Not all adventures have to take place at a specific site. Some adventures can take place in the spaces in between. Depending on the planet in question, these areas may be sparsely inhabited by sentient beings and rife with wildlife, completely devoid of life altogether, or somewhere in the middle. Adventures that take place in areas of wilderness (between sites and communities) are known as
planet-side adventures.
Planet-side adventures get special treatment within SFRPG. Technically, a whole chapter of this guidebook (namely
Chapter 8.2) has been set aside specifically for the purpose of creating this type of adventure, though (as mentioned in that Chapter) those rules are designed to augment a planet-side adventure. They do this by providing random encounters each hour of transit on a planet's surface, making the transit a little more challenging and interesting. In the process, they do require the players to role-play the entire transit. Some player groups may just want to get to where they're going, which is why the GM may
choose whether or not they want to use those rules.
Planet-side adventures can be treated a lot like site adventures. All that's really needed is to have encounters at particular points along the way. Again, these encounters may be random encounters generated by the planetary exploration rules, or they may be tailored encounters the GM intends to happen during the course of the adventure (or even a mix of the two). Each tailored encounter point can be treated as a site in its own right, using natural boundaries (trees, rock formations, rivers, shorelines, storm fronts, etc.) as the bounds of the encounter (similarly to the "natural sites" mentioned in the
previous Chapter. Describing the surroundings (and the bounds of the encouter) accurately tends to become a little more important when the focus of the game is actually out in the open; a GM should mention rolling hills with verdant trees or perhaps a star-filled sky and a cratered surface, rather than merely mentioning that "the terrain difficulty is moderate". With the bounds set, all that is left is to populate the encounter with whatever the GM has in mind.
Planet-side adventures can be incorporated into a larger adventure. Such an adventure may start out in a town, use the planet-side portion of the adventure to travel to a specific site where the bulk of the adventure takes place, and then use another planet-side portion to return to the town of origin. Using the wild portions in between towns to frame other sequences of an adventure is perfectly acceptable, and certainly makes going in between places a lot more interesting for the players. Not all planet-side adventures will involve the characters simply going from place to place; sometimes the wilderness itself will be the destination and setting for the bulk of the adventure.
Characters tend to be more susceptible to their environment out in the wild than they would be in an urbanized area or site. That's not to say that the environment can't affect the characters in those areas, just that usually sites and communities located in particularly hostile environments (such as worlds with low gravity, no atmosphere, high radiation levels and so forth) tend to take strong measures to counteract the environment and make the area habitable. Characters in the wild don't have those benefits. Rarely used equipment such as oxygen tanks and anti-radiation medication may become essential for survival out in the open. For more on environmental effects and how they may affect characters,
see Chapter 12.4.2.
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