Reading FrontierSpace Part 2: Character Creation & Advancement (&Equipment)

What better way to review character creation than to create a character?

There's 6 character creation steps (that include equipping your character) - a FS character starts in pretty broad strokes. In game-mechanical terms s*he is defined bei 6 Abilities, 3 Skills, Species, a Moral Code an 6-8 pieces of equipment. There's a little more differentiation involved in selecting how your species impacts your stats.

I start with rolling up my six Abilities (the core characteristics), taking them in order as they come - RAW, you are allowed to allocate them or use a standard array, but since I have no idea where I'm going, I'll start out as random as possible. Abilitier are rolled with 2D10, using a table that will mostly generate results between 45 and 65, with the minimum and maximum values being 35 and 70.

Reading FrontierSpace Part 1

FrontierSpace is very loosely inspired by TSRs old space opera RPG StarFrontiers, which I actually played back in the day - though just a little. From the looks of it, it assumes the classical setup of a starship crew for hire, though the PCs probably won't start with a starship. True to its title, FrontierSpace also assumes that you'll operate in regions of space where the rule of law can mean the rule of the bigger blaster. It would probably serve well to emulate stuff like Firefly or Farscape. While the same can be said about Traveller, M-Space or Stars Without Number, FrontierSpace does its thing really, really well, and in terms of its rules, it might be my favourite science fiction RPG yet. It has pretty light and consistent core rules, and most of the page count of the two core books (which clock in at more than 400 pages together) is made up of sub-systems that can be slotted in and of encyclopedic stuff like equipment lists. I'm pretty sure that at the table, this is al lighter game than, say, Mongoose Traveller.

However, I haven't played FS yet, so this is just a thorough read-through of the core books. This first part is just about the first chapter of the Player's Handbook, which packs a lot of punch.