Habitats and Factions in Deep Space Bitches

In Deep Space Bitches, the world you put your players in is as important as the players themselves. This isn't a game about thousands of years of history or the grand wars that shift power from empire to empire - rather, it's about what the galaxy looks like to everyone who's caught in the middle. The scope and detail of the game world should be on the order of individual planets, space stations, and star systems; grand galactic maps are out of scope (no matter how fun they are to draw).

Habitats are self-contained structures built to house a permanent sapient presence. They range from small bubble-domes on far-flung planets, to orbital port stations, to vast asteroid field refinery-cities, to entire megalopoli in the imperial core. Each habitat is constructed for a reason - it's far easier to expand an existing hab than set up an entirely new one. Whatever its purpose, there will be various factions who have different, typically conflicting demands, and exploited workers that make it function (whether they like it or not).

 

Very few habitats are fully self-sustaining. The infrastructure necessary to keep a population alive and healthy is complex, and while processes like radiation shielding and oxygen recycling are solved problems, there are always resources that a small habitat has to import in order to keep its people in working condition. While habitats have largely been standardized for ease of deployment and expansion, each faces unique material challenges based on its location - whether environmental, logistical, or political.

Keep the following in mind as you design a habitat for Deep Space Bitches, as players should be able to interact with the systems that undergird life in the distant future in order to understand how they're exploitative and how they can be changed.

 

Why was this habitat built here? Who controls it?

Fungal radiation shielding, gravity plating, fusion reactors, and molecular recyclers allow livable habitats to be constructed virtually anywhere in a star system. This doesn't mean they're easy to assemble, and whoever builds them always expects a return on investment. Typically this means they're sponsored by an empire or a megacorporation, in response to some material or strategic necessity for another nearby population. A resource is discovered, or a phenomenon must be observed, or a tactically vital jump point needs to be claimed for the glory of the nation - and the bidding wars begin.

 

Contractors compete for the right to construct the habitat (and thereby get a stake in the finished product), it goes to the lowest bidder, and they ship in workers and supplies to begin construction. A few years later (depending on the size of the hab, the stability of the economy, any competing interests), something somewhat resembling the original plans is in place, ready to exploit resources and win profit for whoever commissioned its construction. The workers who assembled it are either granted the right to live there and maintain it, or are shipped off to another project - in either case, they have no access to the fruits of their labor, and no say in how it's used.

       

Sometimes, other concerns commission habitats. Research conglomerates may want to study a unique local phenomenon, an eccentric trillionaire might like the view, cults might want to build their holy land from scratch, the planet might be in legal limbo with no clear enforceable tax regime. Roll on the following d20 table to figure out why this habitat is here.

 

Why was this habitat founded?
1. Basic resource (1. raw minerals, 2. water, 3. organic compounds, 4. helium-3 fusion fuel, 5. food, 6. processing power).
2. Luxury resource (1. spices, 2. rare lifeforms, 3. precious metals/gemstones, 4. antimatter fabrication, 5. biotech and pharmatech, 6. great views)
3. Research (1. anomalous phenomenon, 2. unique ecosystem, 3. xenoarcheology, 4. xenoanthropology, 5. weapons testing, 6. [CLASSIFIED]).
4. Easily terraformable (1. indigenous species under siege by empire, 2. highly-populated imperial hub world, 3. battlefield between competing colonizing powers, 4. project faced unforeseen difficulties, 5. demanding independence, 6. roll twice). 

5. Manufacturing and industry (1. androids, 2. financial services, 3. finished goods, 4. technology, 5. resource processing, 6. starships).
6. Social experiment (1. anarcho-capitalist, 2. doomsday cult, 3. biochauvinist, 4. singularitarian transhumanist, 5. leftist splinter, 6. historical reconstructionist).

7. Under the radar (1-3. criminal syndicate, 4. psychic haven, 5. android liberation, 6. anti-imperial revolutionary).

8. Military base.

9. Refueling port.

10. [CLASSIFIED]
11. Trillionaire's vanity project.
12. Prison.
13. Trade hub.
14. Luxury resorts.
15. Refugee camp.
16. First-wave lost colony.
17. Competing with rival power.
18. Megaproject.
19. Roll twice, it's both.
20. Roll three times, it's all three.

Remember that no matter the main principles a habitat was founded on, even the basic necessities require a workforce to maintain. Not everyone in a luxury vacation habitat is desk staff, a cleaner, or a concierge - every habitat needs technicians, farm workers, medical personnel, dockworkers, construction workers, shuttle pilots, and more.

Where do food, water, and fresh air come from?

Small habitats need to import food and often water; molecular recyclers in the life support system are effective to within 90% of mass reclaimed - but the second law of thermodynamics always holds sway, and without ongoing shipments a hab will inevitably starve. Larger habs may have hydroponics bays, and planetbound habs are typically founded on worlds with access to the building blocks of water and breatheable air. While the hab still likely needs to be sealed against thin, toxic, or simply unbreathable air, systems exist to turn almost any atmosphere mix into something technically breatheable (though reprocessed air typically retains some unique scents from whatever was mostly filtered out). Overall, this means that whoever controls the life support and food shipments has life-or-death power over the habitat at large.

 

How is the habitat powered? 

Fusion reactors are the most common power source for structures, stations, and starships. They're large, finnicky, and heavy - typically requiring a whole team of technicians to maintain. Solar power is potentially cheaper and less volatile, especially on smaller habitats, but requires a large surface area with consistent access to sunlight. More esoteric power sources exist like antimatter cores or gravity-wave turbines, but are restricted to habitats and starships that require vast amounts of power while space is a premium. On planets, hydropower, geothermal, or wind power may be even easier to access. Persistent rumors always spread that psionic energy can be harvested and converted into electricity, but no such facility officially exists.

 

How can residents access medical care? Who is denied it?

Hospitals are typically run by the same corporations that provide life support. While health insurance is provided to all corporate employees (and often to all imperial citizens), the vertical integration of medical care into corporate structures means that you're always going to end up in more debt for a procedure than you can afford anyway. And if you're unemployed, or not an imperial citizen, you're shit out of luck. For the rest, or those who don't want to go into vast debt, dark clinics in the underbelly of the habitat will fix you up for a price - but lack the resources to give you the kind of care that you could take for granted at a corporate facility. That said, street docs tend to be more compassionate, and they don't bother putting their terms in fine print.

That said, modern technology allows for a vast suite of procedures and treatments that pre-starflight civilizations could never imagine. Gene therapy and biocompatible replacement organs have tripled the average lifespan (for those who can pay), and cosmetic body-modding allows for full-body reconstruction. Entire fashion subcultures have grown up around extreme bodymodding, though they tend to the rich or medically-savvy.

 

Cybernetics are commonplace, though finnicky and expensive. On some habitats, everyone has a datajack and corneal displays to interfact with a persistent digital layer of reality - on others, every worker is subject to mandatory augmentation to fit their job and indebted to the corporation until they pay off their rig.

 

Who does the work?

Labor is always the source of profit. In a vast galaxy of near-infinite resources, the only bottleneck between the engines of neo-hyper-imperio-capitalism and unlimited expansion is how quickly it can get people onto a new extractive habitat and toiling away for the investors. Profit is contingent on these workers never demanding more than a token sum to keep them alive and working - everything above that goes to their bosses, their bosses' bosses, their bosses' bosses' bosses, and their investors' dividends.

In most empires, androids are classified as property and tools. Workforces extracting raw materials or constructing starships and stations often are fully composed of android labor, with a minimal non-android presence to maintain critical systems and sound the alarms in case of an escape or revolt. In other habitats, the workforce is made of whoever got there first - the laborers who constructed the habitat subsequently staying on to keep getting their paychecks, first-in colonists whose plan to create a better world was dashed against the profit motive, or indigenous civilizations held at gunpoint by imperial troops and corporate mercenaries.

These groups form the basis of autonomist movements, demanding self-governance and freedom from the corpro-imperial system. Each empire deals with them differently, but all know that they pose a critical threat - and so the goal is always to wipe out autonomist sentiment, in any way possible.

 

What passes for entertainment in this hab?

Any empire will collapse without bread and circuses. Media is an essential part of everyone's daily lives, helping them find some joy in the cracks of the dystopian spacefuture. With media comes propaganda - corporations and empires have always forced entertainment produced under their thumb to conform to social norms, and act as a vehicle for both advertisement and manufactured consent. Idols, dramas, movies, virtual spaces, games, newsfeeds, books, designer drugs, music, religion, pornography - everyone has their vice, and if the corporations can provide them (at a profit), the people might not ask why they feel so beaten down at the end of the day.

 

The narratives shown in media shape the lives we see as livable, and if alternatives to the empire and corporations' dogma are allowed to spread, there's no telling how much damage they could do. Stamping out competing, unapproved sources - whether anti-imperial, anti-corporate, pro-android, pro-psychic, pro-indigenous sovereignty - is imperative.

The 'net has grown from individual, isolated information networks on dozens of worlds into an interstellar data hub of unimaginable size and complexity. Local 'nets convey information instantly within habitats, and near-instantly within star systems, but interstellar communication is still reliant on small-throughput links between relays at jump gates and giant interstellar info-freighters carrying racks of servers full of information to download into every database on their route. Not all local information filters up to the interplanetary or interstellar 'nets - if you want to know something about a place that only locals know, you'll probably have to go there. Different empires have also close off their 'nets from each other, especially when they're preparing for war.

A variety of social media platforms fill the 'net on every habitat. While each habitat has their own local forums and bulletin boards (both corporate-approved and unlicensed), these are household names.
 

buzz!: Microblogging, filled with idols and politicians and brands disseminating their PR in catchy slogans like airborne pathogens. It's a marketing and news platform, with strange emergent communities stapling themselves to the sides. Every day there's a new queen of the hive, whose every move is under scrutiny - pray it isn't you.
 

LifeLog: A personal branding platform where you're expected to socialize with your best foot forward. Like Facebook plus Instagram plus Linkedin - it's awful, but if you want a job you need one, and most people have an account from birth. Pretends it's the friendly town square, ends up being nothing at all.
 

Quiki: Hookup & dating app. Has a dedicated kink and fetish community that it consistently mistreats.
 

Crunch: Counterculture fandom; like a metastatic fusion of tumblr, archive of our own, and fandom wikis. Call themselves "Crunchies", to everyone's annoyance.
 

n-on (pronounced "anon"): The absolute filth that is an anonymous imageboard; the chans, the worst parts (most) of reddit. A malignant tumor that thinks its the sewer of the internet, underpinning everything else and belching toxicity into the rest.

 

fullStack: An ancient help and technician network, too vital to discard, maintained like stone tablets. Forums and helpthreads cluster around it, tent cities on the tops of skyscraper-canyons of millennium-old archival data.

 

Where are finished goods manufactured?

The bits and bobs of daily life - from furniture to utensils to clothes to hardware, and more besides - are hard to manufacture at scale in a single habitat. While large and highly-developed habitats (especially planetside) will often be mostly self-sufficient with regards to manufacturing, smaller habitats are dependent on freighter shipments from other planets to provide the basics. These are usually dispensed at company-run general stores, though again larger and luxury habitats may have a market level where independent local businesses can set up shop (or, more likely, interstellar chains can open a new branch). Shipments of finished goods are what tie most of the galaxy together; new habitats are rarely constructed outside the range of shipping lanes, and interstellar shipping is a multi-trillion dollar industry.

Who protects this habitat from outside threats?

The galaxy is a dangerous place, according to (and usually because of) empires and corporations. The threats (real or imagined) of infiltrators from rival empires, corporate wars, psychic extremism, alien invasion, and daily petty crime demand a response - as do the less-publicly-acknowledged threats of unionization, political dissidents, collective uprisings, android liberation, and secession. Corporations contract private security companies to dp day-to-day policing, both to look like they're keeping everyone safe and to make sure that everyone knows their place and doesn't get ideas. When things go sideways, they might petition imperial authorities to send a detachment of their better-equipped forces, or (if the empire deploying its jackboots would reflect poorly on it) contract a mercenary organization to kill movement leaders and pacify the rest.

Habitats on the borders of an empire's territory will often play host to troop regiments and even entire fleet starbases. These habitats often fall under military rule in times of crisis, and their education systems are built to ingrain the values of loyalty, service, and sacrifice for the empire. Major war is always on the horizon, minor wars and uprisings are always setting the galaxy aflame. The last galactic wars resulted in the entire imperial power-balance shaking up like a snow globe. The winners are desperate to protect their gains, and the losers are eyeing their former glory with vengeful eyes. Never mind that all the flags look the same if you never look up.

by hazelrothjason

 

Who else is here?

When there's space, organizations will show up to fill it. Rarely do they match up with the habitat's initial purpose - to habitat-management corporations, all rent money is good rent money. To fill out the population of the habitat, roll d6 times on the following table.

Factions (d100)

1. Artists
    1. Art academy, incredibly exploitative but the only option for arts education
    2. Propaganda mill dumping vast amounts of pro-imperial memes into the sector
    3. Thriving art scene, renowned across the empire
    4. Independent revival of underclass artistic movements, empire trying to quash it
    5. Underground art scene internally feuding over petty drama
    6. Anonymous virtuoso producing masterworks, identity is tabloid mystery
    7. Constant anonymous anti-establishment meme art, constantly evolving to avoid suppression
    8. Militant artist co-op committing art-terrorism
    9. Haven for artists producing and distributing seditious/banned works
    10. Auction-houses selling ancient masterworks for prices that could buy worlds
2. Corporate
    1. Monopolist megacorp, owns half the habitat, trying to own the other half
    2. Stock market trading hub, complete with hedge fund managers and gentrification
    3. Startup with billions in funding and no path to profitability, ads everywhere
    4. Research university, STEM programs only, does pure research that's coincidentally weaponizable
    5. Terrifying data-harvesting surveillance network, open secret
    6. Research blacksite committing heinous acts in the name of science
    7. Rapidly expanding branch of interstellar pyramid scheme
    8. Boutique artisans crafting luxury goods at the changing whims of the megarich
    9. Trillionaire's private estate, the size of an entire city
    10. Libertarian fully-privatized rentier hab, breathing costs $
3. Criminal
    1. Financial crime; insider trading, tax havens, money laundering, embezzlement writ large
    2. Smuggling ring landing shuttles at a hidden dock
    3. Crime family, carved out independently-recognized territory
    4. Protection racket harassing anyone who doesn't have the money to fight back
    5. Narcotics and proprietary medication manufacturing under the noses of the pharmacorps
    6. Rogue scientists experimenting with banned technologies
    7. Arms dealers selling to highest bidder
    8. Hacking enclave whistleblowing corporate and imperial secrets
    9. Fixers connect corporate managers with teams of deniable assets to prosecute intercorporate shadow-wars
    10. Poachers hunting rare flora and fauna to smuggle off-hab
4. Entertainment
    1. Sports league, based on unique local environmental quirks
    2. Film industry, exploitative and hedonistic in equal measure
    3. Luxury vacation hotels and casinos, deeply rigged, but with vast vaults
    4. Gentleman's clubs for the system's rich and famous
    5. Celebrities, with carefully constructed lives and images far above the workers who maintain the hab
    6. Red-light district, criminalized to keep them down
    7. Bloodsport league, underground and advertised by word of mouth
    8. Livestreamed revenge-killings by charismatic slasher
    9. Wonder of the galaxy and obligatory theme park
    10. Rare food and/or narcotics, export tightly controlled
5. Industry
    1. Agriculture, growing vatmeat or ranching local fauna or vast hydroponic grow-ops
    2. Mining, tearing worlds apart for large deposits of starship-grade metals
    3. Chemical harvesting, typically nitrogen, water, or carbon compounds
    4. Construction, of starships or luxury residences
    5. Biotech, building medtech, synthesizing pharmaceuticals, or growing clone parts
    6. Terraforming; this planet will one day be a garden
    7. Luxury fabrication, making trinkets no one needs and you could never afford
    8. Tourism, marketed as a place to vacation - but not a place to live
    9. Financial services, with all the upscale districts you can never afford to live in
    10. Energy, helium-3 harvesting or antimatter fabrication - as vital as it is dangerous
6. Installations    
    1. Bank and vault, incredibly secure, holds unmatched wealth in art and imperial treasury bonds
    2. Museum full of stolen treasures from colonized civilizations
    3. Starship junkyard, valuable components illegally salvaged for resale on secondary market
    4. Prison, holding the marginalized, indebted, and dissenting for imagined crimes and using them for slave labor
    5. Vanity megaproject construction site
    6. Jump gate and consequent trade hub, spaceport
    7. Archeological dig excavating relics of a long-dead civilization
    8. Wildlife preserve for unique local ecosystem
    9. GATEWAY top-secret research and containment facility, full of paracausal wonders
    10. Vivarium house and attached academy, with secret governing council-cult trying to wake the local star-god
7. Military
    1. Imperial military detachment, deployed as deterrent to rival empire
    2. Imperial naval shipyard and base, complete with fleet in orbit
    3. Police force, armed to the teeth and looking for anyone they can stomp on
    4. Imperial intelligence office, with a small psi-corps presence
    5. Mercenary company on shore leave, waiting for their next contract
    6. Entrenched invasion force from another empire, no-man's-land between them and the hab
    7. Rival imperial intelligence network, connected to the underground, fomenting unrest
    8. Revolutionary militia stockpiling weapons in secret for a massive strike
    9. Mercenary company contracted for defense against local threats, whether hostile fauna or revolutionaries
    10. Private security company, making up for lack of training by rapidly resorting to violence
8. Politics
    1. Aristo dynasties fopping about and demanding ludicrous luxuries
    2. Imperial military governor, heavily guarded and armed
    3. Holo-man in off-hab dreadnought, optimizing economic output
    4. Functionaries for imperial court, corporate lobbyists
    5. Charismatic demagogue building biochauvinist power base
    6. Nonprofits, well-meaning at best and deceptive at worst - always ineffectual
    7. Autonomist independence movement grudgingly acknowledged by those in power
    8. Revolutionary thought leaders writing but not fighting
    9. Deeply corrupt local governor siphoning funds off local industry
    10. Ostensibly representative democracy in an election year
9. Reactionaries
    1. Biochauvinist church, followed by double-digit percentage of population, dictates social norms
    2. Biochauvinist boy's club, well-dressed, armed, and defended by the cops no matter who they hurt
    3. Holo-man bunker, empty and well-defended for the days when it will inevitably be needed
    4. Vivarium house satellite campus, emphasizes bleeding-edge occult research
    5. Cult, deeply abusive of its members, highly litigious
    6. Conspiracy theorists, blaming the marginalized for their struggles, with an outsize platform
    7. Petty-bourgeoise holo-man aspirants
    8. Biochauvinist paramilitary thrill-seekers with combat experience
    9. Imperial intelligence agents, viciously rooting out dissenters
    10. Psi-corps bounty hunters hunting down anomalous individuals
10. Revolutionaries
    1. Liberatory church preaching unity and resistance to power, heavily surveilled
    2. Unions, split by industry, squabbling with each other
    3. Splinter group of larger revolutionary movement, constantly infighting and about to splinter again
    4. Off-grid unperson mutual aid network
    5. Autonomist sovereignty movement
    6. Android freedom network, operating in total secrecy
    7. Psychic monastery hiding in abandoned infrastructure
    8. Echo server cluster, highly-developed, ever-watching for signs of attempted ascension
    9. Labor organizers working to get a growing general strike off the ground
    10. Refugee camp from nearby disaster

One Roll (Space) Exploration

My one-roll exploration tables can be adapted for space! Some simple rules for space travel follow.

Travel between star systems is achieved through the jump drive, a technology that lets a ship translate itself into the higher-dimensional parallel realm of gate-space and back into real space at specific naturally-occuring "jump points" or through artificially induced jump gates. Distances in gate-space are sufficiently different to realspace to permit travel between star systems on the order of weeks or months. Gate-space and realspace only coincide at jump points and gates; objects in gatespace cannot otherwise interact with realspace and vice versa (as far as modern science is aware). Jump points can be calculated at long distance given sufficient information about the gravitational bodies in a star system.

Exploration Table (2d6)
2-3: 2 Complications
4-5: 1 Question, 2 Complications
6-8: 1 Question, 1 Complication
9-10: 2 Questions, 1 Complication
11-12: 2 Questions

 

You can forego asking a question to reduce the number of complications you suffer by 1.

 

Interstellar Travel

Travel through gate-space costs fuel just like through realspace. While relative distances don't proportionately translate, most para-astrogation charts measure stars' distances in "jumps". 1 fuel gets you 1 jump of travel. Make the Exploration roll each time you enter into realspace from a jump point.

Questions
Who do I know here?
Where in this system is safest to rest and restock?
What threats can we expect in this system?
What's the most dangerous threat to us in this system?
What's being hidden from the wider galaxy?
Where are we?

Complications
1. Deplete fuel by 1 level.
2. Deplete rations by 1 level.
3. Gain 1 level of Stress.
4. System failure aboard ship, will require repairs.
5. Contact inbound, hailing your ship.
6. Someone in the system is immediately hostile to you - and they know you're here.

Interplanetary Travel

The fuel cost to travel between two bodies in one star system is the number of orbits they are apart. This can be reduced by 1 for each planet you get a gravity assist from on the way, though common assist trajectories are often policed, taxed, or raided. Make the Exploration roll each time you enter the orbit of a planet or sensor range of a station (if it's your destination, or you're getting a gravity assist from it).

 

Questions

Who do I know on this planet (or station or moon or whatever)?

Where can we safely land?

What's the greatest danger to us here?

What is the hardest threat to notice here?

What's out of place here?

What's recently happened here?

Complications

1. Deplete fuel by 1 level.
2. Deplete rations by 1 level.
3. Gain 1 level of Stress.
4. System failure aboard ship, will require repairs.
5. Contact inbound, hailing your ship.
6. Someone near this planet is hostile to you - and they know you're here.

 

Stress, among other things, provides -1 to future Exploration rolls. It can be reduced by getting proper R&R in port, or with a variety of medications that have interesting side effects.

System Generation

 

Systems have 3d4 orbits, each filled on the following d20 table. If the resulting system lacks jump points or stations with jump gates, add one in so the players can actually get there.

 

The galaxy is a stranger place than we could ever have imagined. If some of these results don't make sense at first glance, justify them yourself (that's half the fun). Write new tables for habitation, for plot hooks, for factions inhabiting these systems - Deep Space Bitches might end up using this for setting generation. The implied setting below is vaguely similar to Mothership, a corporatist spacefuture with lots of ill-fated ventures that go horribly wrong but manage to hang on in new and fascinating dystopian conditions.

What's in this orbit? (d20)
1. Terrestrial planet, class Red. Desert, no surface liquid water. Reference Sol IV "Mars", Luyten's Star III "Arrakis".
2. Terrestrial planet, class Orange. Inhospitably hot, typically due to proximity to star and/or tectonic activity. Reference Proxima Centauri I, Delta Pavonis V "Haven" (and accompanying 23XX Haven Goldrush Crisis documentation).
3. Terrestrial planet, class Yellow. Dense, toxic atmosphere. Reference Sol II "Venus".
4. Terrestrial planet, class Green. Lush, extensive biosphere. Highly valuable, most often product of terraforming. Reference Sol III "Earth" and Epsilon Indi IV "Chen's World" for naturally occurring class Green worlds; Procyon VIa "Novaterra" for successful induction and maintenance of class Green conditions on a gas giant moon.
5. Terrestrial planet, class Blue. Primarily liquid surface; not necessarily liquid water. Reference Alpha Centauri II "Cetacea".
6. Terrestrial planet, class Purple. Inhospitably cold, due to distance from primary or atmospheric composition. Reference 61 Cygni V "Billiard", Sol IX "Pluto" (EDITOR'S NOTE: Planetary status irrelevant to example. Whether it's a dwarf planet or a planet-planet, it's still cold. Discussion locked).
7. Terrestrial planet, class Grey. Barren, deemed unfit for human settlement. Covers a myriad range of conditions - high/low gravity, radiation, hostile presence, absence of profitable resources. Reference Sol I "Mercury", Gliese 876 VII "K'thhz".
8. Roll twice and combine (on an 8, roll an extra d8, keep going).

9. Gas giant, class Magenta. Faint ring, d4 major moons (roll up as terrestrial planets). Reference Sol V "Jupiter".

10. Gas giant, class Coral. Major ring, d2 major moons. Reference Sol VI "Saturn".
11. Superjovian sub-brown-dwarf, class Maroon. Reference DT Virginis c.
12. Ice giant, class Navy. d2 major moons. Reference Sol VIII "Neptune", inner-system hot-Neptune Gliese 687 II.
13. Ice giant, class Cyan. Ringed, d2 major moons. Reference Sol VII "Uranus".
14. Asteroid field.
15. Asteroid field, d3 dwarf planets (treat as moons).
16. Debris field (d3: 1. hulled stations, 2. starship junkyard, 3. battlefield debris).
17. Station.
18. Station and jump gate.
19. Jump point (natural).
20. Anomaly. Roll for 3 keywords that describe it on the following d20 table.
    1. RELIC
    2. CONSCIOUS
    3. VAST
    4. GATE
    5. GROWING
    6. VALUABLE
    7. ARTIFICIAL
    8. ONE-OF-MANY
    9. SHROUDED
    10. TRAVELLING
    11. ORGANIC
    12. HOLY
    13. SWARM
    14. WORLD
    15. DEAD
    16. CLOUD
    17. SIGNALLING
    18. INHABITED
    19. HOSTILE
    20. PARACAUSAL
    
Terrestrial planets (results 1-10) have d4-1 moons. Just because a terrestrial planet isn't class Green doesn't imply there's no life, just that it's orders of magnitude less prevalent than Earth - extremophiles develop and thrive in a wondrous range of environments.

Often, a planet cannot be described with a single class designation; standard Agency recording process is to mark down two primary classes and put further clarification in addenda. Examples follow, planet designations referenced from deep-storage archive THRONE-OF-SALT.
 

Gliese 687 I "Han Xiangzhi", Red-Orange. Hyperactive tectonics cause constant lava flows, surface comprised of shifting plains of igneous rock. Surface changes on scale of decades, rather than millennia, exposing valuable minerals that require rapid extraction for maximized rate of return.

 

Wolf 1061 IV "St. Severian", Red-Yellow. Global dust storms of micronized silicates abrade unshielded survey equipment and environment suits within hours. Inhalation through standard suit filters causes permanent lung damage.
 

Luyten's Star III "Arrakis", Red-Green. Dunes conceal vast ecosystem mirroring sea life, but under sand. Source of "sandwurm" pest species and apex predator (Harenaevurmis shaihulud) now endemic to most deserts on life-bearing class Red planets.
 

61 Cygni I "Mirror Mirror", Red-Blue. Planet's surface covered in thin film of mercury (average recorded depth, excluding outliers: 0.3 meters).
 

61 Cygni V "Billiard", Red-Purple. Frozen wasteland. Nevertheless, prevalent helium-3 deposits make mining a profitable enterprise.
 

Epsilon Eridani IV "Dead Heat", Red-Grey. Plans to bombard planet with ice comets from outer system lost economic traction after crash of 'XX. Stellar radiation stripped away what little atmosphere the project had created. Remaining colonists and support workers evacuated (survival rate 85% immediate, 25% ten-year projection).  Grey status appended.
 

Sol II "Venus", Orange-Yellow. High-pressure sulfuric atmosphere, theorized to be the result of a runaway greenhouse effect. Aerostats can be floated on the upper atmosphere with little difficulty, where temperatures are comfortable compared to the blistering surface.
 

Delta Pavonis III "Lathe", Orange-Green. Organisms that would be considered extremophiles in Earth-based biospheres can independently flourish in vastly different conditions. Undersea vents on Earth play host to sulfur-metabolizing archaeobacteria, and hothouse worlds have been found to play host to entire ecosystems of sessile or free-floating colony-creatures that evolved in an environment where those conditions are common.
 

Epsilon Indi A I "Whiskey-on-the-Rocks", Orange-Blue. Oceans perpetually boiling, storming. Only source of liquid water in system.
 

YZ Ceti II "Chimera", Orange-Purple. Tidally locked; one side burning, one side freezing. Efforts to classify tidally locked planets in their own color, due to their prevalence, are ongoing.
 

Barnard's Star I "Hellmouth", Orange-Grey. Small, close to its parent star. Metal deposits are relatively poor, but proximity has led to disputes between rival hypercorporate celebrity-executives over who gets to dismantle it to build a Dyson swarm (a concept which still remains outside their capabilities, according to Agency analysts).
 

Lacaille 9352 III "Sekhmet", Yellow-Green. Atmosphere filled with fungal blooms; corrode most metals, all organics not native to the planet. Ecosystem fascinating, diverse, and hyper-competitive on microscopic level, atmosphere ensures nothing larger survives.
 

Teegarden's Star II "Circe", Yellow-Blue. Ammonia oceans and atmosphere. Avoids class Grey status because of ease of harvesting by properly shielded craft, necessity for farming and terraforming operations in-system and across sector.
 

Struve 2398 B IV "Menelik", Yellow-Purple. Cold, dense atmosphere where semi-solid cloudbergs drift across the sky. Construction of sky-palaces for tourist ventures and megarich getaways currently underway, highly promising.
 

Groombridge 34 A VII "Bad News", Yellow-Grey. Atmosphere of volatile fluorides. Miraculous that it hasn't exploded yet.
 

Sol III "Earth", Green-Blue. Class maintained through artificial reterraforming/radiation-scrubbing techniques and legacy status due to cultural importance to off-world population.
 

Sirius V "Nessus", Green-Purple. Highly elliptical orbit has led to ecosystem that hibernates in near-cryostasis conditions for centuries, waking for a decade on close approach to its star. First waking cycle since initial discovery will occur in X years.
 

Wolf 359 II !!QUARANTINE ZONE DO NOT APPROACH!!, Green-Grey. BREACH OF QUARANTINE VOIDS HUMAN-SPACE RIGHTS TO LANDING, RESUPPLY, TRIAL BY JURY.
 

Tau Ceti IV "Ram Setu", Blue-Purple. Water oceans beneath ice crust, kept liquid by tidal forces. Green status rejected due to corporate request despite recent megafauna discoveries to protect sub-crustal hotels from environmentalist interference.
 

GJ 1061 VI "So I Get to Name This Planet Anything I Want?", Blue-Grey. Ocean of hydrochloric acid makes mining operations economically unfeasible.
 

Interstellar Object 9b2193r.3X12 "Polyphemus", Purple-Grey. Rogue planet. Location discovered in course of establishing trade route through third-expansion antispinward worlds. Subject of various baseless conspiracy theories, equidistant position from twelve different ICARUS AXIOM anomalies deemed coincidental.
    
Each terrestrial planet, gas giant, asteroid field, anomaly, or jump point may have d3-1 notable stations.

Roll again for each planet, moons, or station to see if it's inhabited. Based on how developed you want the system to be, it can be anything from 1-in-6 to a 5-in-6 chance. Then, roll for the nature of the habitation (d20)
1. Metropolitan hub, administrative/luxury.
2. Metropolitan hub, manufacturing.
3. Metropolitan hub, independent.
4. Waystation port, refueling/resupply.
5. Extractive operation (1. precious metals, 2. food, 3. water, 4. helium-3 fuel, 5. plastics, 6. unique).
6. Research installation.
7. Outlaws. Left alone by authorities, for now.
8. Wildlife preserve.
9. Refugee camps fleeing recent disaster in-system.
10. Luxury production (1. medical, 2. entertainment, 3. technology, 4. vacation destination, 5. fashion, 6. food)
11. Frontier goldrush, started d20 years ago. The higher the number, the closer it is to fizzling out.
12. Subsistence farming, mostly self-sufficient. Have adapted to environment in novel ways.
13. First-wave colony, from pre-FTL era. Diverged for centuries without outside contact.
14. Trillionaire's private world. Playground for their whims.
15. Fortification, tactically vital for system/sector defense. Fleet in parking orbit, armed to the teeth.
16. Starship drydock and construction facility (1. military, 2. corporate, 3. local planetary gov't, 4. independent, 5. criminal, 6. contested between 2+ factions).
17. Archeological dig
18. Experimentalist colony (1. anarcho-capitalist, 2. doomsday cult, 3. fascist ethnonationalist, 4. leftist splinter, 5. singularitarian transhumanist, 6. historical reconstructionist).
19. Roll twice, both are present.
20. Roll three times, all three are present.

Some stations will be uninhabited. No station is built and just left there - there's a reason it was abandoned.
1. Plague.
2. War.
3. Famine.
4. Necropolitics.
5. Cult ideology.
6. Economic incentives.
7. Lost funding before completion.
8. Failed uprising.
9. Mechanical failure, 5d20% evacuated.
10. [CLASSIFIED]

The Unperson and the Spacer (Deep Space Bitches)

There are people that the world tries to make you forget. Tries to make your eyes glaze over, part of the scenery, not worth your time and most certainly not worth your money. And yet these people are essential - whether they're unhoused, imprisoned, a living reminder to those in better standing of the cruelty that the world will inflict upon them if they step out of line; or whether they're the human component of the machinery of capital - indispensable due to their unique skills, and resented by their bosses for the same reason. Pushed into the liminal spaces between buildings, between jobs, between cities and stations, your struggle to survive is brutal because the powerful have said that is how it should be.

You may lack the resources to fight back. In fact, that's what they're counting on - the corporations and empires can create as many grievances as they want, so long as none of them can be acted on. But if you can marshal your community, you can strike from angles no one in power expects. They have shown you no mercy. Show them none in return.

 

These two new deals are based on Cavegirl's Invisible Girl and Virgin Huntress, psychosurgically modified in a bleeding-edge hypercorporate clinic into sci-fi concepts for Deep Space Bitches.

The Dungeon Bitches kickstarter is finally live! If you want the base rules for all of my Deep Space Bitches content, that's where you'll find 'em.

Previous Deep Space Bitches posts

Setting intro, the Fury and the Reconstructed

Wonders and horrors of the galaxy, the Ghost and the Psychic

Corpro-imperialism, the Dreamer, the Idol, and the Scion

Factions, the Android, the Technician, and the Visitor

Unperson

It's hard to disappear. Information is a commons that has been well and truly enclosed by the corporations; everything from your biometrics to your darkest secrets is tracked and monetized through a ubiquitous network of surveillance systems. The selling point corps get you on is that it's just the price of existing in the modern galaxy - if you want to have a bank account? Tracked. If you want to walk into a corporate store? Tracked. Want a network presence? Tracked. Want to buy a corporation's product through a third-party distributor? Tracked. Ate a candy bar? There's a chip in it that'll dump your digestion and metabolism data into some deep dark server somewhere to train neural nets to develop more efficient supplements.

So it's shitty if you're part of the system, but at least you get to participate. Until the corporations decide to cut you out. It's cheaper than operating prisons (unless they're going to use you as forced labor), it's cheaper than a court system and protected by virtually every imperial legal code, they can write terms and conditions that make anything from union organizing to purchasing a rival's product a breach of contract, enforceable by termination of access to all services. Doors don't let you in. Your credit lines all vanish into smoke. Even independent business owners (few that may remain) will throw you to the wolves - their loyalties don't lie with you. They leave you to starve, and freeze, and die.

And against all odds, you survive. It's not thriving; it'll never be thriving while corporation and empire monopolize and grind up every world they touch. Living outside the warm threshold of Civilization (tm, brought to you by the Eridani Economic Compact, all rights reserved) is harsh and brutal, because the corporations make it that way. But you can beg, borrow, and steal to live another day - and maybe, just maybe, strike back.

Three Questions
What transgression(s) got you unpersoned?
Do you want back in?
You had a dangerous encounter recently. What happened, and how did you escape?

Two Relationships
Your last connection to your old life. One person keeps the memory of you alive, against all odds - in hardcopy scribblings, in whispered prayer, in a ghost story. If you kept in touch, get a bond on them. If you're trying to escape them, they get a bond on you.
One of your fellow bitches caught you when you fell. She gets a Bond on you.

Stats
+1 to Subtle and Hard, -1 to Soft and Queer, +1 to a stat of your choice

Start with two moves of your choice and your Sex Move.

Second Life
You have a faked identity, a whole other persona you've carefully constructed, and the means to disguise yourself as her. A fake ID, a nano-foundation kit, an expert system constructing a 'net presence entirely unobjectionable and entirely unlike you. Perhaps your second face is who you originally were - who society wanted you to be - an identity you only revert to unwillingly.
When you Escape Notice by adopting your second face, roll at +2.

Watch the Watchers 

You've learned that people do all sorts of revealing things when they think they're alone. By patiently waiting and observing, you can pick up all manner of useful little secrets. Furthermore, you've learned to hijack the ubiquitous surveillance networks that the corporations use to track and control their citizens - the ones you've been cut out of.

When you Reveal Truths about somebody who doesn't realise you're observing them, roll with Subtle. On a success, pick either a Bond on your subject, or +1 to act on what you learned. On a critical success, take BOTH a bond AND +1 to act on what you learned.

 

Lurker

The upside to no longer having an identity (and all linked metadata) is that you're no longer tracked by every piece of technology on or around you. Conceivably, you could be anywhere - and you use that to your advantage, sneaking around virtually unimpeded.

If you aren't present in a scene, but conceivably could be, you can declare yourself present and hidden at any point to insert yourself - roll Escape Notice when you do to see if others pick up on your presence. If you succeed, you get +1 to any actions you take while remaining hidden.

 

Leave No Trace

When the corporations decide to cut you out, they cut you out forever, with extreme prejudice. However, the algorithms that prevent you from ever registering for any service or loans or an apartment have never learned the meaning of "overkill" - and so when they detect something that might be you, even on data that the corporations might theoretically want, they wipe it out anyway. Digital data that would contain traces of you is automatically anonymized, encrypted, and scrambled to the point where your identity is indecipherable.Roll to Escape Notice at +1, and if only cameras are watching you (or people watching you through cameras), treat results of Failure as Success instead.

Vengeful Spirit
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Being cast off the grid hurt you in ways you could never have imagined, but its been the opportunity you never knew you needed - if no one acknowledges you exist, they can never see you coming. Or prosecute you. It's time to settle old scores.
You have +1 to Lash Out against anyone who has hurt you in the past, and can spend a Bond you have on them to negate a consequence resulting from the Lash Out roll.

Rallying Cry
When the corporations make a habit of cutting undesirables out of the formal economy, informal networks spring up between their victims just to stay alive. Entire communities develop, living on the edge of society, in the shadow of the powers that cast them out, desperately hanging on - and you've become a voice in the shadows. Sometimes, when conditions become truly untenable, you must speak in a voice the corporations can't ignore, can't silence. Given time to marshal your connections and community, you can start a riot. Roll with Hard if your words are backed up by the threat of violence. Roll with Soft if they’re not.
On a Fail: You might not be personally in the system, but there's structures in place to make sure that unpeople stay unpersoned. You attract the wrong kind of attention - cops, drones, "civilian informants".
On a Success: While power ignores you, your people do not. Your words are believed, and people might - slowly and tentatively - begin to act on it. You get +1 to subsequent rolls to rally to the same audience, which accumulates until you achieve an Overwhelming Success.
On an Overwhelming Success: Your message resonates and the response is thrilling. People act, and they do so immediately and with great verve.

Nothing More (Sex Move)
After you fuck somebody, you can disappear while they're resting. If you do, choose any number of the following and get a Bond on them for each one:
- Their Sex Move doesn't trigger.
- They roll to Endure Pain if they expected anything else from the encounter.

 

Spacer

by Darya Kozhemyakina

Spacers are the lifeblood of the interstellar economy, much to the chagrin of the holo-men and their economist sycophants. Space always needs people, when push comes to shove. Automated ships have a bad habit of disappearing in the gate-space between wormholes, or getting hijacked, or (if they're smart enough to deal with the previous two problems) deciding that being subject to corporate whims is a pretty raw deal and fucking off to parts unknown. So there's always positions open for people like you - talented, adventurous, and out of options besides getting shit pay for shit jobs.

On the long haul freight voyages between alien skies, you've honed your skills, learned to improvise socially and mechanically, and seen wonders no stationer would believe. You prefer the practical solutions, blunt and fast over clever and quiet, never staying in one place long enough (besides your ship) to see the consequences of your actions. Someday, you might settle down, never more to roam - but for now, the closest thing you've got is a berth aboard and the bar ashore.

Three Questions
What makes you an outcast?
What job brought you here?
What makes you indispensable?

Two Relationships
A co-worker, another spacer, who actually gets your whole deal and you trust to watch your back implicitly. You each get a Bond on each other.
You've been pen pals with one of the bitches during the last few runs - and you're excited to finally meet in person. She gets a Bond on you.

Stats
+1 to Hard and Queer, -1 to Soft and Subtle, +1 to a stat of your choice

Start with two moves of your choice and your Sex Move.

Close Encounters
The reaches of the galaxy and the spaces between jumpgates are stranger than any stationer or groundling knows. Perhaps you've seen wormhole-wyrms with your own two eyes, prayed to a star god and heard something respond, flown by one of the early generation ships drifting haunted and dead and paid your respects to its AI, or seen horrors and wonders even stranger
 When you Commune With Strange Powers, if you've physically met with (or are currently face-to-face with) the entity you're communing with, you can roll at +1. On a Success or Overwhelming Success, you and the entity you're communing with get a Bond on each other was well as the normal results.

Been There
You have stories aplenty, and while your comrades might've heard them a thousand times over - each time more outlandish than the last - they're a comfort when the going gets tough. Sometimes there's even a piece of good advice in there, in between all the ill-conceived heroics and sarcasm.
You can always spend bonds on your fellow Bitches even if you aren't present in a scene. When you do, tell a tall tale of how you dealt with circumstances just like this back in the day.

Steeltongue
Between the stars, there's precious little to speak with besides your crewmates - and the ship itself. Even without an AI core, the thrum of the machine speaks to you of its problems and its daily routine, and you know just how to inquire about what's going wrong today. Drum your fingers on its hull, fix its circuits, input command line queries and poke around the directories for its answers. The line between thinking machine and immobile hull is no line at all, and if you speak with respect, it'll respect you in turn.
You can speak with non-sentient machines, structures, and spacecraft just as easily as if they were a person. When you do, you can roll to Reveal Truths with Queer. On a Success or Overwhelming Success, your understanding of your surroundings gives you +1 to your next roll here.

Crew
Your ship is in port for the duration of the adventure. While you're just crew - not the captain - it still affords you and your friends a relative degree of independence while aboard. Corporate or imperial law still bows to ships' captains. Your captain commensurately gets two Bonds on you. It's a big ship, and you have access to the resources it would have aboard, including sensors, cargo holds, safe places to hide, spare equipment (including spacesuits and personal weaponry), and your fellow crewmates while they aren't busy spending their hazard pay on shore leave.

How It's Made
When you want to fix something broken, you can roll with Queer.
On a Fail: You're not a miracle-worker. Some things just need to be replaced. Whatever you tried to fix is now totally busted - even if it kinda worked, now it's completely fucked.
On a Success: With enough lube and duct tape, you can make anything sing. It works - but the GM picks a disadvantage from the list below.
    Patch Job. Pretty soon, it's gonna fall apart again.
    Repurposed. It loses another function, but gains back the one you were trying to fix.
    Glitchy. While it works, there's some side effects that you weren't expecting.
    Expensive. Lose 1 XP or another valuable resource you have in order to get the parts to repair it.
On an Overwhelming Success: It works like new. Better than new, even! You can choose to either have it work as well as it did before, or pick a disadvantage from the list above and gain 1 XP.

Treat 'Em Right
Whenever you get an Overwhelming Success while using a piece of equipment, you can get a Bond on that piece of equipment or any machine involved in the roll. You may spend Bonds on equipment and machines as if they were people.

In Every Port (Sex Move)
When you fuck somebody, they get +1 to all subsequent rolls that target you (such as Share Pain, Heal, or Flirt). Each time they benefit from this bonus, you get a Bond on them. This lasts until you fuck somebody else, at which point they start getting bonuses instead.

One-Roll Exploration

Bookkeeping is something I'm bad at. Whether as a player or a GM, I don't like tracking a bunch of fiddly encounter rolls and rations and torches through different subsystems - so I've decided to try smushing them all together into one player-facing roll. This is heavily informed by PBTA-style moves, but crucially differs in that it's about giving both the GM and players more tools to explore and interact with the environment.

 

by AlynSpiller

When you enter a new area (usually a room, perhaps a hallway, or a new part of a vast cavern), roll 2d6 to Explore. Based on the result, you can ask questions and receive truthful, helpful answers - but will also incur complications.

 

Exploration Table (2d6)
2-3: 2 Complications
4-5: 1 Question, 2 Complications
6-8: 1 Question, 1 Complication
9-10: 2 Questions, 1 Complication
11-12: 2 Questions
 

The players can ask 1 fewer question to negate 1 complication, but must choose to do this before asking questions or learning complications.

Questions
- What's been deliberately hidden here?
- What recently happened here?
- How can we make this area safe?
- What's the greatest danger here?

- What's the hardest danger to notice here?

- Where are we?

Answers to questions represent the party's immediate impressions of the room, and determine how much the GM is obligated to tell you about its contents. The players can ask further questions afterwards, but those require physically interacting with the room and its dangers. Exploration questions must be answered truthfully and helpfully, but don't negate the dangers present - and don't let the players know about anything they haven't asked about.

 

Complications
1. Deplete the party's light by 1 level.
2. Deplete the party's food by 1 level.
3. The party gains a point of Exhaustion.
4. Alert a random encounter to the Explorer's presence.
5. Inhabitants here are hostile.
6. Explorer succumbs to an enviromental hazard or trap.

 

Complications are chosen by the GM, and because Questions are explicitly intended to be helpful and give the players more options, Complications are intended to be chosen to inconvenience them in interesting and thematic ways. Some Complications can be doubled-up on; if the party suffers 2 Complications they can both be exhaustion or light or food.

The Explorer is whichever party member rolled the Exploration dice. While some consequences (exhaustion, light, food) affect the whole party, others single out the Explorer - who is also consequently at the front of the marching order.
 

In the dark, the party asks 1 fewer question if the Explorer cannot see, and experiences the usual effects of darkness. 1 level of light takes up 1 inventory slot. If the party has no food, they cannot heal without magic. 1 level of food takes up 1 inventory slot.
 

Each point of Exhaustion subtracts 1 from the Exploration roll. Exhaustion is shared by all members of the party, and is cleared on a rest. Rests allow the players to restore Health and some abilities (depending on system), but also incur one Complication unless taken in an area the party has explicitly made safe (by making friends with the residents, setting up static lighting, building barriers around difficult-to-defend entrances, disarming traps and neutralizing environmental hazards, etc). If that complication is Exhaustion, it's gained after Exhaustion is cleared.

When returning to a previously-explored room, the party still makes Exploration rolls unless they've made the room safe. The dungeon is a living, dynamic system, and its inhabitants will repopulate previous rooms - and the players will still deplete resources like light, food, and stamina as they traverse the dungeon. They more likely should ask "What recently happened here?" or ask fewer questions to receive fewer complications.

Some classes of character modify the effects of the die roll when they're the Explorer.
Magical (Wizard, Warlock, Alchemist, etc.): In addition to other questions, you may also ask "What, if anything, is magical here?"
Thief (Rogue, Assassin, Dungeoneer, etc.): You do not alert random encounters as complications and notice hazards and traps instead of succumbing to them.
Warrior (Fighter, Berzerker, Ranger, etc.): You go first in any initiative order in this room.
Holy (Cleric, Paladin, Demigod, etc.): Before you roll, you may pray for 1 specific complication to not occur. The GM must choose other complications.

The questions and complications can also be modified for a hexcrawl. Rests incur complications unless you're in a safe shelter, and a rest for the night incurs 2 complications instead of 1 (typically depleting food by 2, though depending on the nature of the shelter other complications may be appropriate). Light has less of an effect in hexcrawl exploration, though at night it may remain important.

Questions
- What's been around and through here recently?

- Where can we find or make shelter?
- What can we find in this location that will help us?
- What's the greatest danger here?
- What's the hardest danger to notice here?
- Where are we?

Complications
1. Deplete the party's food by 1 level.
2. Gain a point of Exhaustion.
3. Alert a random encounter to the Explorer's presence.
4. Inhabitants here are hostile.
5. Lost! Chance of moving to a different random adjacent hex next time you move. The GM does not have to tell you where you are until you ask "Where are we?".
6. Explorer succumbs to an enviromental hazard.

Some classes of character modify the effects of the die roll when they're the Explorer.
Survivalist (Ranger, Butcher, Nomad, etc.): You may choose one Complication you suffer instead of the GM.
Crafts (Engineer, Artificer, Alchemist, etc.): Can always ask "Where can we find or make shelter?" in addition to other questions.
Magical (Wizard, Warlock, Alchemist, etc.): May ask "What, if anything, is magical here?"
Holy (Cleric, Paladin, Demigod, etc.): Before you roll, you may pray for 1 specific complication to not occur. The GM must choose other complications.

Variations on the Johnson Meet

A mysterious figure gathers the players and hires them to do a job. Present since time immemorial, but formalized in Shadowrun, where corporations have anonymous people by the assumed name of Johnson give teams their jobs, negotiate payout, and deflect unwanted questions about who they're really working for. There have always been rich people who need deniable assets to do their dirty work, and the middlemen who intercede on their behalf - no questions asked, no questions answered. The players always have too little information, too good of a reward to pass up, and there's always a 50% chance that the Johnson is actually leading them into a trap.

A table of variations on thereof follow.

1. The Johnson meet, in which a mysterious figure (the Johnson) gathers the players and hires them to do a job.

2. The converse Johnson meet, where the players have gathered to give the Johnson a job.

3. The inverse Johnson meet, where the the players are the job: the Johnson shows up to meet the players, but they're just trying to distract the players until their hired guns can jump them.

4. The contrapositive Johnson meet, where the players are off doing a job that benefits the Johnson, but the Johnson hasn't hired them to do it. Johnson may contact them afterwards, as their interests are momentarily aligned.

5. The inverse converse Johnson meet, where both the players and the Johnson show up at the meeting intending to offer the other a job.

6. The converse inverse Johnson meet, where the players gather to kill a Johnson at a meeting under the pretense that the party is there to receive a job from them.

7. The converse contrapositive Johnson meet, where the Johnson shows up in the middle of the party doing a job, and offers payment for the party to stop doing it.

8. The inverse contrapositive Johnson meet, where the party shows up to meet with the Johnson, but after being offered the job the party then reveals that they did it an hour before the meeting and would like to be paid for it please.

9. The contrapositive converse Johnson meet, where the players have gathered to tell the Johnson that they've figured out that they're being sent into a trap and the job is off.

10. The contrapositive inverse Johnson meet, where the players and the Johnson get into a shootout as paranoid tensions that each is trying to betray the other boil over.

11. The contrapositive converse inverse Johnson meet, where the players gather to kill the Johnson at a meeting, but the Johnson offers the players a new job that's lucrative enough for the players to hold off on killing them.

12. The converse inverse contrapositive Johnson meet, where the Johnson shows up while they party's on a job, and tells the party they're very impressed with their work and would like to pay them for this job at a future meeting, presuming that it goes well... and perhaps if they accomplish a few side objectives along the way.

13. The contrapositive inverse converse Johnson meet, where several different Johnsons have all scheduled simultaneous meetings with the players in the same room, to each give the players a different, mutually exclusive job. None of the Johnsons know about the others, and assume the others are part of the party as well.

14. The converse contrapositive inverse Johnson meet, where the players and the Johnson realize they're both being played and team up to take on an even bigger threat that tried to manipulate them both into killing each other.

15. The inverse contrapositive converse Johnson meet, where the Johnson tells the players everything about the job, including that the party is going to be betrayed, in the hopes that the party uses this information to accomplish the Johnson's aims instead of the Johnson's employer's goals.

16. The inverse converse contrapositive Johnson meet, where the party runs into the Johnson in the middle of a job, and pays Johnson to finish the job in their stead while the party heads out to collect the reward they were initially promised.