Bioships

By thecowley, in Game Masters

So I love bio-ships. Moya from Farscape, wraith cruiser and hives from Stragate Atlantis. I also run my one homebrew version of starwars with changes to the empire during the time of original trilogy. I know a few of the old expanded universe books make mention of races that grow ships, but im having trouble finding them again. My google-fu is weak. Besides assitance in finding it again before i homebrew my own race, does any one rmember what race/s it was that grew bioships?

Another questions, do you think its fair to let such a bio ship self heal and regenerate? making the same checks as a player character to heal critical damage? Maybe even let the players spend hardpoints in increase its regeneration rate.

*EDITED*

I also dont want to use the Yuuzhan Vong, as i find the race very odd and difficult to want to use, since their whole thing is space apocalypse

Edited by thecowley

No idea about bioships myself, even if I like the concept myself. :) I would make them repairable using Medicine (Xenos medicine) and self heal if given an energy source. They would also need to eat. What does a ship eat?

Not a bioship, but wookies have ships made of really resilent and adaptable WOOD.

The Vong are really your only bet for ORGANIC ships.

However, many ships possess droid brains with some degree of sentience.

These seem to be canon, nowadays.

If you're GM'ing this... you're overthinking it. Or better, just not quite looking at it in the 'right' way...

This is a narrative system, so keep it narrative, because ultimately, the narrative is what's most important.

Give the ship the stats you want, or reskin something that already exists if you want to be sure to keep it balanced, and boom. There you go...

Your players aren't going to remember that the crazy bioship they ran across had 1 more point of defense than it 'should' have... they're going to remember the awesome story that got told about the ship, where it came from, what it ate, etc... so focus on that.

For funsies: Vorlon and Shadow from Babylon 5. Also Minbari White Star and Earth Alliance Omega X. You won't be disappointed, find appropriate class to appropriate and toss on bio-benefits. Then use them against your PCs.

thanks for the thoughts and links

Bio- what?

Like the Invid?

Yeah, I did see a couple of episodes of Farscape, and I'm familiar with Moya, but . . . for Star Wars? <Heavy belabored sigh>

First, I'd recommend talking to your players. Because if either of my GM's introduced something like that to either of the games I play, my suspenders of disbelief would irreparably break.

In your defense, it's a big galaxy and sure it could be a thing somewhere. But it's going to be rare. Also, in the Star Wars universe, bioships aren't going to be nearly as good as what the rest of the galaxy is using. Because if they WERE, then everyone would already be using them.

Bishop69 has some good advise. Go find a ship with comparable size stats to what you imagine and then beat it about with a Nerf bat for about an hour.

There was a species in Saga edition that used biotech ships. They lived in some rift area or other. Their ships were a lot slower than regular ships if I remember correctly.

I've always liked the idea of bio-tech ships and such.

On ‎10‎/‎26‎/‎2017 at 11:18 AM, Mark Caliber said:

In your defense, it's a big galaxy and sure it could be a thing somewhere. But it's going to be rare. Also, in the Star Wars universe, bioships aren't going to be nearly as good as what the rest of the galaxy is using. Because if they WERE, then everyone would already be using them.

Go watch Babylon 5 starting with Season 3 and end with 4. Bioships in this case are at least a million of years more advanced than the rest of the galaxy. They're grown, they learn, and they adapt much like other organic things do. Every class from scouts to planet destroying abominations.