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Penal Colony Earth
Party deals with a minor super villain.
After dealing with this the part is confronted with a sudden, violent, unnatural storm. The storm vanishes as suddenly as it appeared.
If the party investigates, the will find reports of a meteor crashing outside the city. When the party gets there, they find that the meteor is in fact a type of Alien Ship. Searching the party will find that:
If there are any other heroes in the area, they will also appear and help search. They will agree to search for some of the "prisoners" dividing up the escapee trails with the heroes.
The escaped aliens are quite evil, and will pursue various villainous plans. The party has to pursue the villains, and capture/kill them.
A few days after the heroes have dealt with the aliens, a storm similar to the first happens again. When the party investigates they will find that the ship's computer was not completely successful in destroying all the ship's systems - enough that a technical hero or NPC genius can create an experimental space ship.
The heroes have to go into space, where they land on a world on the fringe of the interstellar empire.
Using this information (and any other help that their friends can give them), the party goes to the imperial capital, and has to force the Imperials to stop using Earth as a dumping spot for its most evil villains.
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Why don't you just run it as is? The only thing against this is that spaceships in fantasy have been done before. (Temple of the frog, the very first D&D adventure, has visitors from another world/dimension.)
Honestly, this is a great idea and I'm gonna steal it. Other than that, convince your players that the minor villain is a BBEG, than let one of the prisoners kill him. That will put a shock to the players.
Why don't you just run it as is? The only thing against this is that spaceships in fantasy have been done before. (Temple of the frog, the very first D&D adventure, has visitors from another world/dimension.)
Honestly, this is a great idea and I'm gonna steal it. Other than that, convince your players that the minor villain is a BBEG, than let one of the prisoners kill him. That will put a shock to the players.
One idea I was thinking though is to set the adventure in Arcadia. (The basic situation kind of parallels what really happened in Australia.)
But I would still need a "Who is doing the dumping" and a "What are they dumping that is so problematic."
Under this plan, the characters might be Andorians, Ulfen, and "Skraelings." (I would also need to work up a heck of a lot more about the Skraelings/"Native American" analongs.)
I am not sure about this though.
Have it take place in Numeria. It is the place of a "crashed cosmic vessel".
So, the idea was that Golden Robot Men were intended to be the prison guards?
This has possiblities.
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One way of doing this is by not letting the players know they are on a spaceship. Let them find a huge spaceship and describe it in terms the PC's (not the players) would understand, without using any SciFi slang.
You have to make sure the players won't realize it's a spaceship instead of a regular dungeon until they are about halfway.
When the players fail a knowledge check give them some false information. The voice of a computer is thought to be a Magic Mouth and more stuff like that. A lot of the computers in the spaceship will not be functioning, but some might. Think about what you want them to be able to do.
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Stuff that could use a Golarion parallel;
The prison
a) Gillmen (or Aquatic Elves, or Skum) keep unusual air-breathing prisoners in a prison deep beneath the sea, so that even if they escape, they are still stuck at the bottom of the ocean, stripped of any equipment / spellbooks / etc. that might allow them to breath underwater or teleport, etc. One of their 'prisons' is damaged by an earthquake, and they are transporting prisoners to a different site to hold when the strange undersea vessel they are using is attacked by a kraken and runs aground, perhaps on a reef, perhaps near a sleepy fishing village.
b) An ancient civilization used Imprisonment spells on their worst foes, trapping them for all eternity, and forbidding them from even being reincarnated. A strange magical item helped maintain these spells, and has recently been discovered by an unscrupulous arcanist who not only doesn't know what it really is, but has found a way to tap into it's power to boost his own related spells (like hold person or teleport or slow). What he doesn't know is that the rod is damaged and now draws upon the power of the ancient Imprisonment spells to do so, and the spells are failing, one by one, the more he uses the rod to show off his new power. Worse, the more he uses the rod of ridiculous effects, like Time Stop, the more the rod draws power from the prison of Rovagug himself, which is nowhere near enough to free the Rough Beast, but may be enough to allow him to send a Spawn to the surface of Golarion, or to cause some unnatural weather effects, volcanism, etc. as he stirs in his sleep...
c) The Green Faith saved transformation into harmless animals and plants as a punishment for those who had broken their most sacred oaths, but some force has warped and corrupted this 'prison,' and some ageless trees and animals have awakened to the evil and treachery of their former lives. Most cannot return to their original forms, and remain in the transformed forms imposed upon them by their sentence, but have regained their memories, their class abilities and their wickedness. The nature of the land where this is set will determine the animals to be used, so I'd be tempted to place it within the Mwangi Expanse or the Realms of the Mammoth Lords, so that I could have at least one of the former prisoners be an awakened dinosaur.
d) Baba Yaga throws nothing out. Those who challenge the rule of her daughters are frozen in magical ice that places them in suspended animation, and those blocks of ice, displayed in the capital for a time, are carried off every few years to a location high above Irrisen, on great 'icerigger' ships made of white bone and glistening steel, skating over snow and ice to a 'prison' somewhere on the Crown of the World. One such ship has foundered, for whatever reason, and when it crashed on it's side, the blocks of ice shifted in the hold and cracked, weakening the spells enough that prisoners gathered over the last decade began to awaken. Just because these prisoners were foes to the rule of the ice-witches of Irrisen doesn't make them allies to the living, and some might be members of darker races, like an undead general to Tar-Baphon who attempted to form his own little fiefdom of the frozen dead, or a rebellious ice fey winter queen, or a towering winter werewolf 'master of the hunt.'
e) The Eye of Abendago is a prison. Deep within the howling maelstrom, cloud giants and air elementals hold prisoners from an alien world that attempted to infect Golarion with their unnatural presence. Use the Kaorti from MM2 (or MM3?), perhaps. Or Shoggoth. Or Ethergaunts. Whatever, so long as it's appropriately not-of-this-world. A section of the prison has somehow been maneuvered out of the center of the Eye and spun free, to be dashed upon the shores of the Sodden Lands, with the huge corpses of some of it's Cloud Giant guards (or perhaps even larger corpses of the Advanced Gargantuan Cloud Giants who guard this incredible prison, animated by the necromantic forces of one of the prisoners, or infected by fungal growths or smaller aberrant parasites that now infest it's body or unnatural mechanical implants, and serving as a 'zombie servant' despite now being a plant, parasite-ridden aberrant or even mechanically-'animated' construct)
b) An ancient civilization used Imprisonment spells on their worst foes, trapping them for all eternity, and forbidding them from even being reincarnated. A strange magical item helped maintain these spells, and has recently been discovered by an unscrupulous arcanist who not only doesn't know what it really is, but has found a way to tap into it's power to boost his own related spells (like hold person or teleport or slow). What he doesn't know is that the rod is damaged and now draws upon the power of the ancient Imprisonment spells to do so, and the spells are failing, one by one, the more he uses the rod to show off his new power. Worse, the more he uses the rod of ridiculous effects, like Time Stop, the more the rod draws power from the prison of Rovagug himself, which is nowhere near enough to free the Rough Beast, but may be enough to allow him to send a Spawn to the surface of Golarion, or to cause some unnatural weather effects, volcanism, etc. as he stirs in his sleep...
I like this one. The beauty is that it can be set almost anywhere without an established "ancient civilization."