I’m reading Peter F. Hamilton’s Exodus: Archimede’s Engine and watching James Ohlen’s Exodus Star Heist on YouTube and I’m getting some different vibes for games and media that Game Masters could borrow from for their own Exodus TTRPG campaigns.

Mercenaries for Hire

Sol Bianca—An Anime from the 1980s always reminded me of Traveller, but there’s a moment at the end of the OVA where the crew discovers the Gnosis, a repository of information from old Earth. The crew of the Sol Binaca had a lot of high-tech weaponry, all of the girls had high-tech armor suits, and May could be a Cataphract suit pilot.

Cowboy Bebop—The crew of the Bebop uses the gates to travel between worlds, collect bounties, and does some exploration. There’s not a lot of relic hunting in Cowboy Bebop the way Travelers do in Exodus. Ein could be an Awakened animal, and Edward could be a Prodigy with ancient technology. A lot of the things we see Prodigy’s do in the handbook look like things Spike could do, but he doesn’t wear a lot of armor, he’d be better as a Silicate, but a lot of the bounties and gang turf wars in Cowboy Bebop would work better as the background for a ground level campaign. The far-flung adventures of the crew would fit, but the high-tech gear, and the time dilation would change the narrative a lot.

Crusher Joe—The Mercenaries in Crusher Joe are starfaring and bring heavy weapons to bear on their problems.

Dirty Pair—Kei and Yuri are starfaring troubleshooters with high-tech weapons, and they destroy a lot of property. You could very easily make a Traveler’s campaign based on them. Apparently, they had a Time Dilation episode.

Nothing Faster Than Light

Traveller—In one chapter of the novel, Terrance questions how his and other operatives’ reports reach his boss, the Archon, in a system where FTL communications do not exist and ships would be required to travel between systems to carry message traffic. Those ships would travel using the gates of heaven and get up to a high fraction of light speed, but wouldn’t a message still get there faster at light speed? Lasers wouldn’t stay focused long enough, and radio transmissions could be intercepted by anyone if the signal is too weak; encrypted data might seem like noise, there would be a lot of problems. BUT with the gates, you could push some packet boats through them at regular intervals, and the messages should be intact, if the message ever makes it to the boat.

Futuristic Warfare

Hammer’s Slammers—There’s a chapter involving three high-tech tanks as part of a mission, and you could probably work up a mercenary armor unit with crazy powerful weapons. Bolo and OGRE also represent the supertank genre.

Starship Troopers—Do you want Cataphract mobile infantry, because you could easily do an entire game based on Cataphract pilots being dropped on alien worlds and killing giant alien insects, there are elephant-sized spiders in one chapter, you could reskin different kinds of Ghosts as bugs.

The Great Game

Mission Impossible —There’s a scene in the book with a Police Officer wearing a high-tech face mask disguise, and there is a lot of intrigue between the Archons of the different Celestial factions. This can stay entirely ground-based or entail things happening on multiple worlds in a system or multiple systems. The use of Body Morph shops and Rider personalities make espionage games capable of much more depth than the Othervisor just changing faces.

Cyberpunk and Shadowrun—The jobs the Travelers take on the intrigues and black ops stuff, the gang and turf wars could easily adapt old Shadowrun and Cyberpunk adventures, which could go in the Mercs for Hire sections. However, Crown Celestials live for thousands of years and play very long games; Shadowrun GMs should think of Celestial factions like Dragons in their preference for the long game.

Galactic Empire

Foundation—The Crown Dominion in the Centauri Cluster in the novel uses its Spymaster Archons to spy on everything and operate a star-spanning Cold War espionage network trying to see what the other dominions are up to. The Crown Celestials’ insistence on absolute stability at the cost of growth and stagnation are central to the themes in the book. There may be something about managing large empires and how things change over time to borrow from there.

Time Dilation

Gunbuster—did the Time Dilation part well, but big mecha stories won’t translate well. The starship combat was fine in the novel, but the TTRPG doesn’t go into starship combat at all. The parts where the main character’s family ages in the OVA are fine examples of time dilation.

Forever War—might do a decent job of describing what the Remnant Era wars were like, as they took thousands of years to resolve.

Lancer—apparently, Lancer has some time dilation in the game, although it’s used to handwave travel times and keep things moving?

If you have any feedback about this post or our books, please feel free to contact us.

Paul

Evilrobotgames at Gmail.com