Hyperspace Opera: Retro-Futuristic Swashbuckling and Gunslinging

[Yora]

I decided to step away from my longtime ongoing fantasy setting for a while and had the sudden drive to do a Space Opera setting that has a nostalgic retro-futuristic aesthetic but also feels new and like its own thing. I am a huge Star Wars fan, as big as you can be before it starts getting embarrassing. But it's a setting that has been overstuffed with dozens of different visions from hundreds of different people with decreasing amounts of coordination, and by now it has accumulated a lot of baggage. A while back I was tinkering with an idea for a 1999 Classic Star Wars, back when it was good, and beautiful, and pure, but even then that whole Empire and Rebels thing has started to feel a bit played out. There might still be room to do different things with a Smuggler campaign, but that also didn't quite get me excited to run a campaign. Star Wars remains my primary reference point for this setting, and I am hoping that the result will feel very similar and familiar. But I also want to make something that feels new and it's own thing, that is fun swashbuckling space adventures in a way that is different from what's been done before.
I think when making a setting, every element can potentially be made to work, as long as it is done with purpose. Especially when evoking a style from a century ago, it really pays to take a moment to look at every element that is included or convention that is followed and ask what it is supposed to say about the world and what role it is meant to play in the stories. It's only when you copy blindly what has been done before, with the reasoning that everyone has done it, that things become actually cliches and awkwardly outdated.
I think I'm probably going with Stars Without Number as the system for this setting, though I might also pick Scum and Villainy instead. I'll have to give it a proper read again as it's own thing, rather than as a Star Wars knockoff.

The Style

A few days ago I saw a video about monumental architecture or something, which opened with the aesthetic of architectural concept drawings from the 1920s. And that stuff was still on my mind yesterday when I was playing Kenshi (a post-post-apocalyptic desert planet game) and thinking about Cyberpunk 2077. I was considering how I could be including some of their aspects into my fantasy setting, but then remembered that I had been thinking about a space opera setting before and got the sudden urge to use those images and idea in an actual space setting. I immediately had a couple of ideas I wanted to include.

The main reference pools I am taking inspiration from are A Princess of Mars, Dune, and The Empire Strikes Back. The first one being an actual 1920s sci-fi novel and the other two both heavily inspired by it. I also really like Shadows of the Empire and the Knights of the Old Republic comic series (only tangentially related to the games), and the set design from Blade Runner. Other works I think could be fun places to scrounge for elements to salvage, though they are not quite what I am aiming for themselves are Mass Effect 2 (only 2), the Riddick movies, and Cyberpunk 2077.

- Desolation. That certainly comes from playing Kenshi at that moment and thinking about Night City from Cybperpunk 2077 rising out over the rocky desert hills. One thing that has always bugged me about space settings with giant galactic empires are the ridiculous numbers thrown around by writers, with millions of planets and trillions of people. I think this idea comes from mid-century writers who were seeing the huge spike in global population growth during their time and worries about how many people the Earth can support, but not bothering to do the actual research to learn about the simple concept of "demographic transition". (Which I learned in school in 7th grade or so in the 90s.) As societies industrialize, infant mortality plummets and the population size explodes, but after a generation or two people realize that the old conventional wisdom of "the more children the better" no longer holds when all your children survive and they no longer help working on the family farm. Then birth rates drop rapidly as well to match death rates, and the population stops growing. This has happened to every society on Earth that industrialized, and most forecasts today expect the global population to reach it's maximum in the second half of the century. And signs from East Asia and Central Europe indicate that after a peak, populations will actually start to shrink. Populations of trillions make no sense, even with multiple inhabited planets. It's a convention that started from a misunderstanding o/f population growth and assuming a short term outlier is a permanent trend, and since then people have copied it because it's cool. I won't. I think as advanced societies spread out through space, population density actually goes down, so this setting will have numerous planets with pretty modest population sizes. Other than the homeworlds, inhabited planets will be more like countries than worlds.

- Resource Abundance: Science fiction loves itself silly wars over highly valuable and extremely rare resources, because it's, like, symbolic of oil, man! As an astronomy nerd with a particular interest in how stars create elements and planets form, this makes absolutely no sense. All the stars in the universe are made from the same hydrogen and helium created in the Big Bang, experience the same physical processes in their interiors, and the ones that are large enough end in the same way as supernovas that produce the same elements, that get distributed throughout their galaxies in the same way. The laws of chemistry are the same everywhere, so the same basic elements will form the same naturally occurring compounds. All star systems are made of the same stuff in more or less the same compositions. There might be some systems that have more of some stuff than others, but when you have billions of star systems to pick from, everything you could possible want as a resource will be plentiful on millions of planets. There is no point in trying to conquer a planet over a resource when the same stuff lies around completely unclaimed on thousands of other unclaimed planets that your ships can reach just as easily. I find it interesting what you could do with such a baseline economic situation.

- Hyperspace: I don't believe in faster than light travel, but the space opera genre absolutely demands it. I hate misapplying real scientific principles, so I am going with the most pure fantasy magic approach there is, which is Hyperspace. The idea of Hyperspace is that you can ignore all the laws of physics that make faster than light travel through space impossible by simply moving your ship into a different dimension that has different laws. There is no evidence of any kind that such a Hyperspace exist, so o real physics are getting harmed.
I very much like how Star Wars handles it, with making movement through hyperspace pretty trivial and incredibly fast (in most sources you could cross the whole galaxy in a day), but the navigation to actually arrive at your destination is really difficult. For this setting, I want to go with a Hyperspace that is heavily warped with no consistent pattern, which means that you can't extrapolate a course to a chosen destination from knowing the routes to several other nearby stars. Calculating a course between any two stars is extremely time and resource intensive, requiring a lot of equipment and months or even years of calculation, so usually there's only two or three ways you can possibly go from any given star you might be at. Star maps really look more like public transport maps, and you can't get off the colored lines.
In addition to that, I like the idea that even with all that effort, Hyperspace jumps are not super precise and you'll simply arrive somewhere in the general vicinity of a star. It will take you several hours or even a day or two to reach the planet you are headed for at sub-light speed. Also, ships jumping together as a group will arrive at slightly different times in slightly different places, so a fleet will always take a couple of hours to regroup after a jump. Since there is No Stealth In Space, this makes surprise attack impossible. When a fleet reaches a planet, the locals will have hours to prepare.

- Artificial Gravity: Also something that the genre demands and that has no basis in physics whatsoever. So this setting will have it with no explanation of any kind.

- Railguns: I don't want to go with lasers as this is one of the things I consider a little bit silly. But I also don't want to use gunpowder. So railguns it is. They also shot bullets, but with more science!
Both for handguns and ship weaponry.

- Swords: I don't just want gunslinging but also swashbuckling. At close distances, a knife actually becomes very dangerous in a gun fight, and on space ships distances can be extremely close. Also there might be many situations where you don't want to destroy important equipment. And there are countless records from the 19th century where soldiers with guns just turned around and ran away when being charged by enemies with bayonets, and it even happened in World War 2 when guns were much faster to reload. So I think it makes sense for lots of people in space to carry blades, and to also be good with them.
I also like the idea that lots of places forbid weapons and the power cells of railguns can be easily picked up by passive detectors, while blades can be easily hidden and only get found if someone searches your clothing and luggage, which only very few high security places bother with. So knives and short swords are common backup weapons as well. Realistic? Eh, plausible enough.

- No Starfighters: Starfighters are a cool image inspired by World War 2 fighter planes, but they actually make no sense in space for a whole range of reasons. And I don't think they are actually needed in a space opera. You can still have fun space fights with full sized ships. And I think they are actually better suited for an RPG, since the players can all play together as one crew instead of some others not having much to do why the flyboys have their fun.

- No Force Fields: I think. If we don't have lasers we don't need shields. And there are many other ways to close a doorway and being able to see through that don't require force fields. If I find a situation where they would be needed, I might still include them, but I don't see a reason to just have them included by default.

- A Handful of Species: I think having 10 or 12 different species for characters will be more than enough. Star Wars and Star Trek are doing their thing with their hundred plus species, but most of them are just blank slates with a funny face. I rather have more effort put into making a smaller number of species detailed and pluralistic societies. Mass Effect did perfectly well with a only a dozen species.

- No Humans: I always feel that the more fantastical space opera settings are diminished by including Earth instead of just being their own fantasy worlds. Star Wars doesn't, and I love it. The movies are almost all humans (especially the first one) because that's just the easiest and cheapest way from a production perspective, but in an RPG you can be as extravagant with characters as you want.
Also, in the space opera style, almost all aliens are functionally human anyway. I want to to a bit variety, but there will be a couple of options of species that will be perfectly fine for players who simply want to play a "regular person".

- No Space Orcs: There are good people and bad people. There are even good governments and bad governments. But there are no bad species. Some species will likely appear as antagonists more often than others, but it's important to me that there are no default villain species. As much as I love Mass Effect 2, the inclusion of Batarians and Vorcha was really disappointing, especially given how much effort they put into making the Krogans not evil.

- Merchant Aristocracy: The inclusion of actual nobility in many space opera settings is another of the things I always found a bit silly. Though I think having Industrial Barons in their place could work very well, especially with the 1880s to 1920s reference frame already in place. They are also a nice way to incorporate the Megacorps from Cyperpunk in a less cyber way.

- Some Astronomy Nerding: Most movies show their alien planets as pretty mundane places because it doesn't cost any additional effects budget. But there are actually lots of interesting planet types and combinations of suns and moons that you can have in the sky, with all kinds of funky colors and light. An RPG is the perfect place to use a lot of those possibilities.

The Concept

All those are fun and cool ideas, but they are not really a concept. What is the setting about? What are its conflicts? What are the scarcities that cause tension? And what role will the players be playing in all of that? Talking over some of the idea with other people gave me a couple of ideas I find really quite interesting and compelling.

As I established above, resources are abundant and ubiquitous and populations have more space to spread out into than they could ever need. And travel to other planets is pretty uncomplicated. So what are the conflicts? If anyone who doesn't look how things are where they live, they can just pack up their things and leave. And make their own space colony. With blackjack and hookers! What is anyone fighting for?

But I realized that while natural resource deposits are everywhere and free for the taking, finished products are not. Once you reached your own barren frontier ball of dirt, what now? Most people don't want to live as subsistence farmers growing food with muscle power only. They still want most of the comforts they were used to at home. You can buy some cheap used mining equipment and dig some ores out of the ground, but as a tiny outpost, you will have to trade that for other stuff that you want. There are probably thousands of other such mining camps all over the galaxy, producing tiny amounts of resources, so the price you'll get for your slightly shiny rocks will be terrible. But you're still dependent on imported goods and that makes you exploitable. The big corporations that can make a profit with doing the rounds collecting tiny hauls from dozens of planets because of the massive scale of their operations are all motivated to keep prices as low as possible, to squeeze the colonists as much as they can without the colonies being abandoned. And the prices they offer for the technology the colonies want to buy are outrageous as well.
Now, there is a solution to the colonists' plight and freeing themselves from the dependency on the industrial barons. Pool their own small resources and form cooperatives and collectives to build their own small shared refineries and factories. No single colony can afford to build a refinery for the small amounts of ore they dig up, but 10 colonies building a refinery for all their combined ore together would be workable. The industrial barons have no interest in seeing the colonists gain their own economic independence, and out in the frontier away from the planetary governments of the core, nobody is going to stop them from using all the dirtiest tricks in the book.

That's the central tension at the core of the overall concept: Big fat moneybags conspire to make sure that the exploitable dirtfarmers remain divided or find alternative suppliers for the imported goods they depend on for their survival. At the same time, not all of the colonists are poor innocent victims of the evil capitalists. There's bad people among them as well, and many are seeing opportunities to build themselves up as autocratic despots. Some of which might even be willing to cut deals with the barons to sell out their people in exchange for a cushy life in luxury for themselves.

Looking at all of it, this setup clearly has very obvious anti-capitalist themes. Which I don't see as a bad thing. But where I think this can be made into something genuinely interesting with actual depth is to take a look at the internal divisions and selfish delusions among the hopeful wannabe communist collectives and anarchist syndicates of the colonists. It's both something that was a major aspect on the time period that inspires the aesthetic of the setting and something that is contemporary. It's pluralistic, looks at the shortcomings of who's supposed to be the good guys, and as such should be able to look at such issues while avoiding being preachy or naively idealistic. And most important, it's still a great background for swashbuckling adventures. You still have the classic oil barons with his hired guns to intimidate villagers, selfish profiteers, helpful smugglers, and good old space pirates.