Quote
Instead of focusing on food retrieval, what about focusing on bringing back metal (following up on the recycling board idea) or maybe water to keep hydroponic farms on the stations going? Or the characters could be a group devoted to raiding ruined cities for artifacts and looking for scattered survivors of the zombie apocalypse.

I didn't latch onto this immediately, but I concur. Food-fetching is somewhat plausible as a reason, but they must have a significant source of energy, to make it cost-effective to boost captured food into orbit. Otherwise, you can be sure every raid on Earth begins with securing a refueling.

But, yeah, what Eric said. Give folks a laundry list of potential "raid reasons". You needn't actually write up modules for each, and I doubt your system will need to address those motives with elements or mechanics. Just a nice, chunky list of "Things That The Administrators Need From Earth All The Time". From banal (food) to super scarce (fuel sources for that alledged uber-power-system that lets us deorbit for a grocery run!).

Further, fetching resources is by no means the only reason to go down. Saving survivors is a GOOD one: re-population needs, you see. We need a large gene pool, or the human race is done anyway. Art and information retrieval: do these space monkeys have any desire to save human knowledge? To capture zombies to attempt treatment/experiments (that one's a bit ugly and dark, but you got a planet full of zombies and tin cans in orbit: it WOULD happen; people MUST want to land permanently someday, right?). Establish and maintain bases/landing areas. Setup emergency shelters and evac radios that survivors might discover.

You know... this would be a good thread subject: [Raid Earth] Why raid Earth?

It would cost you more energy to land on earth and take off again than to go to Jupiter and come back, although admittedly it would be quicker.  So, any and all of your material needs can be more easily obtained from the planets.  The only reason to go to earth then is for things that are not just resources, and found only on earth: the detritus of the past civilisation.

Fuck it, you want to kill the zombies and reclaim Earth!

Well, that's one thing that probably all would think of or have as a long term goal.

Thunder_God wrote: Well, that's one thing that probably all would think of or have as a long term goal.

David wrote:
[hr]An Aside, folks: As this is an endeavor, it seems to me that repeating what someone else has already suggested, without addition or expansion, is just redundant noise. Gary, would you please confirm or deny this statement of mine?
[hr]
   (By the way: What is the cause of the worldwide zombification? That might help inspire more specific raid reasons.)

Thunder_God wrote:
Fuck it, you want to kill the zombies and reclaim Earth!

Well, that's one thing that probably all would think of or have as a long term goal.

So please try to be a little more helpful in future.

Slight tangent.... there is a book (Silver Rain by Alistair Reynolds) where the opening portion deals with a group of 'space monkeys' scavenging an Earth ravaged by a nanotech disaster. No zombies but there is a real fear of infection. Unfortunately, the rest of the book has next to nothing to do with that (but it is a damn fine read anyway)

knicknevin wrote:
Slight tangent.... there is a book (Silver Rain by Alistair Reynolds) where the opening portion deals with a group of 'space monkeys' scavenging an Earth ravaged by a nanotech disaster. No zombies but there is a real fear of infection. Unfortunately, the rest of the book has next to nothing to do with that (but it is a damn fine read anyway)

joepub wrote:

So please try to be a little more helpful in future.

Gary... I think Thunder_God was being helpful.

With everyone pointing out "humans need this" and "human species survival" there was a point that was almost overlooked:

The game is (i think) going to be about killing zombies.
I'm gunna put myself in a character's shoes for one second.

I'm on a mission.
In the administration's eyes, I'm there to retrieve art.
But on a personal level... I don't give a fuck about art.
I enlisted to kill zombies. I enlisted to bring a world of hurt to those undead.
The reason I am raiding earth, personally, is to kill some zombies.

New reason:
o  Entertainment - The space station's databases and memory are not infinite. During the rush to escape Earth, entertainment was not a priority. But now, years (?) later, everyone has seen every movie, beaten every video (VR?) game, and read every book. Twice. Sometimes, you'd rather be eaten by zombies than watch another I Love Lucy rerun.
   The Admins send raiders down to power-up and copy entertainment from former Internet repositories (i.e. server farms) or to scan hard copies from libraries. File sharing violators of copyright are posthumously lauded as visionaries and heroes of the future. Currently, "old school" Nintendo and Sega console games are in demand, though there's a strong push for more MMORPGs, because of their generally open play and huge variety of situations.
[hr]Fine, fine, of course, yes, sure... kill zombies. Let's move past the obvious and try to serve this thread's purpose....

Hmmm movies.... VR addicts! Lol please and thank you, I love those idea's more please! ^_^

Similar to those above:
DNA Library - Sure, they can't emulate Noah and bring up all animals two-by-two, but why not a blood and bone marrow sample from every animal they can spot and tranquilize? Some kind of trustworthy cryogenic storage—and hope for a future ability to replicate from gene samples—and we've got the next best thing to Noah's Ark.
   The Admins won't send them down that often, but "safari runs" to collect gene samples would be a smart start towards long-term restoration of the defiled Earth. Domesticated breeds are favored, as most of them can't sustain themselves for long in the wild.

Expulsions - The ultimate punishment of a liberal people with a LOT of spare land. Why have capital punishment muddy up your fine, high-orbit ideals when there's a billion zombies who'll do the dirty work? Also, there's not much good reason to de-orbit totally empty, when you plan to re-orbit with some haul; might as well take down some trash. Thus, the Admins will sentence the worst criminal offenders—folks who aren't worth their labor or their genes—to expulsion from the station. The guilty party catches a ride down to Earth under self-releasing time-locked restraints, is deposited somewhere at random rather far away from common landing locations, and is left to God's mercy.
   Of course, the station culture is not a perfect one, and the innocent can be wrongly convicted, even on a space station which, surely, has plenty of monitoring equipment throughout. And it isn't unheard of for difficult political opposition to be, well, "characterized" as committing heinous crimes (i.e. framed). The threat of the zombie's cruel hospitality can go a long way towards silencing revolutionaries and rabble-rousers, too.
[hr]By the way... do the zombies have to eat? Do they eat animals other than humans (can they CATCH any?)? I presume "no," "yes," and "not usually" otherwise there's no need to fight them, just wait: they'll starve or be bear and wolf food before long.

I think a great deal of this will be determined by how big and extensive your space-based society is.  Or at least they have to be decided together and integrated.

The simplest idea from the description you have given, and which seems most thematically appropriate for zombies, is the idea of the perilous tin can.  If the history includes something like an emergency evacuation of earth, then they will likely have no spare parts and no manufacturing capacity.  What they have is an orbital barracks and that's it.  Everything they need will have to be retrieved from earth.  Plans, machines, parts, clothes, material samples, everything.  And unless their perilous can is in an extraordinarily stable orbit, sooner or later it will fall.  And that means that humanity has not, in fact survived the disaster at all, yet - it has gained a breathing space, but if they don't come up with a Plan before the doomsday clock runs down, the species will burn up on reentry.

That would move the focus away from killing zombies as a goal and towards killing zombies as an expedient.  It also makes every object retrieved, no matter how mundane, vital.  Another reason to go down would be books, because boosting wood pulp to orbit is inherently absurd.  And your survivors cannot possibly include every skill known to humanity, and may not know some things that are critical.  So landing to raid university labs and libraries might be quite important.

It would also seem pointless to me to boost weapons, and especially ammunition, to orbit.  Zombies are usually very stupid; if they can safely lock weapons up on vaults on earth, and retrieve them at the start of the mission, they will.  This also allows you to add tension to the early parts of the mission, and give the mission some structure.

I just had another thought.  There seems to be this pattern of people graphing their highschools like a dungeon; you could take advantage of this.  With the idea that books are to heavy to boost, you can have a mission in which a force lands, draws a perimeter, and holds it against the ravening hordes while the techies scan every text they can find and beam it to orbit.  So now your players can run around their very own highschool with guns, shooting zombies, in what would likely be a quite Romero-esque scene.

cont wrote: It would also seem pointless to me to boost weapons, and especially ammunition, to orbit.

cont wrote: Zombies are usually very stupid; if they can safely lock weapons up on vaults on earth, and retrieve them at the start of the mission, they will.  This also allows you to add tension to the early parts of the mission, and give the mission some structure.

Thanks everyone for the ideas thus far,

David there will be other types of zombies apart from the stupid ones, hell I even have a hidden option for GM's based off that but I won't post it here. Anyway zombies eat anything and everything they can, also I believe e-books are more important.