Scifi media as a blueprint for scifi elements in your game

Recently, my group started playing a game of Stars Without Number. The setting of that game is very light on the backstory and the sector you play in will be a giant sandbox you fill in yourself. The game is very conducive to a lot of scifi - you could play it as Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Cowboy Bebop, Altered Carbon, Fading Suns, etc. What you decide to fill your sector with is up to you.

This gives the GM and the players a lot of flexibility as to how to create the setting. The vanilla Stars Without Number assumes present history happened, humanity built its own FLT ships in the near future, expanded outwards into the far reaches of space, everything collapsed 600 years ago due to The Scream, and now the worlds are connecting up again. This means you can get very varied levels of technology, very varied types of societies, and very specific feels for each solar system.

Swan Song for example decided to build a few planets and organisations around the current or past cultures of Earth. You had the Sunbeam Multistellar megacorporation that was heavily steeped in cowboy culture and mannerisms. The Hoveydan Caliphate was influenced by the cultures of the middle east. Sigrid is viking and Norse through and through.

In our game of Blackstar, we stumbled upon our gimmick for the sector by chance.

Scifi as a blueprint

So here's the idea - in the modern world, a lot of things are influenced by what came before. Scifi has inspired modern technology, the US government was built on the ideas of a classical Greek ideas and the Roman Republic, and even a lot of our fiction draws from the history - talking about emperors, feudal societies, pirates, etc. A lot of things are built on top of blueprints that came before.

So the core conceit for our game is that since the modern history we live in today did happen in the Stars Without Number universe, it's quite possible a lot of modern books, novels, films, or culture in general was passed down over generations, being remixed and remade over and over. Because of that, those stories have become ingrained into the society - you can reference the Alien movie and describe something as a xenomorph just as casually as you can reference the Odyssey and call something a siren or a cyclops.

With the scifi proliferation that exists in the universe, it would then be natural for people and societies to build things based on those concepts. A xenomorph is not only a creature of legends, but a blueprint for a gene engineered killer machine. Starship Troopers is a series of stories from a past, but also an idea on which to build a society. Lightsabres are mythical weapons, but they have also been made real with futuristic technology.

In other words - the scifi contemporary to us the players formed a set of blueprints for the game setting to build around. While the events of that scifi didn't happen (you did not have the God Emperor of Mankind undertake the Great Crusade against the xenos), but the ideas from them did influence the development of the future timeline, and they did inspire various entities to turn some of those ideas into reality with the future tech.

Heck, even Stars Without Number's supplement Suns of Gold refers to space merchants that rule over primitive societies with their future tech as a "kurtzer" in reference to Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. Kurtz went from being a character in a 1899 novella to a template of behaviour that is recognised in the universe of the game in year 3200.

Because of this you could have things like one of the PCs, as a True AI in a Synth shell, looking like Roy Batty, a replicant from Bladerunner. Obviously, whoever designed that shell took inspiration from the old fiction and based the shell on the designs from ancient Earth. Or you could have predators from the Predator franchise appearing as a society - some gene engineer obviously modified some rich big game hunter and gave them powerful weapons so they could go across the galaxy and hunt the most dangerous prey.

This sort of approach to filling a scifi universe gives the GM and the players an excuse to draw from any number of sources without having to reconcile why you would suddenly have stormtroopers shooting xenomorphs - neither of those franchises did happen, but the ideas from those works of fiction did take place. If Picard can quote Shakespeare, he should also be able to quote Star Wars after all ;).

Conclusions

In a sandbox scifi game that branches off our real world timeline like Stars Without Number, it's not unreasonable to use modern scifi as a blueprint for elements that can be found in the game. With sufficiently advanced technology, it would be possible to copy ideas and concept from such works of fiction and make them real in the game's world. This would allow the GM and the players to build on top of such scifi and take elements from them as needed without worrying about keeping the world consistent with those works of fiction.