Animal Planet aka In Search Of

A quick search of my posts does not bring up anything about Animal Planet. Weird. I will likely equally refer to Animal Planet as In Search Of or ISO. Seems like an evocative name.

As a recap/summary, Animal Planet/ISO is a long-standing idea involving anthropomorphic animal characters (mammals and birds) who are travelling between worlds on a vast spaceship. They encounter an enemy warship (anthro reptiles) and take up orbit around an unknown planet seemingly uninhabited by intelligent life to negotiate. During talks, an explosion rocks the ship and the captain orders a general evacuation. Thousands of escape pods launch to the planet's surface, including the pod housing the PCs. The survivors have to seek out other escape pods to gather allies, supplies, and equipment while avoiding would-be dictators, crazed cultists, devolved atavists, dangerous native flora and fauna, hostile biomes and weather, and troubling military patrols from both the mothership and the enemy ship. They also get to cope with the sudden development of psionic powers and, potentially, mutations.

The game is a sandbox hexcrawl. PCs are free to set up their own society, seek a way to signal or travel back to the mothership, explore strange ruins that dot the surface of the planet, or anything else they can dream. In the background of all this are the great mysteries of what caused the explosion (the enemy ship had their own personnel on board for the negotiations), why so many of the escape pods contain military grade weapons and equipment, and the secrets of the ancient ruins. I do not have the full answers to these mysteries myself but I know the passengers aboard the Yggdrasil came from many worlds with many different ideas about how to live (including luddites, off-gridders, and pre-atavists) so internal relations were a mess before the reptoids even arrived.

I am currently working my way through the Stars Without Number revised rules, then I will take a trip through Other Dust to see what elements I can incorporate. I like the simplicity and deadliness of the rules and was specifically wanting a rule set that could handle psionics and mutations. I think both books can be plundered for equipment while OD will offer tools for scavenging. I have not yet read to the sandbox rules but I know I will need tables to cover terrain, weather, flora, fauna, ruins, pods, equipment, supplies, survivors, and development.

What is development? It is what survivors have been doing in the time between crashing down and encountering the PC. It includes building up their shelter, exploring, trading, repairing, migrating, or dying due to disease, hostile environment, lack of food, infighting, or outfighting. The longer it takes PCs to encounter them, the more rolls they will get on the table. Death and destruction should be decently common early on (die on impact, no nearby food, etc.) but grow less common after several "successful" development rolls as they find resources and adapt. I would need to generate pods/settlements on the map slightly further than the PCs can reasonably explore to allow development interaction in an outward direction and for information to flow to PCs from beyond the fog of war.

I can probably program all of that into one or more spreadsheets to quickly generate settlements at least one session before the PCs could reach them to help develop adventure leads.