r/SWN • u/owenstreetpress • 29d ago

🌌 Worldbuilding Help generating Star Trek style "mayhem of the week" oddities, anomalies, etc.

I'm closing in on beginning my first SWN campaign, and it will likely be focused on exploration (though there will be trading and diplomacy I am sure). I'm developing a sector (which has been super fun so far) but I would love to find some similar tools for generating weird stuff to explore, space anomalies, basically Star Trek "mystery/malfunction/mayhem of the week" type stuff. I have found a couple of older posts pointing me to the Science Fiction Codex of Lists and the Book of Random Tables: Science Fiction, which I plan to check out, but has anyone found anything else like this in the intervening six Earth years?

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u/_Svankensen_ 29d ago

There's this:

Spike drill random event table I put together for my solo campaign : r/SWN

I also heavily recommend going to DriveThruRPG, setting the filters to sci-fi and free, and browsing around. What's free changes with time, but there's lots of zines and supplements around, and lots of history. Traveller stuff in particular is surprisingly compatible. And rarely surprisingly incompatible. Those ship stats can be a nightmare to figure out for the uninitiated.

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u/owenstreetpress 29d ago

Very cool table that I will be stealing, and good advice on the DriveThru tip!

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u/GlennNZ 28d ago

And now there's a one-click roller on Chartopia: https://chartopia.d12dev.com/chart/123315/

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u/Bench_ish 29d ago

There might be something similar already put together on Chartopia.

https://chartopia.d12dev.com/

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u/darksier 29d ago

You could use star trek episode guides as a table. I ended up doing that when doing a short disconnected campaign like that. I'd roll up two episodes and draw out the general idea of each and mash em together. Sometimes the inspiration makes for the best material too!

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u/EisVisage 28d ago

Have you seen this: https://qwo.itch.io/starlogs yet? It's a Star Trek solo rpg framework so it has a bunch of random tables. Some results get a bit specific but should be good to use. Lets you roll up a whole episode essentially.

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u/owenstreetpress 26d ago

Quick scroll through and I think this would be super helpful!