GURPS: Space Opera, Part II

There is a problem with generic science fiction. Why bother?

Space Opera goes a long way towards solving this problem, especially if you grab the Star Sector Atlases and use the structure in the core rulebook to establish factions and organizations. All of a sudden, we have a complete universe out here to explore, on the size of a complete setting like Traveller and its Imperium, and due to this game being so rare and niche, practically nobody knows what this universe is about.

Galactic Starship Dune Star Federation Troopers Battlestar Trek Wars: Gordon Rogers is my best explanation of this universe. Every pre-1980 primary science-fiction setting put into a blender, just like D&D did with fantasy.

Drop players in here, and let them figure it all out.

Trust me, after their initial revulsion and complaining that this is not Star Wars or Star Trek, they will begin to like it here. Because this is really Star Wars and Star Trek, with the licensed IP removed, and the whole thing feels like a classic science fiction novel from the 1960s and '70s.

This is solid, playable, generic science fiction!

If you want one of the factions to walk around and act like the Galactic Empire, do it! Just don't play the music, and have their troopers be just as brutal and be better shots. If you want Starforce to be like the United Planetary Federation, just do it! The ships are a little different, more heavy metal, but that does not mean you can't riff on classic Trek.

Oh, and spoiler alert, when you are in battle, everyone will be in a spacesuit and strapped in tight, so take that, stupid TV shows and movies. Decompression is real, and having an armored spacesuit protects you against internal explosions and fragmentation. If you start the game in the middle of a starship battle, start all the players in spacesuits in a depressurized ship. Set the tone from the start.

Seriously, that is such a cool thing to imagine the bridge filled with a crew in armored spacesuits, armed in case they need to abandon ship, and the entire bridge depressurized to a vacuum to avoid explosive decompression. Escape pods will be close to all crew stations. Seats may also be armored to give an extra level of protection. There is a hard-science fiction element to this universe, but it remains at the highest levels of theoretical technology.

Space Opera is a mix of World War II naval battles, hardcore engineering, speculative science, and instant death at any moment. This is not hard science fiction, science fantasy, or any other genre we know. This is the OG version of science fiction found in Starship Troopers and Federation. Yes, you may be dealing with a hyper-intelligent species of alien pod-creatures on some undiscovered world. Still, you are backed up with a battlecruiser armed with one-meter megabolt battleship guns in a triple turret, sitting in orbit. If these aliens give your away team heat, an option always exists to pull out and start orbital bombardment.

Space Opera is Battleship Gray Science Fiction (BGSF).

This genre stands on its own, smelling like a fresh coat of paint and the metallic tinge of air recyclers. The genre is pure STEM, with a heavy metal injection of military power. Science is essential when the captain wonders what they are dealing with, and engineering builds the solution. Navigation and math-plot courses are getting the ship to its destination before a vessel faster than the one the players are in, just because the navigator knows how to use gravity wells to fling the cruiser quicker and on a better course, without wasting time or acceleration.

Right now, they are wondering how we got here before them, despite their faster ship. Communications officer, open a hailing frequency. Navigator, you may raise your middle digit on my command.

This genre is strong enough to carry the entire game, just as good as Star Wars, Star Trek, or Licensed IP. Seriously, I ran BGSF for decades in the Star Frontiers Universe using the Space Opera game, and it was a great time. We ran generals and admirals who planned planetary invasions and got involved in conflicts and adventures. The genre stands on its own without corporate IP. Just look at Helldivers. Star Wars and Star Trek like to pretend they are in the same genre, but they are not, and they have gone too soft, into science fantasy.

Parts of this universe are wonderfully backwards and silly. Other parts of this universe will remind you that you are dealing with anti-matter-powered systems, and things can go horribly wrong. You will laugh, but never cry, since by that time your atoms will be scattered all across deep space.

The ship design and combat system work as-is if you convert GURPS skills to Space Opera (GURPS Skill Level - 10, max 10; so an 18-minus in GURPS is a skill level of 8 in SPO). So there is zero work needed to design starships and have combats with GURPS characters inside them, using converted skill levels. You do not need to mess with GURPS ship combat and design; the system in Space Opera is a bit of WW2 wargamy goodness, but it is functional and works well.

And we have starships! Seriously, there are some amazing ship designs in here, and it is worth learning the starship combat system to see these heavy-metal behemoths slug it out with massive nova-gun battery fire and the follies of dozens of nuclear torpedoes. If the players sit in their starship and whine that they don't care about the universe, have the Space Soviets of the Galactic People's Republic show up in a fleet cruiser and obliterate them all. You will learn to care, comrade!

Those Soviets never really do go away, do they? All of a sudden, we are stuck with the Cold War forever. Yes, this is silly, but hey, we are talking 1970s science fiction here, with spandex jumpsuits and early 80s hair. There are hives of billions of bug aliens here, too, and there are times the only way to stop them is to blow up the planet. Sorry, we need to blow up a world to save the rest of them. Next time, please check the cargo pods with customs before they infest the world.

The players will be back next time to this insane place, a little wiser and wanting to explore more. Play it serious, torture them with the crazy things, turn the factions up to eleven, and make the universe come alive.

I would keep this universe hard, brutal, and deadly. Don't let people laugh it off or take it unseriously. Have the GPR or Blarads show up, beat the entire party up, leave them for dead on a planet with no gear, and laugh as they fly away in their shuttlecraft. The evil factions here are not to be messed with, and they will enjoy taking out their punishment on anyone who crosses their path.

Otherwise, what? I am bored and playing Traveller. Not to slight that game and its universe, but we have had many times where the universe felt too cosmopolitan, safe, and advanced, and it all fell flat for us. While there were small fights here and there, wars did not reach across subsectors. Where Traveller can feel too much like 2025, Space Opera is firmly set in a universe that resembles the Cold War, with a couple of Vietnam Wars going on around the galaxy. Starfleets can and do get into scraps here, especially in border space.

These space armies still use flame weapons, disruptors, gauss weapons, and tactical nukes. Go figure. Star Wars is soft romance fantasy compared to this. Ewok, meet flamethrower. If that fails, we gas the whole forest with chemical weapons and send the warbots in, firing cannister rounds out of gauss cannons.

I wish all of you were back in the 1980s playing Space Opera with us. Very few know the unhinged side of this universe and how slap-in-the-face brutal it can be. It makes Warhammer 40K look like My Little Pony.

Oh, and one of the ship damage results is the solid waste sewage system backing up into hydroponics again. Or a box of bandages in the med-bay malfunctioning and losing their stickiness when the ship is hit by enemy fire. Or all the interior sliding doors need to be cranked open manually. Or the ship's humidifiers breaking and turning the vessel into a sauna, increasing the breakdown rate of every piece of electronics on board. Fire detection systems can go out, and you will never know that the lower decks are currently engulfed in a hellish inferno until smoke starts blowing from the vents and killing people in those compartments. If the anti-matter converter fails with a high enough shutdown level, there is a flat 25% chance the ship turns into a small sun. 

Some of these ship breakdown effects are hilarious in a way only the classic Paranoia game can inflict on players, and your players will be begging the engineer for relief. Or survival. Or it may be too late by then. And no other classic science fiction game makes ship breakdowns this deadly, so you will take maintenance and repair seriously.

Here is a secret. All the ships resemble World War 2 vessels; they explode in gigantic atomic explosions, mount weapons far too powerful for anyone's own good, and hate everyone inside them. Even the smallest starfighters pack a punch that can do severe damage to a city skyline.

Seriously, though, these ships feel like real starships, not just fake CGI or oversimplified parts of the game the designers don't want to think too hard about. Every one of these ship breakdowns needs attention, and continuing to fly with them is a considerable risk that ups the ante and heightens the tension. They can also ground the ship until they are repaired.

And the computers are wonderfully a 1970s vision of computing, with a TL 7 mini-computer (hand computer) having 1 DPU of CPU and 2 DPU of storage, with a DPU being about a megabyte of storage. When you scale up from computers to mainframes, the TL 6-7 multi-computer weighs 500kg and has 100 MB of memory and 500 MB of storage. These are so primitive that they are endearing in a way.

This is not really a society that has the Internet, and computers are more utilitarian and functional. Computers do not control society here; you walk up with a clear plastic "holo card" and put it into a wall slot, and a holographic movie plays.

You can actually talk to the higher-level computers with sentience! Otherwise, the conversation goes like this: "Computer, how many moons orbit Alpha Ceti Five?" And the mainframe answers you like someone talking out of a can, repeating the question with the answer, "The answer is, seven moons orbit Alpha Ceti Five." Think of any computer out of Star Trek: The Original Series or 1970s science-fiction movies, and you have what it is like in Space Opera. As a referee, drive your players up the wall with canned, vague, and too literal answers from these computers.

And you have to pay double and allocate 5 MB of memory (instead of 3) for a galley program to get served chicken cordon bleu. Seriously, the computers in this game are as bad as the starships, and they secretly all hate you, too.

Modern game designers assume that every piece of computer technology has to be "just like today," and they put themselves in a box. I still miss the original Shadowrun universe, where nothing was wireless, and you had to physically "jack in" to access points in dangerous locations. Wi-fi and VPNs ruined the entire setting.

If you port in the classic weapons, you can use GURPS Ultra Tech for the base stats. Still, there are some good parts to take into consideration with the classic Space Opera weapons, like the fact that almost all the energy weapons are capable of fully automatic fire. Even the blaster pistol. So Han Solo will be sitting across from Greedo, and instead of just shooting him one, he will be drilling a burst of ten blaster shots into the poor green latex sap. Tell Jabba to suck on my blaster Mauser with a switch. It is insane, unhinged, but incredible. Make sure to carry around a personal force screen.

Otherwise, stick with GURPS personal weapons and gear if you want to keep your life simple.

Plots? Steal them from other science fiction. If you have a Starforce ship, make a remote outpost lose contact, and send them to investigate. Since we have no transporters, we need to take a shuttle down with a contingent of marines, and then we get to do science in the abandoned outpost. Make the sentient computer get paranoid, and you need your social scientist to talk the computer out of it to find out the truth. Have the Space Marines go on foot to investigate a series of strange signals around the outpost. Let the engineer discover a secret sublevel beneath the outpost, full of labs conducting strange experiments. Let one of the PCs have a possible psionic awakening and hear voices telling them to run.

Come on.

Science fiction is not hard. It is full of secrets and mysteries, and nothing is as it seems.

Also, we are rocking the new Wacom MovinkPad 11 today for my doodle art. If you are into drawing and sketching, this pad is excellent. I did not go all out and get the most expensive one; I just got the smaller one, since all I wanted was a quick tablet to practice on with a Wacom-quality matte screen and a paper-like feel. Just something to practice a little each day, and knock out silly, fun doodle art is all I wanted. If you are looking to get into art, this is the ideal pick-up-and-draw Android practice device that lets you get some pen time in, save your work, and tear off a new sheet of digital paper for another silly idea.

Highly recommended and a great Christmas gift for a budding artist. Don't use AI! Have the satisfaction of drawing it yourself! Practice each day! Learn fundamental skills and grow as a person. Years down the line, you will thank me, and no one else will be able to draw a straight line without using ChatGPT.

But GURPS: Space Opera is a fun universe with a complete set of star sector maps, starships, fun gear, and compatible space combat systems that work efficiently with GURPS. Most of the books are "stuff to play with" either in organizations, equipment, weapons, starships, star maps, or other information. Outside of Traveller, this is one of the most complete science fiction universes in gaming we have, and one that has been forgotten.