Time Off

I am still here, just storing books and moving a few I want to look at again. I play more than just GURPS; having that perspective is good. I also write on a few related blogs, SBRPG being the most frequently updated, and it reflects the current state of my most-played game shelves.

GURPS is still on those.

The Star Frontiers project continues, but the original Star Frontiers game does not translate well to GURPS. The original SF game is 1d100, and the weapon damages don't make much sense. What GURPS does in its science fiction implementation works much better, except for starship combat. When GURPS tries to go into a hardcore math and physics simulation, it gets tedious, dull, and my eyes glaze over. I still have some design thoughts and soul-searching to do here, most importantly, what is the project's goal, and what do I want it to do?

A Star Law game will be different than a UPF game, the same way a PGC explorer's game will be different than a space pirate game.

Star Frontiers never became much more than its original module series set on Volturnus, a sort of John Carter of Mars imitation, and the original game would have been better had it focused on that aspect. I would rather have the four races send their cryo-sleep starships to Volturnus, focus on settling that planet as the campaign's hub world, ignore the sample universe, and tell referees to "make up the rest of the universe themselves."

The game had other adventure modules, but few compared to this original series.

The comparison between John Carter of Mars and Volturnus does not go away for me; the first adventures were classics and delivered on that genre excellently. The "outside universe," being something everyone felt they needed to escape to, felt like a false god, and when you finally did, players quickly discovered there was nothing much out there.

Volturnus had "dirty influences" like space pirates (you could never steal their ships) and other outside influences, but I feel the series could have been much more and never got there. Selling something that wasn't Star Wars in the 1980s was impossible, especially if that game could not be used to "play" Star Wars in a roundabout way. Star Frontiers would have been better off as a more generic science fiction game, just like D&D was, and pulled in pop-culture influences.

You could pull in various other classic science fiction works and base campaigns around those, such as Starship Troopers, Dune, The Forever War, War of the Worlds, Foundation, 1970s Star Wars and Alien, 80s Blade Runner, and too many others to mention.

An actual science fiction game like D&D would Appendix N all these sources and deliver that.

GURPS science fiction delivers on all those classic books and reflects a stronger foundation in those classics, while Star Frontiers is just one of them. As a result, basing a game "just on Star Frontiers" feels like it is missing something. What is missing are those classics.

Looking back on the 1980s, the game that delivered on the science fiction classics was the FGU's Space Opera. After this, we had GURPS Space, which still works well.

These days, we have the excellent Cepheus Universal (CU), which takes more modern science fiction stories and turns them into 2d6 games. Note that CU's inspirations lean more towards science fiction movies from the 1980s to today. If we are talking classic "book-based" science fiction from the 1950s to 1980, I would choose GURPS Space or Space Opera.

Star Wars in 1977 was the death of the classic science fiction book.

Star Frontiers is very much John Carter with Volturnus, so the roots of this game come from the pre-Star Wars era. If you wanted to make great Star Frontiers adventures, you would imitate classic science fiction books of the past, not copy movies from the 1980s to today. We did this in our 40-year Star Frontiers campaign; it was a mix of all the greats. We less copied Aliens and Blade Runner, and instead played these long-arc, sweeping campaigns where those larger issues of morality and humanity were reflected in "space dungeon" adventures.

This is still a project, but with tariffs throwing the world where I work upside down, I need to focus my energies and creativity carefully.