50 Fun Things to Do On An Airless Moon (that don’t involve leaving)
This is my secret santa gift for Dusk Witch on the Sci-Fi RPG Collective discord, thought it was neat enough to share.
Pretend you’re holding the planet the moon’s orbiting with a funny camera angle.
Hide your ship in a big lava tube and pray it won’t collapse from meteorite impacts.
Mine water ice for ship fuel.
Recover one of the colony’s industrial regolith collector drones, there’s resources to be sifted from it if you collect enough of it.
Explore its subsurface ocean, if it has one. Some start deeper than others, who knows what exists down there contained by miles and miles of rock and ice…
Scavenge a recent crater for valuable metals from an asteroid.
Play moon golf, the courses are much bigger with lower gravity and lack of air resistance.
Do criminal actions while the colony is distracted by the moon golf tournament.
Construct a polyandrous penal colony.
Lead a revolution to liberate the people in said penal colony..
Scramble to rescue the poor souls who just crashed here.
Do sick tricks and jumps in your rover.
Find some lava tubes.
Build subterranean honeycomb cities.
Show up as the response team of marines and rescue workers to a honeycomb city that’s gone dark.
Hide missile silos in lava tubes .
Infiltrate a lava tube missile silo like it’s a spy movie.
Stop a lava tube missile or mass driver from firing at it’s parent body at apocalyptic speeds.
Turn the largest crater into a telescope.
Find it. Find it. Find it. Find it. Find it. Find it. Find it. Find it. Find it. Find it.
Plant sandwich-sized flags in every rock you think is cool.
Lay down retroreflectors that form artwork (beautiful, occult, or obscene) when viewed from higher altitudes.
Win second place at the pogo-hopping rally in your Tigger-themed EVA suit.
Hop around the surface in your landing craft.
Make a moonball field out of a crater.
Get in a moon buggy chase to catch that solar panel thief (or run away as the solar panel thief).
Desperately patch up holes in your pressure tent that were punctured by regolith.
Rupture your enemy’s pressure tent.
Risk it all in participating in a low gravity jetpack race to pay off the moon mafia.
Run into ancient light sensitive xenomorphs on the dark side of this moon.
Put unpleasant scents in the colony’s oxygen recyclers.
Use your cyborg friend’s augmented pressure lungs to store moon rocks and spit them out like a machine gun from their mouth.
Do all the yoyo tricks you could never do in higher gravity.
Carve fake alien glyphs on the surface to confuse scientists.
Create a replica of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey and leave it on the surface to confuse scientists even more.
Use a human sized slingshot to launch yourself across a massive canyon in a tight situation.
Wacky Races on the moon, with all of the violence that entails and in new creative ways due to the environment.
Repair the colony’s solar panels and other equipment after meteorite impacts.
Take advantage of the damage to do CRIMES
Moon bungee jumping, that’s all.
Uncover an illegal mining operation (the organization doesn’t have the proper license).
Raid their illegal mining site for resources you can sell (no questions asked).
Start up a colony yourself with the cheapest homesteading ship money can buy.
Skirmish with other colonists for control of strategic lava tubes and resources.
Unite with all the other small colonists against the megacorp’s colony. Gyroget guns and moon buggies with mounted machine guns required, and whatever mining equipment can be used as a weapon or rigged to explode.
Infiltrate the megacorp’s model moon colony, complete with a lovely little green park inside it’s tilted centrifugal disc for the top managers (or for the workers’ 5 minute breaks).
Escape from the “model colony” by puncturing that one spot that’s patched up with a pressure tent, that should have some explosive results.
Exploit the chaos of intercolonial war as a band of several good for nothing free traders localized to this moon.
Accidentally bring in sentient regolith on your suit that gains control over people’s bodies when inhaled.
Use a pocket nuke inside a colony or homesteading ship for… reasons most certainly unrelated to #49.
Thanks to Sammy for making about 10 of these (although I think I edited a couple of them), and to my sister for helping me brainstorm a few to actually finish this.