One of the big differences between running a fantasy campaign and a science-fiction campaign is that when playing SF, I found myself constantly looking for starship deck plans.
With a fantasy campaign, many of the maps revolved around buildings, dungeons or overland adventures, and those sorts of maps were easy to knock out over lunch. Failing that, I had plenty of maps from 20+ years of Dungeons & Dragons that I could fall back on.
With my Star Wars campaign though, the adventures are split between world-based exploration and starship- or space station-based combat. Starship-based adventures represent perhaps 1/8 to 1/4 of the encounters I run, but when I do run them I often find myself scrambling for deck plans.
The big reason there is that it takes more effort to come up with a rational-seeming starship. A dungeon can be as simple as a series of rooms, but with starships, players always want to know where to find the bridge, engineering, Jeffries tubes, etc.
That’s where ready-made deck plans help. The Star Wars rule books (regardless of edition) help with this, as they often feature deck plans for smaller ships, but the place where I consistently come up short is with frigate-class and larger vessels. I don’t expect anyone to map out the Death Star (though I’m sure somewhere, somehow, someone is working on it) but detailed plans of light and heavy cruisers would be helpful.
I’m still searching for those, but over the last few years, I have accumulated a goodly number of starship deck plan links. If you know of a deck plans site that isn’t listed here, please add it in the comments or email me at nuketown@gmail.com and I’ll add it to this list.
General Interest Starship Deck Plans
- Pinterest: Deckplans – Starship: Over 250 deck plans, many of which are setting agnostic.
- Colonial Chrome: A combination of deck plans, vehicle graphics, and character flats for science fiction campaigns. The Deviant Art site has over 700 entries.
- How to Draw Starship Deck Plans [pdf]: Practical advice on how to map a starship.
Traveller Deck Plans
- Traveller Deck Plan Collections
- The Traveller Deckplan Page
- Brook’s Traveller Lowport
- Peter’s Traveller Page
- Cosmographer 3: Traveller Starship Deckplans
Star Trek Deck Plans
- The Star Trek LCARS Blueprints Database: A large collection of starship deck plans and blueprints.
- Ship Schematics: Star Trek: A collection of Federation, Klingon, Romulan, and other Trek-related schematics. These are not deck plans; they’re more like technical renderings of the starships from different angles.
- Pinterest: Star Trek Blueprints: 70+ starship designs, including renderings, blueprints, and artwork.
Specific Star Trek Starship Deck Plans
- Starship Enterprise 1701 A Deck Plans
- Starship Enterprise 1701 D Blue Prints
- Galaxy-glass Deck Plans
- Nova-class Deck Plans
- Miranda-class Deck Plans
- Intrepid-class Deck Plans [PDF]
- Intrepid-class [Image]
- Daedalus-class Deck Plans
- Akira-class Deck Plans
- Oberth-class Deck Plans
Star Wars
- Star Wars Deckplans Alliance: Lots of freighter- and starfighter- class maps.
- Edge of the Empire RPG Supplemental: Not so much deck plans as images and stat blocks for small, medium, and large vehicles for Fantasy Flight Games’ edition of Star Wars.
- Wookiepedia: Technical Drawings: Lots of technical artwork for weapons, vehicles, and starships.