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.

What's Up?

I haven't blogged for a while - so here's what I'm up to and what you can expect in the next few weeks from me:

First, I'm reading Sword of Cepheus (Sword&Sorcery based on the Traveller-inspired old school Cepheus Engine) and FrontierSpace, and I'm hoping to give both a spin soon, so reviews are coming up.

Second, I have a lot more Troika! backgrounds in store, but I'm also working on two scenarios to tie in with them, so I'm holding some of those back to see how exactly the scenarios shape up.

Third, I'm eagerly awaiting the "Zero Edition" of Newt Newports new d100 game Skyraiders of the Floating Realms. Don't know exactly what I'm going to do with it, but a lighter, more streamlined version of Newt's OpenQuest sounds very enticing to me!

My Deceptive Memories of Star Frontiers

Back in my school days, when we were playing pretty much every rpg game we could get our hands on - one of them being TSRs Star Frontiers. My memories of this rpg are vivid: I remember the illustration of the amorphous Dralasite with its eyes that looked like textbook renditions of cancer cells (I immediately called dibs on that one); I remember the characters on the cover, expecially that kind-of-cool, but also kind of revulsive ape-bat creature that turned out to be a Yazirian (my best friend called dibs on that one, which figured, since his favourite childhood plush toy had been a little smiling monkey in a striped tee); I remember the big city map with its ugly, squarish design, that, I think, was supposed to show a spaceport city; and I remember that, when you held the boxes lid against the light, that it was actually from a D&D red box and they had only pasted the Star Frontiers cover on it! (What had happened there? Had they produced too many D&D boxes and saw no choice but to publish another rpg to make use of them? I guess that's not how it went, but it would make a good anecdote. Also, I'm writing about the German edition of Star Frontiers here, which was called Sternengarde, so don't be surprised if you find nothing of that kind when you hold up the lid of your original Star Frontiers box).
Anyway, my memories are so vivid and create such a deep sense of familiarity, I naturally assumed that we must have played the hell out of Star Frontiers and loved it. (I even claimed just that recently on social media).
However, thinking about it a little harder, I actually can't remember playing it.