The Lost Universe: NASA's First TTRPG Adventure

March 4, 2024 10:12 PM

The Lost Universe (science.nasa.gov, 03/04/2024): "A dark mystery has settled over the city of Aldastron on the rogue planet of Exlaris. Researchers dedicated to studying the cosmos have disappeared, and the Hubble Space Telescope has vanished from Earth's timeline. Only an ambitious crew of adventurers can uncover what was lost. Are you up to the challenge? This adventure is designed for a party of 4-7 level 7-10 characters and is easily adaptable for your preferred tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) system." Adventure design by Christina Mitchell. Graphic design by Michelle Belleville.
posted by Wobbuffet (14 comments total)

The nerds at NASA have just out-nerded themselves. I need to find a gaming group, stat.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 10:27 PM on March 4 [4 favorites]

This is what they spend our tax dollars on?

I’m okay with that.
posted by gentilknight at 11:49 PM on March 4 [9 favorites]

A brief look reveals that this is aimed at "the world's most popular RPG". It'd probably port easily to one of the many imitators, but I suspect running it in something like Mothership would not produce the tone the authors intended.
posted by entity447b at 12:28 AM on March 5 [4 favorites]

The premise seems to be "What if there's no Hubble space telescope, and some NASA scientists get sucked to another planet full of Tolkienesque species via some sort of Edar Rice Burroughs magical hand-wave?"

And yeah, entity447b, it seems to claim to be kind of system-agnostic, but the mention of "level 7-10 characters" shows a pretty strong D20ish bias. I don't imagine they expected it to be shoehorned into Risus or Dogs in the Vineyard or anything. I wish the memory of early-2000s Forge-inspired RPGs were a little stronger, from the days before they all fractured off into d&d1e fandom.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 4:39 AM on March 5 [5 favorites]

I mean it would seem dumb to do this and not make it trivial to fit into 5e or pathfinder or the 1e fandom spin-offs. Right? They are trying to drum up some space excitement and have some fun. I'm not well versed in TTRPG but my understanding is that if you try so hard to make it truly system-agnostic, then it ends up just having less content and also being harder to run in the worlds most popular TTRPG system. So I don't really blame them for that, even though I'm a pretty big WoTC hater.

As for tax dollars. Idk if this is explained anywhere but I suspect that people made this for fun on their own time. They weren't paid for this work, but rather *allowed* to slap the nasa name on and host it there. Maybe a quick run through legal and press to make sure they don't cause any problems with it.
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:51 AM on March 5 [4 favorites]

Also, even if they were paid—the way you keep people from burning the fuck out at work is by having stuff like this for them to do when they need a break but are temperamentally incapable of taking one. It’s 0% different from when that person in payroll makes a “Graphic Design Is My Passion” spring newsletter that includes recipes and fun facts about Easter (or whatever).

Anyway, paid or not I’m glad NASA employees have the mental space to do something like this. :)
posted by brook horse at 6:28 AM on March 5 [6 favorites]

Metafilter: shows a pretty strong D20ish bias
posted by tigrrrlily at 8:44 AM on March 5 [3 favorites]

OK, NASA, now release your own RPG system. For space adventures, baby. Maybe classless but d20-based (think open license)... or something GURPS or FATE-adjacent. A hopepunk/cozy SF (think Runaway to the Stars or The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet) alternative to Mothership and Alien. I want to run hopeful hard-ish sf adventures!
posted by kikaider01 at 9:58 AM on March 5 [6 favorites]

More walls of text than I like to see in an "adventure module" these days, and I think a set of pre-gens would make it more readily playable for a greater number of people, but if my daughter hadn't become too cool for TTRPGing, I'd be happy to get her old gaming gang together again for this.

Also, surely it's more D&DBX (with limited 1e) fandom nowadays?
posted by house-goblin at 9:58 AM on March 5 [2 favorites]

NASA, now release your own RPG system. For space adventures, baby

Naveller?
NURPS?
posted by doctornemo at 11:42 AM on March 5 [4 favorites]

Ooh! I love the rough-hewn handcraftedness of it. Not that people didn't put a great deal of work into it, but this does feel, as SaltySalticid and brook horse put it, like a labor of love and not a slick PR operation. Re systems: it feels very much like it was designed as a D&D adventure and then explicit references were snipped out. The lack of explicit stats etc might just come down to someone in legal being uncomfortable slapping all that required D20 licensing boilerplate onto a government publication.

The science connection is a little thin--but who knows! I won't complain if the new generation of space telescopes turns out to unlock the secrets of vacuum energy to the point where we can start harvesting it for spell slots like they do on Exlaris.

(Which my mind kept reading as "the rogue planet Exlax"--a different adventure entirely!)
posted by col_pogo at 1:17 PM on March 5 [2 favorites]

D20 licensing boilerplate is literally legally impossible to add when you're an agency that is unable to hold copyright on anything.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:22 PM on March 5 [3 favorites]

Better use of my tax dollars than about 50% of what the government does, I approve!
posted by sotonohito at 7:46 PM on March 5 [1 favorite]

Mod note: This post has been successfully launched onto the Sidebar and Best Of blog!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 5:49 AM on March 6 [2 favorites]