Misadventure Seeds for Refueling Stations

A gas station in space. Where crews steer their ships when they run low on whatever makes them go. They offer enough amenities to keep crews occupied while their ships are gassed up. Cleaning bridge viewports and cockpit canopies costs extra.

Rosie considers opening a refueling station.

What a refueling station offers for sci-fi roleplaying adventures is twofold. How often ships have to resupply depends on the setting, but they do have to pull over sometime. This leaves the player characters at a relatively isolated location. How fast a ship can be restocked is also setting dependent, but usually takes significant time. So the player characters are stuck for awhile. This gives an enterprising gamemaster an opportunity to get them into trouble without the options of pulling strings or taking off in their ship.

Such a place could take many forms. It depends on details like what spaceship fuel is made of:

• An orbital station circling a gas giant. It relies on scooper shuttles to collect the atmospheric gases the station processes into spaceship fuel.
• A station orbiting a star. It uses vast solar arrays to power a manufacturing facility that can produce antimatter in industrial quantities. It's definitely not something that would be anywhere near an inhabited world or structure.
• A set of landing pads on a backwater planet. The fuel is stored in tanks and semi-regularly topped off by visiting tankers.
• A self-sufficient ground based refueling facility attached to an automated mining and refining operation that turns raw materials into the glowing crystals that FTL drives depend on.

Adventure Seeds:

"Everybody's Dead" - The player characters' ship drags itself to the nearest station on its last dregs of fuel. The station doesn't respond to coms. With no choice, they dock and discover that there is nobody left alive on the station. Do they stick around to review the recordings somebody left all over the place for clues and try to solve the mystery? Or do they grab just enough fuel to make it elsewhere and make a run for it? Either way, whatever killed off everybody on the station is likely to still be around.

"Whodunit?" - Somebody stumbles on a murder scene. Everybody on the station is now a suspect. Fun times ensue. The folks running the refueling station shut off the flow of fuel to make sure that everybody stays put until they get answers. If things drag out long enough, the local authorities might decide to pin the blame on a certain group of itinerant adventurers. After all, nobody knows them and they have no local influence. The player characters are going to want to do something to head that off.

"Neutral Ground" - The player characters and their sworn enemies find themselves stopping at the same station at the same time. The station authorities make it clear that they won't tolerate a conflict that risks damage to the station. Of course, there's plenty of ways to cause trouble that fall short of that standard. The bad guys are keen to try them all.

"Eat, Get Gas" - This is supposed to be a quick stop on the way to bigger and more important things. Unfortunately, the clues that something weird is going on start to pile up around the player characters. Maybe it's the strange symbols on every surface. Perhaps it's something in the air or food. Do the player characters try to figure out the station's dark secrets or do they just hope that the situation stays stable long enough to fuel up the ship and get out of here?

This post was inspired by a tweet from ToughSF featuring space station art by Alexey Pyatov.