I talked about “cosmic shenanigans” a couple sessions ago, so here’s the result of thinking about that. Rather than actually write up a bunch of interstellar civilizations, I came up with rules for doing so - decide how big and how advanced your society is, then write them a drive and some relationships. I also wrote up four alternatives for FTL technology that’d (hopefully) give a good balance of “PCs can go anywhere” and “space empires are a thing”, including portals, password-protected star systems, and naval-submarine analogues.
I don’t know if this game will ever head to space, but if it did (or if I ran a space-themed Masks game), I’d like to give these rules a try and see how they work.
I revised the document to be a lot cleaner and (hopefully) more sensible. So here’s an example: we’ll create a stock interstellar empire that’ll invade Earth!
We assign them the following adjectives: Expansionist, Powerful, Xenophobic.
For Label, we roll 1d6, -1 for Xenophobic, and get a 2 (Freak).
For Tech, they’re Common in all areas except FTL, where they have Uncommon tech. We roll 2d6, +1 for Powerful, and get an 8. We increase their Warfare tech one level, to Uncommon.
For Size, we roll 2d6, +1 for Expansionist, +1 for Uncommon FTL, but get a 6! This makes them Small.
Based on these things, we assign them a Drive: “Prove ourselves to the Universe, one conquest at a time”. They’re a society of would-be galactic conquerors, with good tech and skills at war, but not much experience on the galactic stage.
We can assign them three details. If any of the PCs had a cosmic origin or ties (e.g. Concord), we’d write a relationship to the Universal Concordance somehow. We can also write flavor details like “they overcompensate by building ships, cities, etc. a few sizes too big”.