The goal of this article is to provide a setting where you can use fantasy 5E dungeons for sci-fi adventures with minimal refluffing. There are a lot of 5E sci-fi/sci-fantasy conversions: Esper Genesis, Spaceships & Starwyrms, Hyperlanes, and so on. This article is written primarily with Esper Genesis and its mechanical child, Phantasy Star TTRPG, in mind, but it should work just fine for most of the other sci-fi 5E books.

An adventure is also included in this article, meant to introduce players to the planet and give them some friendly locals to become attached to.

Broad Strokes

Humanity has been orphaned. Earth is but a memory. Destroyed by climate change, hostile aliens or even a gamma ray burst, our mother planet is no longer our home. Humanity set off for the stars, searching for a new home where they can rebuild and repeat their mistakes.

The party is a group of people living on one of these colony ships. Whether there are other colony ships still in contact is up to you, the GM, of course. Other ships lower the stakes slightly but open the door to a conflict with another branch of humanity later, and having only one colony ship does the reverse.

The colony ship has drifted through the stars for long enough that no one alive on the ship was ever actually on Earth. It has spent the intervening time bouncing between star systems, surveying planets and mining asteroids and siphoning hydrogen from stars. The ship’s computer automatically assigns names to stars as they are discovered by its systems.

The Colony Ship

Officially designated Ship #002: Ur, but more commonly known as just “the ship,” the colony ship is a gigantic, triangular vessel with a gleaming gem in the centre. This gem is the City, a central dome where most of the citizens live and work. The City is designed to detach and de-orbit when a suitable planet is found, jumpstarting the colonization process.

The ship has three major power brokers: The civilian government (which runs the City), the military (which runs the rest of the ship) and the Vanguard, which is responsible for surface exploration, resource recovery, and other colonization efforts.

The party presumably works for the Vanguard, which provides a convenient explanation for why they are wherever an adventure module starts: They were ordered to go there and investigate something, make contact with locals, or something like that.

Veyra-2

Veyra-2 is a terrestrial planet located in the habitable zone around a Class G star. This is a long way of saying “It’s an earthlike planet in most of the ways that matter.” It is the second planet from its star (thus the -2) and has three natural satellites, with the largest being just slightly larger than Earth’s moon.

Veyra-2 is a lush planet with a wide variety of environments spread across three major landmasses, two in the south and one in the north. From space, there is almost no visible infrastructure. At best, a keen-eyed observer may be able to spot clusters of small buildings or small networks of irrigation canals. Beneath the surface, however, there are collapsed buildings overgrown with foliage and networks of decaying tunnels. Every now and again, one of these places is revealed by a seismic event or a storm.

The Ancestors

Veyra was once home to a species of humanoids, which we’ll call the Ancestors. They were taller and spindlier than the average human, meaning that most of their equipment is usable, if ergonomically problematic, by humans.

If a dungeon module says there are tapestries depicting the history of the elves, that dungeon now has a mural depicting a scene from the Ancestors’ history. If there’s a carving of two dwarves punching each other, it now depicts two unusually squat Ancestors having a donnybrook. Maybe they’re a subrace, maybe they’re just short, let the players work it out.

The Ancestors were very good at two things: Tunnelling, and genetic modification. As a result, their planet is dotted with underground complexes and tunnel systems filled with monstrosities.

The Lizards

The inhabitants of Veyra are a species of lizard-like humanoids. They are between four and five feet tall, with only the occasional outlier hitting five and a half feet. The lizardfolk have two eyes with slit pupils, plus two heat-sensitive pits at the end of a short muzzle. Their word for their species translates to “the people,” so we’re going with “lizardfolk,” “lizardman” or just “lizards” here.

They are a monogender, egg-laying species and children are raised communally. The closest thing they have to a notion of “family” is a work-group. Fellow farmers, fellow hunters, etc.

The villages are centred around a Spawning Hall, a round building where fertilized eggs are kept. The Spawning Hall is split into two levels, a main floor and a section one foot lower. The lower section can be filled with water. The eggs can survive nearly indefinitely as long as a comfortable temperature is maintained, but they need to be immersed in water for a significant amount of time to hatch. A fire is kept burning in a central hearth at all times.

The lizards are proficient with bows, spears and daggers. Most are reluctant to use more advanced weapons, but any that hang around the Vanguard for long enough will figure them out.

The lizardfolk’s religion focuses on avoiding angering the Ancestors, whose malign spirits still haunt the land. Things like “Never go underground” or “if you find a mysterious metallic canister embedded in the ground, do not touch it, mark the area with the yellow Tape of Warding so nobody else disturbs the Spirit Container.” The sort of things you learn as a society when you’re surrounded by mysterious dangers.

The lizardfolk have a rune-like language which was originally developed by scratching simple images into the trees with their claws. Basic literacy is common among the lizardfolk, allowing recipes, hunting knowledge and so on to be passed from one generation to another. This only applies to their own language, of course, and the language of the Ancestors is not understood, save for various words for “Danger.”

The local priest is also typically the leader of the village. In addition to being generally charismatic, they have some low-level special abilities, derived from knowledge passed down through the ages. They wear skull-like white masks and often carry ornate staves.

Adventure: Dive to the Surface

This section is a short adventure designed to introduce your players to the basics of Veyra-2, provide some intriguing hooks, and put them in a bit of danger.

Briefing

“As you know, we reached the Veyra system three days ago and began surveying efforts. While we found several targets of interest in the Asteroid Belt, what really caught the observation team’s interest was the second planet from the star. This planet, temporarily designated Veyra-2, appears to fit habitable parameters.

“This would’ve been intriguing enough on its own, but we’ve spotted some unusual formations in one of the forests. It looks like the ground has collapsed in one area, and we’re seeing what appears to be glints of sunlight off of worked metal. It’s probably a weird rock formation of some kind, but it’s as good a point as any to start exploring this planet. Take a Diver down to the surface and take a look around. You’ve got half an hour until we intersect the optimal drop point, so grab some surveying gear and get ready.”

The Diver

The Diver-class ship is the primary small ship of Ur’s fleet. It has space for a crew of five, plus 4-10 passengers, depending on how concerned the crew is about safety. A Diver with standard equipment carries enough rations and other supplies for a three day expedition by a crew of five. There is some scientific equipment on board, but if you want to put some pressure on the party, tell them that whatever they need can’t be done with the Diver’s equipment, and they need to send a sample of whatever (or at least an exhaustive scan of whatever) up to Ur and let them figure it out.

The Survey Site

“As you look down into the pit, you can see four parallel metal tracks, partially obscured by rubble and plants. It looks like this section of the roof caved in a few years ago. A yellow strip marks the edge of a concrete platform. It appears to be some sort of underground train station.”

“Three furred creatures are on the platform. They look like apes with six limbs and gigantic teeth. One is grooming another, while the third is fiddling with something made of metal.”

The survey site is an old underground rail station whose roof has partially collapsed. The tracks are blocked at either end by heavy metal doors, but the station is accessible. The forest above the station smells of dirt, pollen and rotting wood. The station itself smells of dust, sweat and animal feces.

All the interior doors are closed, but only the door to the easternmost structure is locked. There is a blue hexagonal panel the size of a palm beside it. A blue hexagonal keycard can be found behind the desk on the west side of the station. This will open the easternmost door if tapped on the blue hexagonal panel.

Behind the door is an officer’s ready room, with an office whose walls are covered in decayed maps and charts. A keyboard with hexagonal keys sits on the desk, in front of a square depression approximately 6 by 6 centimetres in length and width, and 2 centimetres deep. Another device is supposed to dock in this slot, but none are present in this area. This keyboard may be a valuable resource in decoding the Ancestors’ language at some point in the future.

The ape-creatures are hostile, because they view this area as their den. The easiest course of action is to kill them, of course, followed by rendering them unconscious with some clever plan (tranquilizers, knockout gas, what have you), and then luring them out with food and exploring while they’re occupied.

The third creature is holding an old pistol, which it will fire at the party if provoked. The first shot is accidental, but further shots are intentional.

Three rounds after the first shot goes off, a green-scaled lizardman (Gisk the Hunter, statblock below) arrives on the scene and begins to fire their bow at the ape-creatures. The lizardman is friendly to the party, based entirely on the fact that they are fighting against monsters.

After the fight, the lizardman will try to persuade the party to leave the station, primarily by pointing to the piles of rubble that lead up and out of the station and making concerned noises. The lizardman does not share a language with the party, so this is largely a game of charades. Luckily, these are very simple charades: Danger. Leave.

If the party doesn’t leave, the lizardman will hang around them, occasionally pointing back at the exit.

The contraption on the east side of the central structure in the station has a sideways circular lid marked with a filled-in black diamond surrounded by a hollow, thin-lined black diamond. If any of the party attempts to interact with this device, the lizardman panics and tries to stop them. This symbol indicates that this cover is a shield over a radioactive source. The party would not recognize it but may be able to guess the meaning based on the lizardman’s reaction.

Once the party finally leave the station, the lizardman will try to lead them back to their village. It’s about a half-hour journey on foot, in the opposite direction of wherever the party landed.

The Village

Deep in the forest is a lizardfolk village, protected by wooden walls built between sturdy trees. At is center is the Spawning Hall, where the lizardfolks’ eggs are kept warm by a wood-burning hearth. Rectangular halls with thatch roofs are strewn around the village, each home to a particular kind of worker, housing both the workers and their tools. The huts are each slightly different, modified to serve their purposes.

This village is home to roughly one hundred lizardfolk, split between various professions.

The most important person in the village is a light green lizardfolk called Sh’kraal, who serves as the village’s mayor/priest. Gisk drags the party over to Sh’kraal, then heads back to the hunters’ hut alone.

If the party can’t come up with a good way to communicate with Sh’kraal, he eventually uses some kind of minor technomagic technique to directly translate speech between himself and the party for a few minutes.

Sh’kraal communicates that his people consider the underworld cursed, and the lizardman who helped them is very brave indeed for venturing in to help them. He asks the party to join the lizardfolk for a meal, as a sign of friendship. The supper consists of grilled fish filets, which is bland but well-cooked.

For completing this adventure, each party member gains 900XP, which should be enough to put them up to level 3 and pick a subclass before your next session.

Afterword

I hope you’ve enjoyed this! This originally started as a background document for players in a weekly drop-in game of the Phantasy Star TTRPG. I wanted to minimize the amount of prep I would have to do for each session, so I decided to focus on making it easy to rework fantasy dungeon modules for the science-fantasy setting.

That said, the inspiration for this setting comes from Phantasy Star Online 2 more than the classic series that the TTRPG focuses on. I don’t even want to think about how many hours I put into that game back in the day, before there was an official English translation. Good times.

Anyway, if you’re interested in more adventures for this specific setting, let me know. Otherwise, grab something you haven’t run yet, cross out “magic” and replace it with “supertech,” and go nuts!

-Garm

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