Thrilling Adventures in Rhyme and Space

Had this idea in my head for a while now and am currently hacking together a proof of concept in PHP (since I’ve been doing a bit of that at work recently.) But today I’m going to set out my idea and if someone thinks they can do it better than me then they are free to do so. I’d rather play the thing than have it sit in my head forever!

Imagine all the best storytelling elements of a tabletop RPG or a LARP combined with a real time space sim…

SSOS consists (in my head) of the following setup.

The World: A space sim engine, set up beforehand with ships and planets and can be manipulated by…

The Master: A DM/GM player. They prepare stories and control both NPCs and antagonists. In a big game this can be multiple people. Their goal is to create a cool experience for…

The Crew: The main players. They ideally sit in one room, big screen at one end showing their ship’s forward view, and each player has a console with controls for their particular ship’s systems.

The Master will have prepared a storyline (of their own or from the community) feeding information to the players through text and pictures, or even live with voip. The crew will decide where to pilot their ship and the Master will introduce other ships to fight or talk to into the sim.

The play area could be as simple a bunch of guys with laptops/netbooks/phones around a TV or as extravagant as a replica Enterprise bridge set with switches and lights for interfaces.

The interfaces as well as the world should be infinitely customisable. You don’t need to do the Star Trek model of bridge, in theory you could have the CIC from Battlestar Galactica with a strategic map in the centre and individuals in fighters. You could even expand the ship to include engine rooms with engineers running around, rerouting power via mini-games and shouting about not being able to change the laws of physics. Would be a scream at a convention or something.

As I said, i’m knocking together a PHP/MySQL based version as a proof of concept. A web interface is fine for touchscreens on netbooks and phones. Somehow i’ll need to interface with a space sim engine. There are a few that are open source, particularly the Freespace 2 engine which was the best space sim since Tie Fighter. One other idea I had was to make it a fully fledged operating system, linux or bsd-based, dedicated to the game. Perhaps a live CD you can stick in a friend’s media centre pc and run a server on there for an evening.

I’m not a developer so have little idea as to how to do all this crazy stuff but if you are and decide to start a project like this please let me know as I’d love to see what you come up with!