Has anyone created little encounters that go off mid-hyperspace travel? There are lots of reasons why PCs may spend days or weeks at at time in hyperspace, and I'm very hesitant to simply hand-wave it away. I'd love to have SOMETHING happen in that time, even if it is fairly minor, and I'd like it to not be totally in-fighting related amongst the PCs. Any ideas?

Have them visited by a Force ghost that lays out some future session.

Come across an ancient ship traveling in hyperspace that appears trapped there. I suppose that could be a whole session, not really little.

Equipment failure that results in them not being able to drop out of hyperspace without repairs.

Equipment failure that causes a jump error throwing them out of the galaxy. That could also lead to a whole session, with them arriving at some lone planet, asteroid base, or derelict ship.

As far as I know, there's really not much that can happen in hyperspace other than travel - the Warp it ain't. Your best bet is to either take some of 2P51's ideas or just say, "And then you arrive at your destination."

Social interaction if they are transporting some VIP. (making possible shade deals or how much does it costs if there comes any "trouble")

Making plans for their actions when they arrive to their destination. (My game group uses travel times for this so we don't bog down when action happens if they have specific mission on the way.)

If they have XP banked they can use that time to train. (Ask if anyone wan't to train skills, talents etc etc)

2P51 has good suggestions.

SPACE HERPES!!!!

Wait, what happened to the Space Weasels?

Since a ship is mostly "immune" to outside influences when travelling through hyperspace (except for stuff that forces it to drop out of hyperspace, obviously) most of the things that can happen revolve around the ship itself and its passengers and cargo. You could have stowaways, or something going wrong with the ship that requires fixing - complicated by the fact that you can't go outside the ship or shut down power. Or something could go wrong with the cargo, such as live speciments escaping or toxic materials spilling out.

A Kowakian monkey-lizard stows away onboard at their last stop. It proceeds to tear up wiring, all the while cackling in the background. It causes problems that require fixing: life support, hyperdrive, sensors, whatever. And the party has to hunt the little bugger down on top of that.

If you have a very powerful group drop one of these bad boys on them if they are bored in hyperspace or stopping in deep space for repairs: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Starweird

I dropped one on my super group and, while they killed it, they all agreed if they hadn't handled it exactly as they did it would have probably tpk'd them.

If the ship was previously used before the PCs got it, they could suddenly discover a secret smuggling compartment with some "troubling" contents in it. Could be darn near anything -- whatever will pose a quandary for your players.

A flicker of movement outside the ship, a shift in the "walls" of hyperspace. Only one player sees it, and the roll to convince other party members that it happened suffers two Setback dice because everyone knows there's nothing in hyperspace.

Everyone knows it, that is, until the adventure you just hooked comes up.

I think it'd be cool to have a Bounty Hunter (Marauder/Enforcer type) stow away on their ship and start trying to pick off the crew one by one. Think Jubal Early from Firefly, but maybe a Defel with a vibroknife.

It would be a neat mix up for combat encounters when all of a sudden every ranged attack gets red dice and a risk of putting a hole in the hull. Melee combat is just slamming into equipment (breaking it with Threats?). Hand out a few setbacks for party members being in the way or just generally not having a lot of space to move around.

Once the hunter is down, discover that, with his last breath, he has triggered a thermal detonator to go off unless your mechanic can disarm it. Maybe you don't want to hit them that hard though.

You can always have them get pulled out of hyperspace too.

A gravity mine with an ion pulse? You're ship is drifting. Maybe a streetwise PC recognizes this as a common trap set up by pirates in this sector.

An Interdictor Cruiser pulls your party out of space and right into the middle of a battle with the rebels...

I think it'd be cool to have a Bounty Hunter (Marauder/Enforcer type) stow away on their ship and start trying to pick off the crew one by one. Think Jubal Early from Firefly, but maybe a Defel with a vibroknife.

It would be a neat mix up for combat encounters when all of a sudden every ranged attack gets red dice and a risk of putting a hole in the hull. Melee combat is just slamming into equipment (breaking it with Threats?). Hand out a few setbacks for party members being in the way or just generally not having a lot of space to move around.

Once the hunter is down, discover that, with his last breath, he has triggered a thermal detonator to go off unless your mechanic can disarm it. Maybe you don't want to hit them that hard though.

You can always have them get pulled out of hyperspace too.

A gravity mine with an ion pulse? You're ship is drifting. Maybe a streetwise PC recognizes this as a common trap set up by pirates in this sector.

An Interdictor Cruiser pulls your party out of space and right into the middle of a battle with the rebels...

Not for the next few sessions, but once they are a bit more capable/infamous, I love the bounty hunter idea. I've already established a bounty hunter that they chased off. I plan on growing him into a nemesis eventually.

Not mid-hyperspace, but I kept meaning to do something with mynocks when our party arrived at a new starport.

Han reacted like they were pretty common, so it seems like every now and then they'd need to do a sweep or have a maintenance team at the starport discover some mynocks had chewed on some of their cables.

Forgot the obvious one, not a real short quickie modular thing, but overload or some kind of hyperspace anomaly and when they emerge the players find themselves thrown back in time to the Old Republic....

Forgot the obvious one, not a real short quickie modular thing, but overload or some kind of hyperspace anomaly and when they emerge the players find themselves thrown back in time to the Old Republic....

And they have to make sure their great-great-ancestors meet and fall in love!

Forgot the obvious one, not a real short quickie modular thing, but overload or some kind of hyperspace anomaly and when they emerge the players find themselves thrown back in time to the Old Republic....

And they have to make sure their great-great-ancestors meet and fall in love!

Only they find their great-great-ancestor is a bit of a wuss and being picked on by a wookie and a PC's great-great-ancestor-mum falls in love with him instead and they have to get things back in track before the big dance is over? And they need to utilize a rare nova event that occurred that night to get their hyperdrive up to the necessary 88 parsecs per light year necessary to return home.

Would something as simple as an unexpected mass shadow that drops the ship out of hyperspace fit the bill? A couple pirates with a tractor beam could move a chunk of rock into a lesser-known but frequently-used smuggler's lane.

More seriously than my last post, I'm a big fan of just creating a world that feels large and independent of the PCs. I've always disliked a feel that the world was created solely for the players. I'd be very tempted to have something happen that didn't have any plot / real impact, but just served to baffle or entice.

The PCs are travelling through hyperspace. Suddenly sensors pick up dozens of small entities on their sensors when there's not supposed to be anything in Hyperspace. The things track along the PC's ship for about an hour. They seem to respond to scans, moving when probed, but almost nothing can be discerned about them except that they're uniform in size and their density suggests they're partly hollow. Obviously the PCs can't just stick their head out a window in hyperspace and the things most congregate below / above / alongside where there aren't any windows. After an hour, they vanish.

When the PCs return to civilization they naturally find that no-one will believe them and the only people who do are obviously crazy / outcasts / conspiracy theorists.

A pirate ambush that was able to haul a fair sized asteroid into the normal hyperspace lane. Now you have a corvette, and a half dozen star fighters to deal with

Here's a quick list of seeds for mid-hyperspace journey encounters (to be used, perhaps, if a despair or threat comes up during the astrogation check, but you don' t really want to make them LOST IN SPAAAAACE.

1.) Stowaway: A strange warning light pops on in the cockpit signaling an equipment locker isn't dogged while prepping the jump to hyperspace. Further investigations reveal a stowaway onboard. This can be a child/street urchin type character, a plucky droid with an important message for someone at the destination you filed with the spaceport (even though it has NOTHING to do with your adventure), a spy affiliated with Imperial Intelligence or a rival criminal organization, a spurned lover, a pretty cool PC introduction if you are adding someone to the group, or perhaps someone has planted cargo in the locker, like spice, to frame the PCs as an act of revenge.

2.) Equipment malfunction: Mid hyperspace trip, that damaged Ion exciter starts giving overload readings, looks like it isn't going to hold out after all. A rapid series of checks, including Pilot (space), mechanics of course, and Astrogation (can we just drop out wherever we are? Is there anything close where we can repair?) are required to prevent the ship from arriving without ion engines, or some other system.

3.) Snooty Passenger: You almost forgot! You have a passenger onboard for this trip, to help cover the costs of all this starhopping, and provide a cover story to help hide the "secret cargo" better. Turns out he's a real blue-blood to boot. The passenger tests the patience of all involved, forcing a group Cool or Discipline check as appropriate against the passenger's non-sense. For each party member to fail the check, charge an extra 100 credits in docking fees at the next port of call (since the passenger's credits aren't offsetting some of those refueling costs and the like).

4.) Medical Emergency: Another passenger, this time an elderly alien, is so excited by his first jump into hyperspace, he up and suffers cardiac arrest as soon as the jump is made. Knowledge (Xeonolgy) and Medicine checks are required to bring him back to the land of the living.

5.) Vermin Infestation: Oh fierfek! It looks like the ship is infested with critters, gnawing on the power cables (who keeps coating them in peanut butter, anyway?). It's up to the PCs to race around the ship with Opposed Perception/Stealth checks of the critters to find them, then capture or kill them (coordination, brawl, melee, or even ranged light if you have some kind of extermination equipment), and then repair whatever systems they might have damaged with Mechanics checks. Number of vermin and which systems they are nesting in/affecting to be determined by the GM.

6.) Skifter: A passenger has challenged the ship to a few friendly hands of sabacc. Use the Sabacc rules, only this drifter uses a skifter card, he's cheating! The PC's need to discover his scheme before he cleans them out of all their credits, and then figure out what to do with him once they hit port.

7.) Cargo Rodeo: The crew has taken on a cargo of nerfs, and while they were all nice and contained in a single cargo bay at first, one of them somehow got the cargo hatch open, and a dozen nerfs are now engaging in dominance matches (re: headbutting each other) and chewing on everything in sight throughout the ship. The PCs need to make Athletics checks, Charm checks, Coercion checks, or any other checks they can think of to get the animals back to the cargo bay, and sealed in their pen. Mechanics checks might be required if they damage anything important through head butting, and medicine checks might be required for trampled party members, or damaged nerfs.

That should get you started.

More seriously than my last post, I'm a big fan of just creating a world that feels large and independent of the PCs. I've always disliked a feel that the world was created solely for the players. I'd be very tempted to have something happen that didn't have any plot / real impact, but just served to baffle or entice.

It sounds as if you're describing the concept of Fronts, used heavily in Dungeon World. The tl;dr is that you the GM pick a number of plotlines that will unfold in your story whether the players interact with them or not. I like to envision it like a mess of gears that twist and turn, and I adapt the story to the players' actions, but it breathes life into the setting for me to put strange, seemingly unrelated events into play. I don't waste time working up things that don't really matter to the story unless it's a red herring.

...to get their hyperdrive up to the necessary 88 parsecs per light year necessary to return home.

I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but I love the fact that you both referenced Lucas' mistake on parsecs being a unit of distance and not time and then managed to make the exact same mistake with light years.

...to get their hyperdrive up to the necessary 88 parsecs per light year necessary to return home.

I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but I love the fact that you both referenced Lucas' mistake on parsecs being a unit of distance and not time and then managed to make the exact same mistake with light years.

It was deliberate. I thought about how I could parody the original goof but I didn't know if anyone would catch it. You have restored my faith in the Force.

More seriously than my last post, I'm a big fan of just creating a world that feels large and independent of the PCs. I've always disliked a feel that the world was created solely for the players. I'd be very tempted to have something happen that didn't have any plot / real impact, but just served to baffle or entice.

It sounds as if you're describing the concept of Fronts, used heavily in Dungeon World. The tl;dr is that you the GM pick a number of plotlines that will unfold in your story whether the players interact with them or not. I like to envision it like a mess of gears that twist and turn, and I adapt the story to the players' actions, but it breathes life into the setting for me to put strange, seemingly unrelated events into play. I don't waste time working up things that don't really matter to the story unless it's a red herring.

I'm not familiar with Dungeon World. It sounds like "fronts" are just the age old practice of throwing a bunch of things at the players and fleshing out things in response to what they chase after. Been doing that since the D&D Expert set introduced me to adventures not set in a dungeon!

But no, I wasn't suggesting this as a means of inviting the players to go off in a different direction. As I said, the intent was just to create a feeling that the world was large and existed independently of the PCs. To that end, you could actually say it runs counter to that to let the players pursue it as a plot line. Sometimes the unexplained remains exactly that - adds a sense of mystery to things.