My Perfect Sci-Fi Game FOUND!

I love the Star*Drive setting. I blogged about it last April indicating I was on the fence between GURPS, Savage Worlds, or just sticking with the original Alternity. Each offer its own benefit, but I pretty much ruled out GURPS by virtue of me getting rid of the core books.

So that left Savage Worlds vs. Alternity. Alternity was the system originally used with Star*Drive and would require the least amount of conversion, but it was also not supported any more. Savage Worlds is one of my favorite core systems but it wasn't crunchy enough - good space pulp, like Star Wars, bad for more realistic sci-fi. So I've tinkered with vehicle rules in Savage Worlds with the original intention of using them in a Star*Drive campaign.

I don't regret doing this, and I hope the vehicle rules and associated Tech Backgrounds see the light of day in some future product (such as Agents of Oblivion) but it still didn't satiate that thirst I had.

I was aware of the Traveller game in the sense that I had heard the name, and during my GURPS kick I looked seriously at the GURPS Traveller: Interstellar War for a good sci-fi game. I poked around and picked up Marc Miller's Traveller, which was the third edition of the game, at Half Price Books but didn't really look at it. It has sat on my shelf for a few months at least.

In early 2009 Mongoose Publishing released an updated Traveller ruleset. Again, I was aware it was out but never gave it a look. Well, I picked up the main book over the weekend and I've got to say - this is what I was looking for.

It's got everything I would need for a sci-fi game set in the Star*Drive universe. Excellent character background generation rules? Check. Crunchy starship construction system? Check. Random planet generator? Double check. Rules for trading and guidelines for goods and services related to the planet's statistics? Oh yeah, you know that one's checked.

I'm digging into the ruleset more to get a handle on things and I've already ordered off Amazon a number of the sourcebooks (Mongoose is nothing if not prolific) so expect more details soon. Really this time. Really.

Star*Drive On the Horizon ... Again!

So I've been wrestling with what system to convert the Star*Drive campaign to. I like the setting a whole bunch, and I've been on the fence on whether to move to GURPS or Savage Worlds. GURPS is a much more complex game with rules and math to handle every situation, while Savage Worlds is light and easy to run and understand. You sacrifice the technical aspects of a sci-fi game with Savage Worlds, but you sacrifice ease of play with GURPS.

This has plagued me for going on two years? A long time. And I was working on it again last night when I came to a startling revelation.

I think I'll just keep Alternity. I'll need to tweak the system to remove levels but ... maybe I'll just use that. More thoughts required, but it certainly would be easier.

Star*Drive on the Horizon ...

So I've been watching Babylon 5 lately, which is a really wonderful show that I think I've mentioned to everyone. But watching it has started my old noodle going and I've gearing up towards the Star*Drive campaign. One of the things I'm going to incorporate into the campaign is the interactive universe mapping software called AstroSynthesis, which will give you a map of the universe to do whatever the heck you want to do in.

More so than any other campaign I've run this will be player-motivated. I have events I'm going to incorporate, but the thrust of the campaign will be driven by the players not by flavor text or scripted occurrences. Because of this I'll need more detailed backgrounds for characters with NPCs that I can mine to make things more involved.

The other thing is that the campaign is moving to the Savage Worlds rules rather than the clumsy Alternity rules. Savage Worlds is fast, furious, and fun, and very easy to pick up and use for everyone. The system is light on details and heavy on story, and the presented rules are very simple for starship construction and modification. I'm working on a hybridization of the detailed Alternity starship rules and the overly-simplified Savage Worlds starship rules. I think that will give the players access to the toys they want and the customization options while still making my job easy.

Star*Drive is coming. It won't be long. Soon we're going to need a session to remake characters (I hope everyone keeps their characters). Reminder of who they are:

* Luke - Axel Hargreaves, grizzled old starship captain of the Iron Fox
* Harris - Philander Shirow, smooth arms merchant and smuggler
* Griff - Jack Krueger, human former space marine
* Aaron - Sheshak, t'sa engineer and parts expert
* Lee - Ereshkigal, sesheyan assassin and freedom fighter

Those are the players who made characters for Star*Drive originally. There were also two extra characters (Katrina Apollo, human thief played by Jesse and Gar "Sawbones" Torgin, weren surgeon and field medic played by Travis). If Jesse and Travis are interested in playing they can create their own characters or use these pre-gens.

Soon. Not long now.

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.