Re: extremely long term low berth travel

Anders asks:
>Has anyone dealt with extremely long term low berth travel
>in their campaigns?
#1
 Well, it was like this. In my campaign (bits of which
have been described previously) the players were press-ganged
(kidnapping is such a nasty word) from their bucolic planet
"beyond the fringe" by a Scout. Eight of them, plus her nibs,
packed onto one scout ship. She drops them for one year basic
training. Their first assignment after graduating was to deliver
the ship, The Parshidona (any Hebrew speakers out there?) to
her some distance away.
 Well now there was only eight of them on the ship. They,
of course, ransacked the ship while onboard and discovered,
welded behind the galley, a low berth. It was functioning and
occupied. They could find no record of it in the computer (those
parts they could get at, anyway) and the data display just said
that it was functioning within normal parameters.
 Curiosity got the better of them, of course, and they
eventually opened it. They found a fairly young woman wearing
nothing but a unicorn tattoo. They tried a medical analysis but
all they could derive was that she had been in there for "more
than 7.5 years". She was recognised as being from a minor tribe,
now almost extinct, from one of the character's home planets
even further "beyond the fringe".
 She eventually woke and would listen attentively to them
but would not speak or otherwise try to communicate. She seemed
familiar with the ship and spent the rest of jump sifting though
boxes and collecting bits and pieces. They characters became
resigned to having yet one more person aboard...
 Well that story goes on for quite some time, however,
that is best told under another topic...

#2
 In a campaign previous to the above several "young
aristocrat" characters from the same world "beyond the fringe"
were taken to The Imperium by a trader. He suggested they take
one of the jumps in a Low Berth to relieve their tedium. Later
they worked out that they had actually spent several months
in there...

#3
 I wrote a short story once where the main character is
on an adventure with another. His memory of it seems a bit
jumbled and there are long gaps in the story line along with
bit that were temporally out of order. The mission seems to
go badly wrong and we are left with him becoming slowly
conscious. He has just been woken from "cold sleep" by automatons.
The date is much later than he remembers and he is anxious
about his business. There is a note left, though, saying to
forget about all that and not to try to remember anything that
happened while he was asleep.
 The note was in his own handwriting...


Boris says:
>Nop.  The problem is that you can not roleplay much
while you sleep :-)
 Unless you dream :-)
 But seriously, in another campaign in a different system
I have a technocrat pumping money into just how deeply you
can suspend someone's animation and still have a neural jack
work. She plans to live a long, long, time and doesn't want
to deal with her friends all dieing on her. She plans to "plug
them in" and let them wander cyberspace in a low consciousness
level. Sort of like "Dark Star" I suppose...


 All the above use long term suspended animation tied
in with the theme of immortality. There are several ways you
might deal with this. Say you want to use some elements of
the Imperial Collapse but not the New Era settings. The PCs
might be part of a team used by an "immortal" (either someone
with very good medical tech or a AI or a mega-corporation).
They could be woken up at strategic points during the rebellion,
and or collapse. In the end the whole organisation/secret society
might just decide to "sleep out" the Long Night.
 Was it the Golgafincharians in HHGTTG that did the same?
Alternatively you might examine a similar "Universal Soldier"
like theme in John Fords Start Trek Novel "The Final Reflection"

    Jo Grant