Thursday, January 21, 2010

You would prefer another target? A military target? Then name the SYSTEM!

If only I could! The problem is there's more Sci-Fi RPGs out there than you can shake a stick at. To be honest, I'm in a similar situation as Doug over at Athanor. But I figure, this is as good as any exercise to develop some ideas and we'll see where it goes from there.

Anyway, on to the good stuff! I've recently invested in an old box set of Star Frontiers I purchased from ebay. I'd previously downloaded all the PDFs available at StarFrontiersman.com, a sort of super fan site that has "remastered" all of the old material into nice, clean PDFs. The Frontiersman also offers its own magazine supplement (also in PDF format) which provides loads of gaming material. But I'm not sure SF is THE system yet. Currently I'm also looking at Star Blazers, X-plorers (on it's way from LuLu), and James Maliszewski's Thousand Suns. All would provide the proper amount of "pulpy" sci-fi I'm looking for.

Back in High School I played the original Star Wars RPG by West End Games. I really loved that system and there's no reason to think I couldn't strip out the Star Wars branded stuff and start from scratch. (I love SW, but I'm not interested in playing a straight SW-themed game right now).

And I haven't even hacked into Gamma World, or it's OSR equivellant, Mutant Future for that matter!  At this point I'm overwhelmed, but I think I'll settle on something soon. At the moment I've opted to stay away from GURPS and I've not looked at Traveller (for the moment). From what I've read Thousand Suns is sort of Traveller stripped down, so perhaps that's a better alternative anyway. That's not to say I won't borrow source material. There's just lots to choose from, including several I've not even mentioned.

So where does that leave us? Which system? Well, let's say that it's in research and development at this stage....

Oh, and suggestions, insights, and criticism are welcome (as always)!

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