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I had this idea to set a campaign in an area of space somewhere in the Vast which is called "The Forbidden Zone." It's been on all the charts since the end of the Gap but nobody know who forbade it or why it's called that. Now, there's a chance to go and explore the Zone because a drift beacon was found there.
But there's a big catch: I can't figure out why the Zone is Forbidden, or Who Forbade it. I've been thinking "maybe there are mind flayers there," but I don't know why or if that's even a good idea, or if a previously unknown race of psychic monsters is really worth forbidding a zone, especially since I'd like to avoid a "just another Swarm" situation.
So... any ideas?
Thought: the word Forbidden comes from the roots For- Against and Beodan- To command, which comes from the older root Bheudh- to make aware. Perhaps it is 'Forbidden' because, at the time of the 'forbidding', all species that live within the zone were pre-galactic, or even pre-industrial, and thus not AWARE of the greater universe that they were a part of. Perhaps post gap societies where incorrect in their translation of during gap maps, and it was more of a warning not to expect fueling stations and shops in that area.
A place is typically forbidden if a) someone is trying to protect something or someone precious there from outside contact, b) someone wants to establish exclusive rights over a place or resource, c) someone just wants to demonstrate through brute power that they can exclude you, d) some kind of secret project is being conducted there, or e) something or someone dangerous is there and a zone of exclusion has to be established for everyone's safety. You can mix and match these.
A couple of real-life or in-literature examples:
The Forbidden City was thus because it was exclusively the residence of the ruler of a great empire and of his courtiers, ministers and personal guard.
Forbidden Space in Stephen R. Donaldson's sci-fi epic (coincidentally named the "Gap" books) was thus because it was home to a dangerously hostile alien race that wanted to mutate humanity into an adjunct to itself.
The Lambada was the Forbidden Dance because it could lead to terrible Nineties movies. (That one's apocryphal.)
The Forbidden Dimension is thus because its denizens rock too hard for mortal souls to handle. (That one is gospel.)
There are some other forbidden places that might be good for ideas. (EDIT: One useful example there might be Poveglia, which was abandoned because it was thought haunted by the traumatic events that happened there. Perhaps your Forbidden Zone was abandoned on similar grounds but, the reason for it having been lost and there being no obvious sign of danger, some group of Pact Worlds or other interests have decided to move in.)
All the best sorts of Zones, anyway. :D
Maybe it would give away some deep secret that those in authority would rather not see revealed, such as the Forbidden Zone in the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes....
"Wait a minute... Statue of Liberty... that was our planet. You maniacs, you blew it up. Damn you! Damn you all to hell!"
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Maybe it's a Forbidden Zone precisely because someone... or something knows that's the best way to get people to come to your Zone...
And from the ape point of view, the big secret that they wanted to keep hidden was all of the evidence that their planet used to be dominated by humans.
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Maybe it's a Forbidden Zone precisely because someone... or something knows that's the best way to get people to come to your Zone...
It started out as a way to try and keep people away, but then they discovered that it just attracted more people. Then they discovered how much money they were making from people coming to investigate the Forbidden Zone, so they embraced it.
It became essentially a giant theme park, but on a multiplanetary scale.
The problem is, that between the Gap and everything else that's happened, nobody knows about the history of the place. The name stuck around, though. Any visitors are immediately chased away. The people living there don't know why it is forbidden, but they know they must uphold that name.
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It's the hottest club in the cosmos! And here's how I think it'd play out...
GALACTUS-SIZED BOUNCER: Can't let you in, bro. It's the Forbidden Zone.
ME: But, c'mon... be cool.
GSB: Not in those shoes, man. *unhooks velvet rope three parsecs long; several people pass by*
ME: Aw man! That guy was wearing the same shoes as me. Come ON!
GSB: *impassively folds arms* Kid, don't make a scene.
ME: Oh, I'll make a scene!
GSB: *twitches pectoral as dense as a neutron star*
ME: *receding at near speed of light; shouting over the Doppler effect* Uncoooool...
If you don't mind bending the lore a bit when it comes to drift engines, the forbidden zone could be a pocket space where drift engines suffer from an interdiction effect that partially or even fully jams a ship's FTL.
Now this FTL jamming can take on a multitude of different forms:
1) Direct penalty to drift rating
2) Engines randomly pick up the glitching/malfunctioning.
3) Going into drift takes considerably longer, meaning you can't run away from the real threats so easily.
4) Drastically increased encounter rates.
So in a ways the forbidden zone becomes akin to a space Sahara or Deep jungle, where the danger comes from being a place that is difficult to enter and leave. Thus, placing a vital importance on supplies and navigation to survive rather than gunning down each threat you face.
Gallifrey, Earth, and Golarion are all there.
You have to get past the Paizo legal fleet to get there.
There are beacons detectable from the drift signaling friendly systems. I'll assume they could be repurposed to signal "Oh G*D stay away!"
Normally, navigation computers steer around the detectable gravity wells with no markers. A scout ship stocked with markers could steer toward "Goldilocks" gravity wells to explore and mark unknown systems. Goldilocks gravity wells would be strong enough to denote at least a mineable rock, but not enough to show a dangerous Black Hole.
Your doom patrol might be visiting these Red Drift Beacons to make a threat assessments. They should have Anti Matter Missiles to take care of Zombie Worlds and other horrors if necessary. If they find the current Swarm homeworld, energy nullify it from orbit. The forbidden zone might be an attempt to contain something even worse. That was before even nastier weapons were invented.
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Thanks for all the comments! These are really great suggestions and have given me a lot to think about.
Are you ready for the big twist? I've already started running this campaign and I've hit a wall! (Surprising, I'm sure.)
So I created a group called the Oracle Initiative, which is kind of part Starfleet and part Andromeda Initiative (from Mass Effect: Andromeda) and as members of this group, the PCs are exploring a star system in the Forbidden Zone, where a Drift beacon has suddenly become active. At this point, they've discovered an ancient derelict ship and a sort of post-apocalyptic culture on one of the planets. The ship, and the ruins in which this culture exists, were built by a mysterious culture called the Ba'ib who, according to legend, either created the races on the planet or brought them there, and defeated some force called only The Dominator. Also, the Aspis Consortium has shown up and been very dismissive of the OI but not had a chance to do anything yet.
I set up this star system to be a sort of foyer for the Zone, which I imagine is connected by a series of ancient point-to-point FTL gates. The Ba'ib (who are probably extinct) closed the gate in this system on their end and hid it (possibly in the system's Pluto analogue) and then basically died out. That leaves a handful of races mostly living in the ruins of an old arcology built by the Ba'ib, as well as sme in a mysterious "monastery" on the other side of the planet, which was likely not built by the Ba'ib and is probably weird and alien in design.
I've gotten a lot of great feedback from my players, and what this campaign needs is a villain(s), and a storyline. I realized too late that I had sketched out an interesting setting, but not really a plot for a campaign, and it is in developing that plot that I've really hit the wall, creatively. I've got some time to work on it before we can play again, which is why I came here to crowdsource some ideas. I think that having a grasp on the why of the Zone would really help me to develop a campaign plot that involves said Zone.
So again, thanks for all the suggestions, and any other ideas or thoughts on the corner I've written myself into, would be much appreciated!
1:The dominator probably has created lesser monsters to try and free it. Think Terask, but even less cute.
2:Also there is a humanoid race(Worm people are cool) that the Dominator has twisted from their normal path to attempt the ritual that will free the Dominator.
3:The Ba'ib have ascended to the point where one or more, calling themselves the sentinels or something, can only manifest as "energy balls". They have started a second cult that fixed the beacon, keep disrupting the ritual attempts, and generally obey the Sentinels.
4:There is a planet, where a Sentinel tried to directly intervene, and now it's home to a horrendous banestorm. All life there is now nomadic, even the plants, as they try to keep out of the storm's way. There is also lots of volcanism, which means raw drift drive crystals coming to the surface.
Perhaps Ba'ib tech blocks Drift travel, leaving the point-to-point FTL gates to only way to get around the Zone. The first focus of the campaign could be to enable Drift travel. In doing that, they begin venturing into Ba'ib ruins and uncover evidence of an ancient and mighty Ba'ib warform, along with an army of smaller Ba'ib battle robots all controlled by a warmind, a single, highly advanced, artificial intelligence. Somewhere along the way they accidentally activate the Ba'ib warmind which comes alive, intent on reclaiming it's home system from "agents of the Dominator." Once the warmind is defeated, the dominator makes its appearance. What that is could vary depending on what you might want and how long you plan for the campaign to run.
It's the hottest club in the cosmos! And here's how I think it'd play out...
GALACTUS-SIZED BOUNCER: Can't let you in, bro. It's the Forbidden Zone.
ME: But, c'mon... be cool.
GSB: Not in those shoes, man. *unhooks velvet rope three parsecs long; several people pass by*
ME: Aw man! That guy was wearing the same shoes as me. Come ON!
GSB: *impassively folds arms* Kid, don't make a scene.
ME: Oh, I'll make a scene!
GSB: *twitches pectoral as dense as a neutron star*
ME: *receding at near speed of light; shouting over the Doppler effect* Uncoooool...
Very funny, since there are no such things as neutron stars.
Must be a time traveler. That explains why The Forbidden Zone isn't in the core rulebook. When is the book with the forbidden zone in it coming out?
Very funny, since there are no such things as neutron stars.It's the hottest club in the cosmos! And here's how I think it'd play out...
GALACTUS-SIZED BOUNCER: Can't let you in, bro. It's the Forbidden Zone.
ME: But, c'mon... be cool.
GSB: Not in those shoes, man. *unhooks velvet rope three parsecs long; several people pass by*
ME: Aw man! That guy was wearing the same shoes as me. Come ON!
GSB: *impassively folds arms* Kid, don't make a scene.
ME: Oh, I'll make a scene!
GSB: *twitches pectoral as dense as a neutron star*
ME: *receding at near speed of light; shouting over the Doppler effect* Uncoooool.... . .um, is this sarcasm?
No, I wasn't being sarcastic. It's just chemically impossible to create neutronium. The neutrons fly apart if you try to get them together. Plus they decay into hydrogen. One proton, one electron. If neutron stars actually existed, we would have neutronium produced in labs right now.
The explanation is that the conditions created in a star collapse cannot be reproduced on planet Earth.
If part of a White Dwarf entered Earth's atmosphere, it supposedly would explode. The DC Universe obviously has different rules.
Its actually a minor translation error. Ancient earth aliens wanted Joe Bidden to move in.
There's radiation in them there asteroids
Its an alien god teenagers room
A black hole will form there sometime in the next 100 years and the aliens don't want any colonies getting set up, all comfortable, and they have to move or get sucked in
An ancient species lost an intergalactic war of aggression. In response the other races promised to wipe even their name from the universe. They dont' want anyone finding any traces of that civilization.
The area contains a really nasty brain parasite that survives as spores for millennia and rides its host for years before becoming active and detectable. Only way to keep it from spreading is to keep sentient being out of it.
How about the zone contains some ancient and terrible dormant race that no one wants to risk waking up?
Maybe something like the delphic expanse from ST: Enterprise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek_regions_of_space#Delphic_E xpanse)
If you’re looking for villains, one you could work in would be an Oracle Initiative agent who is secretly on the payroll of the Aspis Consortium.
The forbidden Zone is rife with rules mush. The major race is so rife with mutations that it takes forever to roll up NPCs. Every priest worships a different, unique, god. Natural laws vary from one mile to the next. It never made it past the first playtest session.
I keep wanting to make a Danny Elfman/Oingo Boingo joke about why it's forbidden, but that just seems like so much work.
I'm sure the queen of the 4th dimension has something to say about it.