Star*Drive - Thoughts Backwards and Forwards

I love science fiction settings. And when I say science fiction settings, I mean far-future sci-fi - spaceships, lasers, new planets, different aliens, the whole shebang. For a very long time I've been itching to run a good sci-fi RPG but have come up short on the settings. About five years ago it hit me. Why not use the Star*Drive setting from Alternity? The Alternity rules seemed okay enough (we had been using them for the occasional game of Dark*Matter) and the setting was exactly what I wanted. The release of Firefly on DVD certainly added to my enthusiasm, and the Star*Drive setting seemed to fit the Firefly mentality very well.

Well, I dug around and dug around, finally finding the various sourcebooks for the defunct game setting (all of which were excellently written). The main core book was massive - it is still one of the setting books I own that contains the least amount of hard and fast game data. So many details, describing our universe in 500 years. It fit everything I wanted in a sci-fi setting, and the two online-only releases (Starships and The Externals) cemented my position in needing to run this setting.

I got my group together and we made characters. I decided to start the campaign with a free release used mainly at conventions where the PCs would start out as prisoners at a penal colony. I used to help each player develop a reason for being in prison. Some of them were actual criminals, some of them not. It took two sessions to complete that first adventure, but in it they got a ship and eventually headed out for the wild, untamed wilderness of the Verge.

We played one more scenario, kind of just a filler scenario to give them a taste of what was to come. And then ... nothing. I think I got cold feet, floundering in a vast setting with no idea what the heck I wanted to do. Eventually, I settled on the idea of having this Star*Drive campaign be more open ended than anything else I've ever done - I would give the players a map of the universe and they would let me know what they wanted to do. A great idea, but one that I felt required a lot of preparation on my part. I LOVE maps, and I wanted to be able to hand the players a star chart of the system they were entering. Over the years I've been slowly working on a repertoire of detailed star charts, and so far I've got about ... seven. Not a lot.

Also over the years I've decided I didn't like the way Alternity played out. There were plenty of other game options out there and I wanted something that was flexible, powerful, evocative, and easy to pick up. With some trepidation I settled on the GURPS system. So many people play GURPS that it must be kind of simple, right? I mean, they just released a new version.

And GURPS fulfilled my needs, probably too well. The system is too complicated, I fear, and too overwhelming in its options. I like simple but effective, and GURPS was effective but complicated. I'm prone to fantastic purchasing whims if the mood strikes me, and I've purchased the main corebooks for GURPs and more than a few additional titles to aid me in my Star*Drive campaign. But it all served to illustrate just how thorough and complicated the system really was.

So, I've all but abandoned the GURPS rules for any game. The setting books are well-researched, so I still pick them up from time to time when I catch one that seems appropriate, but the rules are just too much. Then, in my wanderings, I came across Savage Worlds by Pinnacle Entertainment/Great White Games. I had played a single game of SW at Con of the North a few years ago and didn't find the system to really grab me. But, willing to give anything a good look at, I downloaded the Test Drive Rules and a sample adventure to see how things were.

And was completely blown away by the rules. They were simple and elegant, and perfectly captured a quick style that lends itself to fast play. I decided right there to use SW for my upcoming pulp game (more on that in a later post) but the idea kept coming into my head to use Savage Worlds for Star*Drive. I don't like having to rely on too many details to have fun, and the information presented in the Star*Drive corebook was generic enough to fit anything.

So here I am, contemplating switching Star*Drive over to a new game system YET AGAIN. Most of my players I think are more interested in playing than in debating the merits of one rule system over another, but I want a rules set that will work for me before I jump into a new campaign setting. Luckily, only one of my players has switched their character over to GURPS, so for everyone else it is only one jump instead of two. But I'm not convinced yet.