Spaceship Zero Index | 

Some people see the BTL drive in Spaceship Zero and ask, "what's the point of the game when you'll just turn it back on and destroy the universe again?". That completely misses the point of it. It's an awesome plot device...

You have a horrible moral choice - if you screw up and let the hydronauts get it, the universe might be destroyed again. But if something goes terribly wrong, you can use the drive and hope the next universe is better. After all, you already know the universe reformed with very close duplicates of everyone, so it's not *exactly* universe-cide--'50s sci-fi heroes are pretty shallow, so that's good enough logic for them.

It's also a giant plot reset button--every week on Star Trek, everything's back to normal, even though they blew up half the galaxy and started a war with the other half last week. Well, this is how that works.

If you want to make Universe 3 be just like Universe 2, so you can keep using the setting material, you can. Or you can twist it differently each time. Look, it's a time machine! You can estimate the decon time wrong and come out in the time of dinosaurs, or after humanity has evolved into giant floating brains, keeping Deep Ones as slaves.

And ultimately, you can choose not to use the drive again, unless you're playing with Ren and Stimpy (see the bibliography): "Must! Not! Push! The! Button!" If your players want, they can take a spanner to the damned thing as soon as they find out what they've done, and throw the professor out the airlock (where he'll either explode or asphyxiate, depending on whether you like genre-simulation or realism).

Or you could let the professor come up with a fix to the BTL drive, now that he's tried the wrong way to do it, so it really works.

Last modified: 2003Jan05
Created