I have actually spent an inordinate amout of time reading, researching, and playtesting for this review. My apologies for its slowness... but it was definitely a pleasant way to spend the time.
This is a roundup of SciFi TTRPGs from the small publisher and indie scenes that do Scifi well that have that old-school feel:
Stars Without Number
The metaplot of Stars Without Number is that humanity had spread across a vast swathe of space using hyperspace technology. And then, a mysterious event called The Scream rendered hyperspace travel inoperable and destroyed a significant amount of technology.
In the ensuing Silence, most worlds were isolated from the rest of humanity and forced to fend for themselves. Some remained high-tech and even continue to advance many of their technologies except for space travel. Some fell to barbarism. Some were forced to become something other than human to survive.
After centuries, the Silence has ended, and hyperspace travel is possible again. The PCs are members of a crew setting out to build ties between their homeworlds and the rest of the fragmented remains of the old Terran Mandate. Often following ancient star charts to discover the fate of worlds that have been cut off from humanity for a very long time.
When I first started looking into Stars Without Number, which has a free edition available online, I found its rules were a bit heavy and complicated for my taste. It uses a B/X D&D core, but it adds on top of it a fairly hefty skill system, and a character background system.
In retrospect, this is power for the course for apace opera OSR games. Most of them try to add on some kind of skill system, and offer some sort of mechanical benefit for generating a character background as Traveller does.
If you were to ask anybody who has been in the OSR for a while which OSR games do science fiction well, this is likely to be the first one that they will name.
Stars Without Number has a 2d6 skill resolution system that uses b/ modifiers, and a bonus for any skills a character has developed, rolled against a variable difficulty class. This feels very much like the task resolution system from Traveller and it's close on purpose.
It also uses the action economy of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition, with move actions, main actions, instant actions, and on turn actions IE free actions. Ultimately, the game feels like it fascinating hybrid of D&D3.5e, B/X D&D, and Traveller.
Stars Without Number likewise adapts Traveller's concept of technology level, although it uses a five point rather than a 16-point scale.
Starship combat in Stars Without Number incorporates elements of story gaming into it. When a ship is hit, the player serving as captain may choose to have the ship suffer some sort of crisis, such as a blown airlock killing some crew, or a fire starting up somewhere aboard the ship that player characters can then attempt to mitigate, rather than taking hit point damage to the ship.
Overall, I think you can break down science fiction role playing games that deal with space opera into three subcategories.
- You have the ones that are interested in creating a serious, hard science fiction story that feels like something akin to the Expanse or the Honorverse.
- You have pulpy Science Fiction and Fantasy stories that include Jedi and archetypal for anthropomorphic aliens, and that often don't take themselves too seriously.
- And you have the sleazy science fiction ones that are interested in telling gritty, two-fisted and naughty sci-fi stories.
I find that most old school science fiction games, and even most story games that focus on scifi are interested in the latter two. Games oriented towards serious and hard science fiction are much rarer. Of the games I'm reviewing here today, I would say that only stars without number really qualifies as the first group.
Cities Without Number
I will simply leave this one as a footnote to
stars without number. This recent release from Kevin Crawford gives you
rules for generating science fiction cities and running cyberpunk
campaigns in them. I haven't had much of a chance to look at it, but
given the solid hacking rules and stars without number, and it's ease of
play once you get over the hump of understanding the character
generations system, I expect it would perform excellently.
Star Adventurer
Rather than presenting specific alien races, the system provides you with a template for generating an alien race based on common science fiction archetypes. Backgrounds four characters, like Dungeons & Dragons 5e are single chosen or randomly rolled quality that grants a few points of skill bonus es.
Overall, Star Adventurer feels like a hybrid of B/X D&D, Lion & Dragon, Dungeons & Dragons 5e, and a touch of Swords & Wizardry. Ability score bonuses follow the B/X model, and characters are rolled using 3d6 down the line. With bonuses in line with the Moldvay B/X charts. However, the game uses the d20 system, with a d20 added to a skill bonus and a ability score bonus. The list of skills is middling in size, and comparable to the skill list of Stars Without Number or White Star. Most characters will begin with just a handful of skills with bonuses between plus one and plus three. Unlike D&D5e, difficulty classes and overall skill bonuses do not advance very much with level. When a character gains a level, they either choose once or roll twice on a table of possible upgrades, which can include hit points, attack bonuses, improvements to saving throws, or an increase to skills. This allows the difficulty curve of the game to remain pretty flat.
Character classes in Star Adventurer have a set of subclasses the player chooses at first level, and there's a psionic equivalent for each primary class.
Star Adventurer does not give anything like random tables for generating star systems or much guidance on how to develop an adventure. It is a bare-bones system designed to give you quick and dirty tools for building your own pulpy science fiction setting.
I have used Star Adventurer extensively run my solo games, and so you can read about it in action here.
Machinations of the Space Princess
Almost everything is framed in terms of these X-out-of-six skills that Lamentations of The Flame princess popularized with the specialist character class. Psionic characters have an X out of six chance of successfully performing one of their abilities. Specialists have a range of general and specialized skills that they can use x out of six times. Combat-oriented characters have special moves, like hitting multiple enemies at once, or destroying an opponent's weapon that starts at one out of six and can be built as the character develops.
Machinations of the Space Princess is designed specifically to imitate sleazy science fiction from the 1970s, where characters are low lives living in our universe where people still have to struggle to make a buck, and the best technology is reserved for the extraordinarily wealthy and powerful. For inspiration, I might consider watching Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity, Critters 2, The Vicious Lips, or Cherry 2000.
Character races can be created by combining several different sets of traits that will modify ability scores. A human simply buys the same trait three times in a row that gives it extra skill points. A player may choose to buy more than three traits to define their alien species, but in doing so they start to suffer charisma penalties for being too far from the mean of Galactic species in the setting.
The setting, for what it is worth, is a universe where people jump from star system to star system with relative ease to wind up on sleazy space stations with dive bars and criminal syndicates. Most of the setting is implied, with an inspirational one or two sentence footnote on every other page giving you some sense of what the universe is like. For the most part, though it is kept deliberately and artfully vague.
The element that gives the game its title, is that a powerful Interstellar matriarchy has recently lost its queen, and her 2000+ daughters all stands to claim the Imperial throne. But, they must manoeuvre themselves into a position of financial success, political influence, and assassinate the rivals all at the same time. This change of events has created a lot of opportunities for sleazy space-farers who desperately need to earn a buck.
The game keeps the characters moving by having a mechanic where in events occur to drain their bank accounts in downtime. The characters always have debt, always have to earn a little more money, and have an incentive to blow their cash on starship upgrades and fancy toys.
One thing I particularly liked about Machinations of the Space Princess, even though it is a little heftier on the rules, is that it includes a great deal of mechanics for customized equipment. Fire and freeze rays, disintegrators, armour with specialized protections, smart weaponry, and I'll be designed with a minimum of fuss. This isn't like building a custom drone in Shadowrun: it takes only a few minutes to figure out how to build a custom blaster with all the tricks and tactics of one of Samus Aran's weapon arrays from Metroid.
Ships and vehicles are designed likewise too range in size and function, from small one-man crafts to gigantic behemoths using a pretty simple set of rules. Vehicle combat doesn't look very different from regular combat in this system.
Alpha Blue
Alpha Blue is a game meant to simulate the kind of sleazy sex saturated science fiction you might see in Species or Femalien, or in the pages of Heavy Metal magazine.
Rather than presenting even a complex OSR system, Alpha Blue is a very free wheeling rules light system using Venger Satanis's VSd6 engine. Characters have no ability scores, instead they have a description of their background rolled randomly as three events, description of the weapon they prefer, there fashion choices, and their profession. Optionally, you can also roll a great deal for their preferences in sex partners. Aliens and robots can be generated by simply rolling on a couple of tables for alien beliefs, mannerisms, and biology. Characters rule a pool of dice, with one die for a situation at which they are insignificant disadvantage, 2d6 for a normal situation, or 3d6 for a situation in which the background, skills, fantasies, and preferences might show that they have an advantage. The highest die is taken and the result is determined using a Talisanta-style results table.
Characters have a level, and hit points, and not much else other than the paragraph that the random tables let you just use to describe them.
That said, because this interlinks with Venger Satanis's other two game settings, a character could make use of a B/X D&D character sheet when visiting certain planets. And, a character with a full set of D&D stats can rule a 3d6 if irrelevant stat is over 15, or 1d6, if irrelevant stat is under eight.
Setting also includes its own equivalents of Jedi (the Knights in White Satin and the Knights and Black Satin,) and Star Wars-style Force mysticism in something called the Zedi arts, as well as granting certain powers to Templars of an obscure holy order in the setting. Most of these are incredibly simple, and any character can attempt to pick them up without needing to have it as part of their backstory as long as they can find a teacher. none of these come even close to representing the kind of power that magic represents in D&D.
The setting of this particular role-playing game is a space station called Alpha Blue, which once was meant to be a colony for performing isolated psychotherapy on thrill seekers and sexual deviants who don't fit into the current regime of oppressive, stuffy, corporate life. After a rebellion, the space station became the largest floating brothel, black market, and hub for spies and organized criminals in the galaxy. It's such a chaotic mess that the command staff rolls over on a weekly basis, and the space station has been outfitted so it can jump from place to place to avoid getting into too much trouble from authorities.
Alpha Blue is weird, fast, and loose. And definitely meant to be played with a mature crowd that's comfortable with sex discussed at the table. It is meant to be good, stupid, Gonzo fun and the majority of the book is a selection of random tables for generating loose and silly sci-fi adventures.
One thing I particularly love about Alpha Blue comes from its first supplement. It offers a starship battle system that is based on rolling on tables to describe damage received to starships. Smaller ships start with a smaller die on the table. As combat escalates, the ships climb up the die tree, making it possible for them to deal increasingly more devastating blows to the other ship. At low levels, cargo getting loose, vending machines going berserk and spilling their contents, some couple in the passengers crew getting unceremoniously knocked about will in flagrante leading to a bite injury, or heating or cooling breaking down occur. At high levels on the table of 20 or higher, there's a good chance of the ship exploding.
The ship's pilot can influence outcomes by taking evasive maneuvers to prevent the other ship from hitting it for several rounds, or maneuvering in a way that allows them to rule a higher die during the attack sequence. Players are given free reign to figure out how they might use their abilities to increase their sides die or decrease the opposing size die. It is a funny and clever system I have used several times when called upon to handle ship battles and not having a more structured system at hand.
My complete Alpha Blue review is here.
White Star
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White Star is built on the old Swords and Wizardry White Box rule set. Nice, it has its roots in 1974 Dungeons & Dragons.
I have the more recent Galaxy Edition, which includes material from the first two source books released from White Star, and his sold at the same price as the original game.
In a tip of the hat to Traveller, White Star has a background rolling system it call "serials" which detail a character's homeworld, youth, first adventure, rivals, allies, relationship to their family, and a critical event, each as a d6 table. unusually, the critical event table has injuries requiring cybernetics, and a chance of character simply dying during character generation as an additional callback to Traveller.
White Star as much of the heavy lifting of establishing a setting using classes. The character classes are quite varied, giving player characters 25 options in the Galaxy Edition ranging from mercenaries and aristocrats to alien mystics, star knights (Jedi), merry halfling space pirates, and uplifted space squirrels. This includes using race as class.
Like the old White Box, all hit dice are d6, and characters don't necessarily gain them at every level. And like Swords and Wizardry, saving throws are a single roll-over number determined by character level. White star uses ascending armour class rather than combat matrices as a touch of modern convenience.
I will do a complete review of White Star very soon. It's flavor is very much inspired by light hearted pop Space Opera is like Star Wars, and has a lot of references to Star Trek, Howard the Duck, Buck Rogers, the Transformers, and Flash Gordon throughout.
White star has a very simplified skill list, with every character being able to choose two skills and getting one from their class. These work much like Machinations of the Space Princess, with each skill having a rating out of six. Anytime the character wants to try something exceptional related to that skill they can roll out or under their rank on a six-sided die, modified by ±1-2 for difficulty.
White Star is designed to be a heroic role-playing game. It rewards player characters with XP for clever ideas, heroic acts, role playing their alignment, and entertaining the rest of the table.
The system has detailed rules for starship, mecha, and and vehicles which work on different scales of distance and damage. Outside of gunnery, only the PC controlling a vehicle has any particularly important roles during vehicle, mech, and starship combat, but it is a pretty solid system otherwise. It allows for customizing vehicles, but it keeps it pretty simple.
While not heavy on random tables, it has enough material to generate interesting star systems.
Cepheus Engine
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Mutant Future
his game from goblenoid games does for Gamma World 2nd edition what Labyrinth Lord did for B/X Dungeons & Dragons. It is a fairly close clone to the 2nd edition of Gamma World. I have looked at them side by side, and managed to find a few places where they differ, but for the most part where Mutant Future deviates from the second edition of Gamma World, it is to clean it up a bit and make it a little more playable. If you're looking for the authentic GW experience, it is a perfect choice, and there's a free downloadable version of it out there. However, as goblenoid games has effectively closed their doors after the ogl scandal, it may be a little harder to find.
Mutant Crawl Classics
Also like Dungeon Crawl Classics, Mutant Crawl Classics, also has a profusion of modules with premises that make even first level characters feel awesome, and the threats feel world spanning. There are no rats in the sewers in DCC RPG, and there are no simple raider gangs to eliminate in MCC RPG.
Death is the New Pink
Because it is built using MotO, Death is the New Pink feels dangerous and ultra-violent: attacks never miss and it only takes one or two shots to put even the toughest PC down. The lethal combat encouraged the PCs to use cover, ambush, overwhelming force, and ruthless strategic thinking rather than brute force to solve problems.
DitNP brings an intense punk aesthetic to the game. It feels as influenced by insanely violent post-apocalyptic like Wizards and Dead Leaves as it does Ubik or Doctor Bloodmoney.
It's greatest flourish, however is how it uses narrative -based levelling. To reach higher levels, PCs must help lower -level NPCs survive the perils of the wasteland, help build up a community, command war bands, and ultimately leave an indelible mark on life in the Wasteland. You only get legendary power by doing thinks that help you become a legend.
The Wasted Hack
The Wasted Hack enables you to play scavengers, raiders, gunfighters, or mutants with mysterious Powers trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with robots from the final war, alien invaders, deranged mutant life forms, with all that Philip k dick style goodness in a very short package.
Like all Black Hack games, it can be difficult to challenge players or make action feel incredibly risky. The game itself prefers players to come out triumphantly after over the top action worthy of assignment green novel.
If you are looking for a brainless good time, you can't go too wrong with it.
The Mecha Hack
Once again, the incredibly lightweight, high action, and high powered PC mechanics make The Mecha Hack sometimes less challenging than other ttrpgs in the genre.
Player characters are composed of a pilot type that gives the mecca one special talent, and a class of mech between black hack interpretations of the four classic Mech types the height weight Scout the medium utility mech the armored heavy, and the incredibly destructive assault style Mecha. The player characters statistics are reflected in the battle mech's stats and vice versa. So, a player character with a dexterity of 15 pilots a mech with a dexterity of 15. The mech and the player character are essentially indistinguishable.
When a player character is outside their mech, they don't have access to the special systems piloting talents, etc that their battlemech has. And use a different hit point scale. Attacks from conventional weapons and human scale NPCs can't hurt mechs, while mechs do insane damage to human scale creatures.
As the player characters level up during downtime it is assumed that their Mech is being upgraded and modified, reflecting the increase in its stats, and occasionally the addition of new optional weapons systems
Overall, The Black Hack and it's derived games push for fast, intense, and brutal action and tends to favor the player characters. It's great if you want to tell a story like Gundam or Macross where you were following the most gifted and talented pilots of a force as they help turn the odds for their side to victory. Perhaps it's not so effective at playing a setting where war is hell and player characters are constantly dying in combat.
ICRPG: Warp Shell
Warp Shell player characters are over the top heroic with incredible abilities. And like all things with icrpg, there is an element of video gaming this to the setting that you have to adapt to.
Ultimately, Index Card RPG's Warp Shell setting is light-hearted, and can't be taken very seriously. It feels
like the Marvel comics set in outer space like the early Captain Marvel,
and the Guardians of the Galaxy.
If you want to play a drittier,
darker tone of Science Fiction game, Index Card RPG can actually be a
pretty good choice. Most of the characters abilities are based on the
equipment they are holding, which can it capture the reliance of sci-fi
Heroes on their technology beautifully. However, you will want to make
your own character archetypes, and equipment lists rather than relying
on the ones in Warp Shell.
Mothership
Mothership is designed to simulate science fiction horror films like Alien and Event Horizon, and does so admirably. The game is fast, and flexible, while it's fumble rules, panic mechanics, and combat engine all keep the game tense most of the time. My one one shot using Mothership ended in disaster when one of my players' characters panicked and threw a grenade carelessly, resulting in a tpk for the whole party, which everybody felt perfectly caught the aliens asked feel I was trying to go for.
You can read my full review here, but suffice it to say that Mothership is a masterpiece of information design. Everything about the way the manual is laid out, the design of the character sheet, and the way information is presented about things like Starships make it easy to use even where it gets fairly crunchy. The character generation process is actually laid out on the character sheet, so that you can build a character without needing to reference the book.
In addition, it's handful of modules are legendary for their clever design.
Death in Space
The mining colony meant to harvest it is mostly based in a massive torus-shsped colony around the moon where the crystals are found: a place where the tech and habitat is slowly decaying. The PCs live in the same hub... a habitat that needs power and maintenence constantly. If the PCs can't find what it needs, slow suffocation or a sudden, lethal technological collapse will likely kill them.
Meanwhile, a hostile alien energy, the void, slowly seeps into everything and everyone in the Tenebris System, causing mutations, madness, and supernatural horrors.
Much of the game is focused on a desperate struggle to scrounge parts to keep the air and power going in their hub.
The thing that has
made Death in Space notable, is its community.
Death in Space has a strong following, and a lot of community content
gets put out for it.
Frontier Space & Star Frontiersman
It is worth noting that Star Frontiers had its own devoted following
that tried to resurrect Star Frontiers during the OSR's a early days.
Frontier Space was one of the two most popular projects of that sort.
Unfortunately, while Wizards of the Coast has been content to let the
OSR stick around, they were far more aggressive and protecting the Star Frontiers property. And the Frontier Space project, along with a
community that was sharing the old Star Frontiers material were asked to
cease operations. It is now a little harder to get frontier space. And
it's community seems to have been content to stick with the PDFs they
already had, or purchase the Star Frontiers PDFs off of drive-thru RPG
That
said, there are a few community resources that can still be found for
frontier space, and an excellent scene full of resources for either
frontier space or Star frontiers called star frontiersman that has an impressive volume of material for a Star Frontiers sytle game.
Cy_Borg
Cy_Borg leans heavily in to randomization, and I expect, having looked at it, at least, that this one would provide a fun challenge to a GM as they try to interpret the latest grimdark development they have rolled.
Grok‽
Grok‽ is set on a world that was once the hub of an Interstellar teleportation network, and this covered in Cosmopolitan colonies full of strange aliens and a Marketplace of advanced technology. When a cataclysm caused the planet to collapse, and its core to become a miniature black hole, the system was abandoned and everyone on it left either stranded on the irradiated fragments of the crumbling planet that now orbit the black hole, or on fragments of the collapsing ring habitat that once encircled the planet.
Centuries have passed, and it's clear no one is either coming or capable of helping the people on Grok. Your player characters are survivors who use a mix of magic and high technology to help themselves and their small community survive in a world where bizarre aliens and their mutated descendants, deranged robots, radiation, wild magic, and technology gone awry can be found everywhere. With its amazing artwork, simple rules, and fast play, Grok‽ is one of my favorite go-to's when I just want to play something weird in a Solo game.
Cha'alt
Now a world of radioactive deserts and a mix of fantasy and high tech city-states, Cha'alt is slowly being drained of soft, the magical crystallized form of the blood of elder gods, which induces psychic powers and amplifies Magic, by means of Zoth fracking by ultra high-tech visitors from outer space, who don't care that their operations are slowly ripping the planet to shreds and breaking down time and space itself in the area.
This setting can go from post-apocalyptic wasteland to survival, to Fantasy dungeon crawling, two playing rentable Heroes against hey totalitarian Galactic empire, to mech warfare, to cyberpunk in the blink of the eye depending on where the characters are going in the setting.
It is also heavily satiritical, and laced with more cross-textual references than the average Simpsons episode. Of course, some of the more recent modules have been very political in nature, and highly controversial. It's creator, Venger Satanis, knows how to troll the TTRPG community in order to create buzz and conversation. Accordingly, some of those newer modules may not be to your particular taste, especially if you are easily offended.
Cha'alt plays using a super lightweight OSR engine called Crimson Dragon Slayer d20, which can be played without character sheets, and whose character generation takes the sum of 2 minutes. Both a simple version of the rules, and a more advanced version are found at the backs of the various Cha'alt books as an appendix. Everything remains compatible with more sophisticated OSR games. You can grab any TSR era Dungeons & Dragons retro clone and play Cha'alt with zero conversion work, pr you can play any TSR module with CDSd20.
Each of the compiled Cha'alt books includes a few midsize dungeons, one mega dungeon, and a handful of short adventures, along with some kind of friendly town location that player characters can resupply at and gather information in. And at least one chapter that details more about the setting itself, which are inevitably extremely heavy on random tables, colorful npcs, and adventure hooks, rather than infodumps. Cha'alt is definitely a game that shows not tells.
Here are my reviews for Cha'alt, Cha'alt: Fuschia Malaise, Saving Cha'alt, and a non-review of Cha'alt: Chartreuse Shadows
Lowlife 2090
I love Shadowrun. My longest running role-playing campaign of all time started in Shadowrun second edition and played through to 4th edition. It was 5 years of intrigue, high tech crime, and revolution in occupied post-apocalyptic San Francisco. If I do the math, we probably put over 1,100 hours of play into that campaign.
But, even though I have a deep love of the Shadowrun setting in game, I can tell you that has gotten out of control, and it has started to strip the fun out of the game. Meanwhile, 5th and 6th editions have worked hard to try and turn the Matrix and Magic into mirror images of one another, which has stripped the unique feeling away from both. Well at the same time taking away much of the crazy, over the top ways that the wireless Matrix made 4th edition shine. It's so hard to keep track of the changes to the system that I felt like I was getting whiplash trying to integrate the metaplot developments that were coming out with every module.
And I want to make a note here that Shadorun is one of several systems where there is so much metaplot that if you know the setting better, you will be able to be more effective as a player. It rewards mastery over the setting in the same way many modern games reward mastery over the rules. And often feels just as unfair.
The first simpler Mendoza City setting of Lowlife 2090 was breath of fresh air. It has most of the same fun with much simpler, faster rules, and a much lower learning curve for the setting.
I have only played a few sessions of Lowlife 2090. I am currently in a dark place in my life, and I don't need my escape to be just as gloomy. I have been avoiding cyberpunk for a couple of years. But, when I do feel that itch, LL2090 is my go-to game.
Some really interesting entries there I hadn't heard of. A little surprised you left out "Death Is The New Pink".
ReplyDeleteCompletely an oversight. I shall add it.
Delete