A background story for a sleeper colony ship, that is optimized for plot
hooks and for giving the Gm handweave material to explain away suboptimal
mission planning:
We have a first world nation (or equivalent) that is able to build thoose
ships. We have a large number of people who somehow are the repsonsiblity
of that nation or want to become so, who are widely considered a liability
within the first world nation however.
Refugees would be a good example, but you also could go with badly
integrated ethnic minorities, like for instance Roma in eastern europe.
Now someone, who might or might not be on the payroll of astro tech
corporations, starts selling the idea to send them off to make colonies in
outer space. A compromise beween the "left", who want to help them here,
and the "right", who want to get rid of them and punish them for being a
nuisance and it helps the ecconomy and probably it also serves as good dry
run, for later colonisation projects with "real" people. (The last point
would depend on the rules for time dialation and generally how soon
information will get back).
So we have colonists, who fit better to the classic wild west pioneer
tropes, then a state of the art selection program would produce, who
likely have sharp ethinic divisions (their ethicities being only
equivalent with respect to the first world nations political disourse)
plus maybe some first world volunteers, with a classic patronizing
colonialist superiority attitude.
The ships crew might be distinct from the colonists and be more concerned
to prevent the cononists from ruining the ship, then with making the
colony work.
The colony might be supplied with a constitution or similiar rules, that
reflect the first world nations political discourse, but don't particulary
fit to the actual colonists-
How much and what supplies the colonists get will not only depend on what
a colony needs, but on what the first worlds "left" considers to be
neccessary for a life fit for humans beings and what the "right" considers
frivolous luxury and which industry has the best lobbyists.
In short the perfect setup for a disaster, that the pcs have to fix and
"politics" as pretty universal answer for why saveguards that should be
there to prevent adventure situations, are missing.
Johannes
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