Hi all.

I know that the Stargate series has been discussed on these boards before and ill be using those rules as a framework for the game.

Now with that out of the way, my idea was to do a stargate game based in the Andromeda Galaxy and am wondering what kind of unique physics, races and tech would be in the galaxy.

I was thinking of adding in the Magic Rules from the core book as a unique thing with all the tech being technomagic esc and the races using said magic in their everyday life.

Id like to see what these boards can come up with to help me with the unique races involved in such a system where magic is part of the natural order of things.

Thanks all for your help.

One of the hallmarks of any SG series is the Over the Top Big Bad alien species that wants to enslave humanity. Another is (quite obviously) a stargate network.

So you'd need to figure out how the SGC gets to Andromeda, why there are gates there (or the local equivalent, if it's not of Alteran design), and who the dominant alien species is and why they enslave humanity.

From there, a lot of their tech should emerge from that. The goa'uld uses humans as hosts and they impersonated gods. So their tech was "magical" and themed appropriately. The wraith fed on humans, so their tech was mostly of the "subdue and capture" variety—and to further differentiate it was organic-based tech.

Just a few ideas that will hopefully help!

9 hours ago, c__beck said:

One of the hallmarks of any SG series is the Over the Top Big Bad alien species that wants to enslave humanity. Another is (quite obviously) a stargate network.

So you'd need to figure out how the SGC gets to Andromeda, why there are gates there (or the local equivalent, if it's not of Alteran design), and who the dominant alien species is and why they enslave humanity.

From there, a lot of their tech should emerge from that. The goa'uld uses humans as hosts and they impersonated gods. So their tech was "magical" and themed appropriately. The wraith fed on humans, so their tech was mostly of the "subdue and capture" variety—and to further differentiate it was organic-based tech.

Just a few ideas that will hopefully help!

Well, as to why there are gates there you could retcon the the retcon. In the original film the gate took them to a very distant galaxy, the makers of the TV show just thought that was too big a playground to play in but I think it could be fun to imagine that part of the gate network was just disabled or cutoff somehow.

hmm ... you might draw some inspiration from Rifts

On 10/22/2019 at 4:26 PM, hellrazoromega said:

but I think it could be fun to imagine that part of the gate network was just disabled or cutoff somehow

Like you point out, the show dorked with things from the film to make them work better within the context of a TV show... but taking that on...

So in the films the gates "dial" locations with constellations at the gate's planet of origin being the various characters in the combo. By extension every gate is different, featuring different constellations, and of course the point of origin (which is what fouled up Spaderman in the film, he assumed the return combo would be sitting around out in the open right by the gate). Now... since you can only put so many constellations on a gate's dialing ring, and only so many of those combinations can even be valid at all, then you would logically need a set of transit hubs to expand your access. Indeed you'd also need transit hubs as when a gate is first built it can only include the characters for existing known locations at the time of it's construction, so hubs would allow a traveler to get from an old location to a new one without the need to build an entirely new gate on their starting planet.

Soooo that gives you a justifiable pathway and a baked-in setting hook. Dial a location, arrive at a transit hub, and find one of those gates dials wherever you want the setting to go.

If you like, make that transit hub primitive. While knee-jerk says go with something akin to Atlantis, I'd actually say make it hella primitive instead. Open air, some nice roads, and just a bunch of gates and not a heck of a lot else. That way once the players get to Galaxy 2 (whoa, that hub lead to another hub here, and all these gates go places!) then they are also kinda stuck. #1 they need a return dial from there, but also when they go somewhere else from hub 2, they're kinda remote. Anything they request has to get back to the SGC, which means the supply line looks like this: Request:Location->Hub2-Hub1->SGC, Returning supplies SGC->Hub1->Hub2->:Location. So the players will be a little more on their own than usually depicted in the shows. And by extension means you can provide some FOB building at Hub1 and Hub2.

Now... just my thoughts... if you're gonna do that, do a soft reboot. Dump the adventures of MacGyver across the 5th Dimension and only go with Kurt and Spadermans' wild ride as canon, or only use a specific season or 3 of Stargate. Stargate just plain ran too long, so going forward is going to be a lot harder than picking up a an earlier time.. That'll give you more to work with while also dumping all the easy solutions MacGyver provided. The players will have to rediscover the setting, which may or may not carry over. That way it doesn't matter where you take the players or what's there. No fretting on how your Carthaginian-themed Aliens will work with all the known and dead Ghouls.

Now... as for magic... your call. As Beck said you're kinda getting into the old Clark quote: Any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic.

From that perspective I'd say you can develop a couple different kinds of magic that fall into different categories. Nantites, Hard-light projection, whatever. How it works can be whatever you like depending on the level of accessibility you want the players to have. Some Magic might be a literally bit of esoteric tech. A "magic wand" that manipulates gravity allowing for telekinesis-like effects to those sufficiently trained in it's use for example. A player might be able to make that one work with minimal training if you wanted. On the other end it might be something less obvious. Nanites infused in the character's blood stream allowing for them to heal/repair/damage things by touching them. In this case the nanite infusing might something so beyond the player's tech level they can't ever figure it out. Or maybe something in the middle, cybernetic implants that allow the user to manipulate magnetic fields. The implants are there, they can be seen on an x-ray. What they do isn't hard to figure out and can be scientifically detected with Earth-available tech. But the exact how and why it works might be lightyears ahead of Earth.

To an extent here I'd say look at Superheroes for inspiration over traditional Sci-fi. Soldiers with metal reinforced skeletons and self-healing nantite infusions. A hard-light projector that can allow the user to conjure up items with a thought. Multiphasic armor that can allow a person to "conjure a steel skin." All these kinds of things would work under the magic umbrella, even if when asked, the wielder can just respond with "well once you figure out that the speed of light is relative and not constant, it all makes total sense."

Another thing to keep in mind, if you're doing any sort of soft/hard reset, is the 7-chevron address system.

Yes, the movie explains that you need 6 points to tell the DHD where you want to go and a seventh to tell it where you are. But you can get the same result with only 5 chevrons: 4 points to create a tetrahedral area of space instead of a cubical area. The 5th can be your point of origin.

Thank you all for the thoughts on how to achieve this.

I do like the idea of nanites and cybernetic implants being the device that makes the magic work, gives me that Technomage feel from Babylon 5.

For the setting, i like going back to the beginning to reinvent it since everything will be new and i do like the idea of being isolated to a certain extent, perhaps it takes forever to get anything to them since its so far away from Earth.

As for the gates, theyll work in a similar manner to the stargates in the shows but will be way more efficient with the use of technomagic and will appear thinner than the milkyway gates and look far more advanced with different chevron symbols than the ones from the movies / show.

I ran a Stargate game a looooong time ago and set it in another galaxy.

Generally, to make it feel Stargate-y, I needed an enemy who was scary but dumb enough to be foiled regularly (like how the Wraith and Goa'uld were long-lived and outrun by modern-thinking SG teams), touched by Ancients somehow (in mine the galaxy was colonised by Ancients who were kicked out for being dicks. They called themselves Hyperboreans and meddled regularly in the affairs of mortals as self-proclaimed gods, which was part of the norse vibe I was going for). The hard part is making a modern day team viable in a setting with space gods, which I assume is why most humans are downtrodden medieval types.

Also, pick a vibe. SG1 had Egyptian (and other Earth cultures), SGA had a Trek vibe, SGU had steampunk. I went norse, what would be cool would be like Homeworld, where all the names are from Cradle of Civilisation places and words (Tanis, Hiigara, Kapisis) and there's a strong ME vibe that looks to places like Pakistan and Iraq, with mythical entities like Tiamat and Kali more than Egyptian stuff.

With technology, Ancient tech (or something equivalent) would work well. I'm thinking like Runequest/Elder Scrolls, where magic (or nanotech or tapped control of some etheric energy source, like B5 Technomages) means that there's a certain level of powered stuff going on anyway. For example, the Ancients could have developed a noosphere that propagates through the gate network and connects all nanotech devices, connecting them metnally or even physically. At the wierdest you could dissemble a nanotech entity and remake them at the end point, control the weather or even the minds of the people around them.

The space peasants can still be space peasants, oppressed by the Ancients or their successors. I mean, a race that usurped the Ancients' name would be an interesting enemy because culturally they may not really be ahead of humans, but have all that fancy Ancient tech they don't understand - kind of a mirror to the Tau'ri, who have always been placed as the Ancient's successors.