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Okay as a bit of background for this, I'm currently running two Starfinder campaigns based around the idea of starting up a colony on a planet in the Vast, and in the process I've made a lot of notes and spent a lot of time reading through Pathfinder APs, the forums, and 3rd party stuff and I wanted to put everything I've discovered and learned into one big document. After spending a good few hours doing just that I decided that maybe I should share it for people who wanted to run similar campaigns but weren't sure how to go about it.
So with all that out of the way, here's my first draft: CLICK HERE.
It's still a very rough, no frills version and it's far from unfinished because it doesn't really have any content past what I would consider 'book 1' of a campaign, but it's a culmination of my observations and things I've learned. That being said I'd absolutely love to hear people's thoughts and feedback on the contents of this monstrosity I've created, and if you decide to actually use some of my advice I'd love to hear how it goes for you!
This is a great idea! I've run a couple of really successful Pathfinder hexcrawls and I've been thinking on how to translate that to Starfinder. A colonization concept is a good way to do that.
Several initial thoughts:
(1) I imagine most PCs would want to take a planetary scan on their first day. This means most of the "hexes" of a planet would be known immediately. That doesn't mean there isn't room for exploration, but rather the PCs are going to know the planetary layout immediately. You've got some good ideas for hex population, but don't count on it not being known - instead focus on making the PCs land on the ground to check it out.
(2) Is there an interesting system you can create for investigating and colonizing a planet? Some sort of game system by which the PCs can make choices about how the colony will function, and then potential random events they have to react to?
(3) I highly recommend a section on a "Dark Secret" for the colony or planet. Sci-Fi stories are replete with examples, from atmospheric diseases to monsters sleeping below the surface. But in addition to exploring the planet, it gives a driving motivation to the PCs.
(4) Star Trek: The Next Generation style colony problems can probably give you a lot of fodder for ideas.
Shortened for brevity.
Thanks for the ideas! I've been quite lucky in that neither of my groups have actually tried to pre-scan the planet. The way I would play it is as you've said, give them the basic details about topography and any notable features or strange signals, but not enough information that they wouldn't have to go down to the planet and physically check out the tiles.
The way I've personally gamified the colony system for my groups is by taking aspects of the Star Empires book by Legendary Games and streamlining them. I'm planning to develop these into a cohesive set of rules as time goes on but I've not used them too rigorously yet and would be hesitant to put out something that's barely been tested. As for random events, I've definitely got a basic table together and I'll probably add that once I've fleshed it out a bit more..
The 'Dark Secret' concept is one of the things I was trying to touch on with the idea of planetary threats, something that acts as a barrier to the colony and the party and that they'll have to overcome that is tied to the planet itself. I definitely want to expand on that in more detail though.
I'll definitely look into the TNG stuff as well, thanks again!
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I've been thinking in the same direction, also have a plan to at some point start a "star king maker" campaign. I've bumped up against some potential roadblocks that I'm trying to figure out.
* Scale: are we talking one colony on one planet, multiple settlements on that planet, outposts in the system's asteroid belt, or even spreading to multiple systems? If my methodology calls for every 12 mile hex to have something interesting in it, that can get out of control when we start talking in astronomical scales. But on the other hand, if each planet has only 1d4 interesting things happening on it, that feels a bit empty.
* Administrative detail: the settlement building rules from Kingmaker don't really scale up very well I think. If you build ten cities, you get ten times as much administrative detail to keep track of. I don't want the players to tune out from empire-building because it's becoming an accounting exercise. But I do want them to care about what's in one or two specific settlements, like their capital.
So I'm thinking that I need a sort of hybrid camera zoom, where for the PCs' main headquarter settlement we'd be noting down specific buildings, for some other notable settlements just an abstract description, and some external planets just some details on their overall productivity and who the PCs appointed to govern it. Basically, I want the total amount of administration and choice-making that the players have to do in a game session to stay constant even though their realm is expanding.
For planets, I'm thinking that instead of pre-populating all hexes, I might try a kind of on the fly content generation, but with a common background factor. So I could have a "random hex content" generator that generates seeds for what's in a hex. But I also have a "planetary dark secret generator" that tells me what sort of background story is happening on the planet. Now when the PCs go explore some hexes, I roll on my random hex table, and interpret my roll result with the dark secret in mind. So if I roll "crashed ship" and my dark secret was "vanished precursor civilization", the crashed ship might belong to the precursors, or perhaps to archeologists who were looking for precursor traces but who had a misadventure.
I think the answer to the scale issue is that increasing the scale needs to change the party focus. In the beginning while they're checking out that first area, you might want a fair number of those 12 mile hexes to have interesting details. As the party moves on from that main settlement and they're exploring larger areas, the party is gonna focus less on the small things and become interested in larger points of interest. Leave the small stuff for the empire to deal with and have the PCs focus on the most important details.
The rules from Kingmaker and Ultimate Campaign don't mesh as well I agree, I'd recommend having the PCs focus on the capital, maybe adding one or two major cities as the empire expands. Most of the smaller settlements can be assumed to have negligible effect or just offer smaller static bonuses. Again I recommend Star Empires by Legendary Games (feel like I'm repeating myself here but it really is the best resource I've found for Starfinder empire stuff)
If you're expanding to the interplanetary scale then I definitely think that putting together some random tables will help a lot in the long run.
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I've read Star Empires, but I was a bit disappointed. It's take on the scale issue was basically "pick one scale", be it either 12 mile hexes, whole continents, planets, or whole star systems. It doesn't really handle the case where you might be interested in one strategic space station as well as one city on a planet and another city with hundreds of cities.
My idea is that the amount of "direct reports" the party has to deal with should remain fixed at a maximum of say, 10 - that can mean that there's two high profile NPCs, one area that they're hex-mapping, a couple of planets with a planetary governor to handle the details, a space station, a fleet, a special ops team, an ambassador to a nearby empire and a capital city.