenging destroyed Worlds. They use their Void Ships to find other pockets of reality, or to tear holes in the boundary between Worlds and the Void to pillage the rich resources therein. They carve the hulls of these ships from the “voidstone” excreted by Wyrms to withstand the Void, and use Void Engines to traverse between their own broken realities or those of Worlds yet unruined. The knowledge of this technology, like all technologies that sustain life in the Void Zones, came from the mythical Void King through generations of ‘Techs. Biotechs sustain life, Necrotechs give the dead a semblance of life, Wartechs build weapons and useful tools, and Shiptechs build Void Ships.

However, intruders into the Void have introduced new technologies that the Void Raiders have stolen and adapted. Interlopers’ hulls use “voidmetal”, a refined type of voidstone. Instead of arbalests and cannons, the outsiders (insiders?) use Raycasters, a blend of magic and technology. Instead of rockets, they fly using M-Drives that use the same energy crystals that Raycasters use or the mysterious “spatial tubes” that connect one point in space to a distant point. A vanished people called the Grigori introduced “grigorium”, a far harder voidmetal that Void Raiders cannot reproduce but which they can peel off abandoned ships. The enigmatic Builders harnessed the quantum barrier between worlds to create shields for their ships and devastating weapons to destroy those shields, which are worth their weight in oxygen.

The Rules

Translating this setting into game rules has been hard. Originally I started with the spaceship rules of the Quantum Engine and of Faster Than Light: Nomad, but bending those rules for a setting that runs from arbalests to beam weapons and stone ships to force fields proved difficult. I think now I’m going to build on the Shadowdark translation of this setting, but that means working with Armor Class, Hit Points, and cargo rated in Gear Slots. I may have to revise the current versions of Void Ships to be consistent with the more general ship-building system, although I can’t imagine anyone’s using it so I can change it with impunity.

In this notional general system, Void Ships will have a number of parameters: Size (how big a target it is), Endurance (how long the life support will last), Crew and Passenger limits, Cargo (how much gear it can haul), and maybe Agility (how fast it can accelerate, decelerate, and turn), in addition to the aforementioned humanoid-scale AC and HP which are functions of the hull composition (voidstone, voidmetal, grigorium, or “quantonium”) and thickness (which may affect the other parameters). To that I’ve added a “Void Technology Level” (VTL) which reflects what armor, weapon, and propulsion technologies it incorporates.¹

I want to keep ship AC and even HP at a humanoid scale so that humanoid weapons can do damage, albeit very little. One sailing ship system I found in a magazine used a “ship scale” for its rules, but it only had to deal with Age of Sail sloops and galleons, not targets ranging from human size to city-size … which is how big the Grigorians and Builders made a few of their ships.

Or maybe I should back up and try another system for inspiration. Mini Six’s vehicle rules handle extreme sizes and tracks structural damage as escalating conditions rather than hit points. There’s the risk of embedding an alien system into Shadowdark, however.

The Reality

Granted, I wonder why my mind keeps drifting back to this concept. Aetherdark is a set of Spelljammer-esque rules for Shadowdark and it looks like more fun than explorers of a deadly void and the vacuum-adapted scavengers who hate them. Of course, I can’t let go of my vision of the Astral Plane either.²