I used to have a reoccurring dream. Well, it was more of a reoccuring theme. I would be in a comic book shop, or a book store, or a flea market in an ancient submarine, or in the Transylvanian basement of a fetid castle - and I'd be looking through boxes. These were big long white boxes filled with every role playing game imaginable. I would dig through them, looking for that one science fiction role playing game that had everything I wanted - good combat mechanics, good skill systems, good starship rules, and good universe generation systems.
I'd inevitably find some rpg system that had an awesome cover and everytihng I wanted inside - and I'd rush to the zombie check out girl or the auto-purchase-bot with a big smile on my face. Then I'd wake up and start cussing - realizing that it was just a dream.
I've had that dream a LOT. It's representative of my search for a perfect rpg in my younger years - especially a perfect science fiction game. I've played quite a few - Star Frontiers, various forms of Traveller (black book, mega, 2300,) Space Master, GURPS Space, Star Wars - and read even more.
Okay, I'm not going to say that Stars Without Number is perfect, but damn, it's good. It seems to fulfil the promise that Traveller made back so many years ago, but never quite delivered.
Traveller had a fun - if nerve racking - character generation system where your character could die before gameplay started. It was great for generating back-story - but the actual mechanics were - MEH. Stars Without Number takes good old fashioned D&D mechanics, simplifies them, and tweaks them with a light skill system.
There are just threee classes, Warrior, Psychic, and Expert - but the Expert - like LotFP's Expert class, is highly customizable with skills, allowing you to create anything from a doctor or spaceship mechanic, to a bounty hunter.
The game tosses out the good old hit charts and follows a simple formula. Twenty always hits, one always misses, and you determine that with a d20 + your Combat Skill + Att Mod + Att Bonus + defender's AC. Poof. Beautiful. I really wish the d20 developer dudes would have thought of this, rather than having to flip AC on it's head.
And you know when your first level psychic has d4 HP and a sniper rifle does 2d8 - only good things can happen. :)
Where Stars Without Number really shines though, for me, is in it's universe creation. Just like in Traveller, you sit down and randomly roll up a sector full of stars. In my youth, I loved this, and as other sci-fi RPGs were produced, they had similar creation rules, but they got more specific on the physical characteristics of various solar systems.
I loved the complexity and exactness of some of those systems. Charting out how many AUs distant each planet was from it's star, calculating the specific density of a planet, determining albedo, etc - all these were great fun - for me - an amateur astrophysicist.
It never really translated into fun during a game. Even if the players knew what the term 'albedo' meant, they wouldn't have cared to know that planet X925g-U had a rating of 57%.
Stars Without Number tosses most of the physical nuts and bolts and replaces them with - um - for lack of better words - a SCI-FI-TROPE-A-TRON-3000.
The default setting of the game is that humanity expanded rapidly into the galaxy, achieving amazing technology, then something happened to crash civilization and crash it HARD for a while. Now humanity is rebuilding and worlds are reconnecting with one another. You know, that old chestnut.
Rolling up a world, you might get something like this:
Atmosphere: Breathable mix
Temperature: Warm (could result in a desert or swampy type place)
Biosphere: Immiscible (i.e., you can't eat the natives)
Population: Hundreds of Thousands of Inhabitants
Tech Level: 4 - Baseline
Worlds Tags: Police State, Hostile Biosphere
Culture Base: Russian
Looking at the results, and the pointers in the book, a hundred idea pop in my head. The first to come into mind is a place like Harry Harrison's Deathworld - a planet full of jungle animals and plants ready to eat anyone in a second. But it could just as easily be a world reminiscent of earth in Stephen King's The Mist or frankly, Frank Herbert's Dune.
The creation process wonderfully tosses a bunch of tropes together and lets that pot full of 'kitchen sink' soup cook in your mind for a while until something awesome pops out. Who gives a flip about the gravity of a world - unless that gravity is different enough to mean something and be a good plot device.
Star Without Numbers also allows for the same type of randomized trope construction of cultures, aliens, npcs, religions, political parties, and corporations. Each of these systems is geared towards creating conflict and issues that will provide ample adventure opportunities for the pcs, wherever they go and whatever they do. It's a wonderful sandbox creation system, and very fun to work with.
I mean, I would have never thought to make up a low-tech world where the entire society had to hunt down alien whale-like creatures to survive, in some sort of Moby-Dick-gone-viral planet, but with a roll of some dice, my mind began churning along and I was there.
Sine Nomine published the original version as a free pdf, and I bought a physical copy of it. Enjoying that, I grabbed Skyward Steel, which is a sourcebook for space navies. I liked that so much, I went and got the updated version of Star Without Numbers from Mongoose - and it was worth it - rules for AI's and mech, and an entire world culture generation system.
I'm really impressed with what Kevin Crawford has been doing with this game. I haven't been this inspired to run a science fiction game in quite a while.
So if you haven't yet, go grab Star Without Numbers. It's free, and even if you don't intend to play it, it's chock full of good adventuring ideas that should impress even jaded players.
- Ark
Showing posts sorted by date for query stars without number. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query stars without number. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
The Metallic Mouse That Doesn't Rust
I just devoured The Stainless Steel Rat. I forgot how much I enjoyed my first reading of it, circa 1982, or how much the Stainless Steel Rat series influenced my playing of both Star Frontiers and Top Secret.
The books follow the adventures of 'Slippery Jim' DeGriz, one of the biggest thieves and con-men around. It's over 32 thousand years in the future, and most of humanity has grown up and solved problems like war, plague, famine, and crime. This has left the universe a very boring place, and for hyper-intelligent people like DeGriz, such boredom is simply unacceptable - so he stirs the pot and sows as much chaos around as possible.
He's not a 'bad' guy. Slippery Jim doesn't like hurting people - and killing people outside of self-defense is definitely not on his list of things to do. But as long as he's sure the insurance will cover it, he'll steal anything - and the more complicated, the better. His sheer outrageousness and intelligence puts him at the top of the most wanted lists, and makes him the target of the galaxy's super police, the Special Corps. who eventually employ him to catch other ne'er-do-wells, stop war-mongering planets from mongering, and fix time itself.
The Stainless Steel Rat books became a template of how I constructed just about every Top Secret and Star Frontiers campaign I even ran. 'Slippery Jim' is essentially a PC - straight out of a game - a smart ass there to amuse himself and put on a spectacle for others. The stories are essentially sandboxes with some loose 'mission' that ties everything together, but the Rat is free to wander entire planets to complete his objective - usually in whatever timeframe he feels like. One minute he's pretending to be a janitor herding robots with a whip, the next he's a billionaire on a golden space yacht.
The players fell into the pace quite easily. A grumpy 'administrator' gives the team an assignment. They get dumped off undercover far away somewhere and start snooping around. They discover the 'bad thing' is being done by some rich guy. They need funds, so they knock over a bank. They then go pretend to be millionaires (well, at that moment they 'are' millionaires) A chase ensues. The bad guy gets away. They chase him to another planet. Then they discover that the rich guy controls the mafia on that planet, so they have to join and work their way up the ranks until they have access to the guy. Etc. Great fun, and lots of role playing,combat, scheming, lying, and stealing to be had.
The formula worked for both Top Secret and Star Frontiers. On the surface it may seem very James Bond-ish, but there is a certain air about The Stainless Steel Rat. It's . . . well . .. it's chaos. Much like the Honey Badger, 'Slippery Jim' DiGriz don't give a shit. He does what he does for fun - not for duty, honor, or what is best for society. That's really what makes it. There is nothing to 'convice' the PCs to do. They are given a job, and they figure out the most fun way to accomplish it - preferentially with lots of explosions and loose cash.
And, strangely, the books allow for a great way that relative npcs can be useful and fun. See the novels for details. :)
I'm already chewing through the second book in the series - The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge - grinning away. I've also got Retief of the CDT next to me as well - speaking of great books to turn into adventures. It's giving me a big itch to run some Ratty Sci-Fi games, big time. And over on the table is Stars Without Number. Geez. Gamer ADD, take me away!
- Ark
The books follow the adventures of 'Slippery Jim' DeGriz, one of the biggest thieves and con-men around. It's over 32 thousand years in the future, and most of humanity has grown up and solved problems like war, plague, famine, and crime. This has left the universe a very boring place, and for hyper-intelligent people like DeGriz, such boredom is simply unacceptable - so he stirs the pot and sows as much chaos around as possible.
He's not a 'bad' guy. Slippery Jim doesn't like hurting people - and killing people outside of self-defense is definitely not on his list of things to do. But as long as he's sure the insurance will cover it, he'll steal anything - and the more complicated, the better. His sheer outrageousness and intelligence puts him at the top of the most wanted lists, and makes him the target of the galaxy's super police, the Special Corps. who eventually employ him to catch other ne'er-do-wells, stop war-mongering planets from mongering, and fix time itself.
The Stainless Steel Rat books became a template of how I constructed just about every Top Secret and Star Frontiers campaign I even ran. 'Slippery Jim' is essentially a PC - straight out of a game - a smart ass there to amuse himself and put on a spectacle for others. The stories are essentially sandboxes with some loose 'mission' that ties everything together, but the Rat is free to wander entire planets to complete his objective - usually in whatever timeframe he feels like. One minute he's pretending to be a janitor herding robots with a whip, the next he's a billionaire on a golden space yacht.
The players fell into the pace quite easily. A grumpy 'administrator' gives the team an assignment. They get dumped off undercover far away somewhere and start snooping around. They discover the 'bad thing' is being done by some rich guy. They need funds, so they knock over a bank. They then go pretend to be millionaires (well, at that moment they 'are' millionaires) A chase ensues. The bad guy gets away. They chase him to another planet. Then they discover that the rich guy controls the mafia on that planet, so they have to join and work their way up the ranks until they have access to the guy. Etc. Great fun, and lots of role playing,combat, scheming, lying, and stealing to be had.
The formula worked for both Top Secret and Star Frontiers. On the surface it may seem very James Bond-ish, but there is a certain air about The Stainless Steel Rat. It's . . . well . .. it's chaos. Much like the Honey Badger, 'Slippery Jim' DiGriz don't give a shit. He does what he does for fun - not for duty, honor, or what is best for society. That's really what makes it. There is nothing to 'convice' the PCs to do. They are given a job, and they figure out the most fun way to accomplish it - preferentially with lots of explosions and loose cash.
And, strangely, the books allow for a great way that relative npcs can be useful and fun. See the novels for details. :)
I'm already chewing through the second book in the series - The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge - grinning away. I've also got Retief of the CDT next to me as well - speaking of great books to turn into adventures. It's giving me a big itch to run some Ratty Sci-Fi games, big time. And over on the table is Stars Without Number. Geez. Gamer ADD, take me away!
- Ark
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