Bunnies XIII: The Bad Hutch

[robkelk]

A catgirl who is so cowardly that all of her halfhearted efforts to accomplish anything end up being undone by her lack of confidence. With the requisite punny name, Sissypuss.

[robkelk]

So... I've been re-watching The Starlost in order to recap the episodes for All The Tropes. (It seemed like a good idea at the time, and "the time" was during a heat dome when I wasn't firing on all cylinders. But I finish what I start. Anyway.) There's a throwaway line in the fourth episode -- the one where a scoutship returns to the Ark but because of time dilation 409 years have passed since their launch a durational decade ago -- about something called "The Dome Wars". Since the scoutship's crew knew about it, it wasn't the disaster that killed the crew and crippled the Ark.

"The Dome Wars" sounds like something to hang a story series or a roleplaying campaign on. I seriously doubt that Glen-Warren Productions, Limited or the estate of Harlan Ellison would care if this became a noncommercial property somewhere, and even if they did we can point to the mutiny in the backstory of Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky as prior art.

Again, I'm suggesting this in the middle of another heat dome, so I'm probably not firing on all cylinders again. especially considering I have both KanriKyara and Isekai by Moonlight to work on. But if it is a good idea, well...

[Bob Schroeck]

I seriously doubt that Glen-Warren Productions, Limited or the estate of Harlan Ellison would care if this became a noncommercial property somewhere, and even if they did we can point to the mutiny in the backstory of Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky as prior art.

Or Silent Running where just domes are concerned. But yeah, that does sound like a good basis for a campaign, possibly using GURPS to best handle the differences in cultures and tech levels and whatnot between domes.

[Dragonflight]

I picked up a PC game from Steam a couple years ago for about $12 called Analogue: A Hate Story. There's also a sequel called Hate Plus.

Both games take place on a generation ship. Your character is a spacer who stumbles across an ancient generation ship. It's cold, and dead. A quick check shows someone opened the main airlock and locked it open, killing the entire ship. Your only clue is a computer analogue, an AI designed to assume important system control functions during the voyage. For some reason, the analogue, despite being a mature, self-realized adult in your launch records, is presented as a demure, submissive teenage girl with limited self-confidence. As you begin to get the story from her, you become aware of another analogue in the system. She's confident, knowledgeable, but may just have an agenda. You can only run one at a time, so you have to flip back and forth, trying to figure out what happened to these people, all the while both analogues are trying to get you to delete the other one.

I won't spoil the identities of these two analogues, or what makes their story so painfully poignant. I will say it is possible to rescue them *both* if you want, but in a nod to the old text games, you can't actually discover the method in-game. You can *only* discover how to save them both by finding it online in the real world.

If you save them both, they sort of give you the Look, because they *know* you went for the cheat codes. And they refer to it a few times in Hate Plus as well. But their story is so heartbreaking as i it is, I didn't have the heart to play an entire sequel with only one of them.