For some SciFi RPG fans, space-operas are made for exploring planets, blasting the heads off aliens, and rescuing the space princess. Other fans run tactical campaigns as mercenaries and space marines, using battling armies and armadas as the backdrop for their heroes’ saga. But for some fans, turning a profit by trading goods across the galaxy and out-smarting a dangerous trade cartel over a colonial deal worth mega-credits is just as thrilling as shooting a plasma cannon into any four-armed alien monstrosity.
The hugely popular and long-running EVE Online MMORPG has more than adequately demonstrated that space-opera fans can find a greatly satisfying gaming experience in building up mega-corporations and destroying your enemies’ profit margin. Although the MMO has elements of clashing armadas and aliens, its central core still revolves around making a profit by trading among the stars.
Not too long ago, Sine Nomine Publishing released a supplement for their table-top space opera OSR RPG, Stars Without Number. This new release, Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns, offers Gamemasters and Players the opportunity to run a campaign where traveling the stars, trading goods for hard profits, and even founding whole colonies in a post-apocalyptic space-opera setting!
Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns for Stars Without Number
Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns is a supplement product for the Stars Without Number RPG from Sine Nomine Publishing. The book contains information about creating and running a campaign in which player-characters operate as free traders in a space-faring setting. Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns contains not only an overview of how a campaign would be structured, but also has tables for handling a variety of merchant activities, cargos, rival traders, and more.
Product Quality
The product quality of Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns is quite good, with excellent writing and a decent layout. The content of the supplement is presented in a logical fashion, and tables and important text appear in boxes for emphasis. There a bit of a “wall of text” feel to the page layouts, however, whenever there are no illustrations, tables, or boxed text there to give it some relief.
The Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns supplement ends up being really well organized. The book has both a table of contents and an index, as well as a set of PDF bookmarks for easy navigation. There are a lot of random tables in this book, and most of them can be hit with a click from the bookmarks, which is a very handy feature.
The artwork in Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns consists of some cool heavy-ink style black-and-white drawings of space ships, characters, settlements, and more. They are quite evocative of the drawings in some of the earlier Traveller RPG “black books”, which is great for giving the game that Old School feel. Regretfully, there are very few drawings and illustrations within Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns, and this certainly contributed to some of the “wall of text” on many pages.
Starships and Profit Margins
Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns is designed for use with the Stars Without Number, an OSR RPG. Stars Without Number uses an AD&D-like rules system with a Traveller-like setting and content. The combination works fairly well together, so it’s rather like playing two old systems in one role-playing game. A free copy of the Stars Without Number RPG is now available for download from RPGNow.
Stars Without Number is a space-opera futuristic setting in which the people of Earth expanded outward among the stars, but a catastrophic event isolated the Earth and its colonies from reaching each other. Set 600 years after the catastrophe and collapse of interstellar civilization (The Fall), players create characters that travel through space, and are involved in the re-integration of humanity into a colonial empire, as well as deal with a few alien species along the way. The Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns supplement expands the sparse rules on interstellar trading found in Stars Without Number, and opens up new campaign possibilities, wherein the player-characters ply the space trade-lanes as far traders.
The Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns supplement is divided into seven sections, followed by a section with GM Resources. There are random tables scattered throughout the book, designed for handling the wide variety of mercantile/space-opera situations in which the PCs might involve themselves. Thankfully, most of these tables are accessible from the bookmarks in the PDF version of the product.
The introduction section, The Jewels of Foreign Suns, discusses the role of far traders in the history of the setting. Their function both before and after The Fall are discussed, offering a good deal of “fluff” material to base a campaign on.
Slaves to the Credit describes what life is like for far traders, and some of the pitfalls that might arise in that particular line of work. The author also discusses an overview of the economics of far trading, and even includes a table for how the local currency is backed by a commodity of some kind. This section ends with a brief about the considerations for setting up and running a merchant campaign, reviewing the necessities for getting the game rolling.
The author covers the basics of far trading in An Honest Day’s Work. This section is full of charts for finding goods, bargaining, and paying the upkeep on a trading ship. An expansive list of trading goods, their cost, value, and weight is given here, along with a random table for determining the usefulness of a new trade good. The author goes on further to add trade tables for various world types such as Agricultural, Cosmopolitan, and Tyrannical. Each world has its own goods table, and a table for random Troubles that might interfere with trade on that world.
In Treasures in the Sky, the author creates additional “trade tags” to add to existing “world tags” found in the core rulebook of Stars Without Number. In Stars Without Number, tags operate as “brief conceptual tropes that set the world off from planets of otherwise similar population and characteristics.” These trade tags do much the same as world tags, except for being focused on trade issues. There are more than twenty tags listed in this section, each with several tropes for categories such as Authorities, Antagonists, and Things one might find on a world. As help for GMs, there’s also a dozen different worlds already created using the tags scattered throughout this section for easy use.
For GMs, the section entitled An Offer You Can’t Refuse goes into some greater details on creating trade adventures and for running a mercantile campaign long-term. Again, the author has gone to considerable effort to create random tables to assist GMs, including adventure type and plot tables for dozens of adventures, details on NPCs, and on conflicts that can affect a trade scenario. There are also tips on handling the ever growing wealth and influence characters will have as they become more experienced at trading.
In the Lords of the New Suns, the author describes how to design colony worlds upon which the PC far traders can ply their mercantile skills – specifically as the founders and sole means of trade to and from the colony! There are tables for creating failed colonies, as well as instructions for designing growing ones, with details on facets of the colony such as population, morale, supplies, and banking. Of course, colonies always run into trouble which will test the patience of a colonial merchant governor, and the author included an expansive list of possibilities from disasters caused by an insane colonist to saboteurs from a rival stealing supplies and goods.
The section entitled Tools of the Traders offers a wide range of gadgets, gear, and starship fittings which can be used by player-characters in a Stars Without Number mercantile campaign. These items range from grav containers to prefab colony bases to pocket nukes, and even include ship parts like a smuggler’s hold and a nuke launcher. This section also introduces an Exodus Ship – a behemoth cruiser which can transport 10,000 colonists to their new world.
The author provides more tables in the GM Resources section, allowing GMs to generate a quick reason for a planetary financial crisis, or generate a business contact and rival NPCs for the PC far traders. There is also a table of stats for enemies such as primitive humans, low-tech thugs, and alien monsters. This section ends with four area maps for use in a scenario, and a Planetary Trade Profile sheet for keeping track of all the factors that goes into trading among the stars.
Overall Score: 3.6 out of 5.0
Final Conclusions
Overall, Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns is a wonderful supplement for the Stars Without Number RPG, providing a number of useful resources for adding the element of trading to a space-opera setting. While the book is a little lacking in the layout, and its illustrations are few, the cornucopia of random tables for generating all sorts of useful content for a campaign really gives the supplement its OSR feel.
And even for fans of other SciFi RPGs, there is still some great content available in this supplement, as many facets of Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns are system-neutral. The author does a great job of creating a trade system which is quite detailed, and also scalable to make far trading a major or minor element in a storyline.
All in all, the price is pretty good for the amount of cool game content provided in Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns – you don’t have to break your galactic bank account coming up for the credits to make this supplement part of your gaming collection!
Reviewer’s Note: This Reviewer received a complimentary copy of the product from which the review was written.
Grade Card (Ratings 1 to 5)
The hugely popular and long-running EVE Online MMORPG has more than adequately demonstrated that space-opera fans can find a greatly satisfying gaming experience in building up mega-corporations and destroying your enemies’ profit margin. Although the MMO has elements of clashing armadas and aliens, its central core still revolves around making a profit by trading among the stars.Not too long ago, Sine Nomine Publishing released a supplement for their table-top space opera OSR RPG, Stars Without Number. This new release, Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns, offers Gamemasters and Players the opportunity to run a campaign where traveling the stars, trading goods for hard profits, and even founding whole colonies in a post-apocalyptic space-opera setting!
Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns for Stars Without Number
- Writing & Design: Kevin Crawford
- Illustrations: Pawel Dobosz, Bradley K McDevitt, Maciej Zagorski
- Publisher: Sine Nomine Publishing
- Year: 2013
- Media: PDF (85 pages)
- Price: $9.99 (Available at RPGNow.com)
Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns is a supplement product for the Stars Without Number RPG from Sine Nomine Publishing. The book contains information about creating and running a campaign in which player-characters operate as free traders in a space-faring setting. Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns contains not only an overview of how a campaign would be structured, but also has tables for handling a variety of merchant activities, cargos, rival traders, and more.
Product Quality
The product quality of Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns is quite good, with excellent writing and a decent layout. The content of the supplement is presented in a logical fashion, and tables and important text appear in boxes for emphasis. There a bit of a “wall of text” feel to the page layouts, however, whenever there are no illustrations, tables, or boxed text there to give it some relief.
The Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns supplement ends up being really well organized. The book has both a table of contents and an index, as well as a set of PDF bookmarks for easy navigation. There are a lot of random tables in this book, and most of them can be hit with a click from the bookmarks, which is a very handy feature.
The artwork in Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns consists of some cool heavy-ink style black-and-white drawings of space ships, characters, settlements, and more. They are quite evocative of the drawings in some of the earlier Traveller RPG “black books”, which is great for giving the game that Old School feel. Regretfully, there are very few drawings and illustrations within Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns, and this certainly contributed to some of the “wall of text” on many pages.
Starships and Profit Margins
Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns is designed for use with the Stars Without Number, an OSR RPG. Stars Without Number uses an AD&D-like rules system with a Traveller-like setting and content. The combination works fairly well together, so it’s rather like playing two old systems in one role-playing game. A free copy of the Stars Without Number RPG is now available for download from RPGNow.
Stars Without Number is a space-opera futuristic setting in which the people of Earth expanded outward among the stars, but a catastrophic event isolated the Earth and its colonies from reaching each other. Set 600 years after the catastrophe and collapse of interstellar civilization (The Fall), players create characters that travel through space, and are involved in the re-integration of humanity into a colonial empire, as well as deal with a few alien species along the way. The Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns supplement expands the sparse rules on interstellar trading found in Stars Without Number, and opens up new campaign possibilities, wherein the player-characters ply the space trade-lanes as far traders.
The Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns supplement is divided into seven sections, followed by a section with GM Resources. There are random tables scattered throughout the book, designed for handling the wide variety of mercantile/space-opera situations in which the PCs might involve themselves. Thankfully, most of these tables are accessible from the bookmarks in the PDF version of the product.
The introduction section, The Jewels of Foreign Suns, discusses the role of far traders in the history of the setting. Their function both before and after The Fall are discussed, offering a good deal of “fluff” material to base a campaign on.
Slaves to the Credit describes what life is like for far traders, and some of the pitfalls that might arise in that particular line of work. The author also discusses an overview of the economics of far trading, and even includes a table for how the local currency is backed by a commodity of some kind. This section ends with a brief about the considerations for setting up and running a merchant campaign, reviewing the necessities for getting the game rolling.
The author covers the basics of far trading in An Honest Day’s Work. This section is full of charts for finding goods, bargaining, and paying the upkeep on a trading ship. An expansive list of trading goods, their cost, value, and weight is given here, along with a random table for determining the usefulness of a new trade good. The author goes on further to add trade tables for various world types such as Agricultural, Cosmopolitan, and Tyrannical. Each world has its own goods table, and a table for random Troubles that might interfere with trade on that world.
In Treasures in the Sky, the author creates additional “trade tags” to add to existing “world tags” found in the core rulebook of Stars Without Number. In Stars Without Number, tags operate as “brief conceptual tropes that set the world off from planets of otherwise similar population and characteristics.” These trade tags do much the same as world tags, except for being focused on trade issues. There are more than twenty tags listed in this section, each with several tropes for categories such as Authorities, Antagonists, and Things one might find on a world. As help for GMs, there’s also a dozen different worlds already created using the tags scattered throughout this section for easy use.
For GMs, the section entitled An Offer You Can’t Refuse goes into some greater details on creating trade adventures and for running a mercantile campaign long-term. Again, the author has gone to considerable effort to create random tables to assist GMs, including adventure type and plot tables for dozens of adventures, details on NPCs, and on conflicts that can affect a trade scenario. There are also tips on handling the ever growing wealth and influence characters will have as they become more experienced at trading.
In the Lords of the New Suns, the author describes how to design colony worlds upon which the PC far traders can ply their mercantile skills – specifically as the founders and sole means of trade to and from the colony! There are tables for creating failed colonies, as well as instructions for designing growing ones, with details on facets of the colony such as population, morale, supplies, and banking. Of course, colonies always run into trouble which will test the patience of a colonial merchant governor, and the author included an expansive list of possibilities from disasters caused by an insane colonist to saboteurs from a rival stealing supplies and goods.
The section entitled Tools of the Traders offers a wide range of gadgets, gear, and starship fittings which can be used by player-characters in a Stars Without Number mercantile campaign. These items range from grav containers to prefab colony bases to pocket nukes, and even include ship parts like a smuggler’s hold and a nuke launcher. This section also introduces an Exodus Ship – a behemoth cruiser which can transport 10,000 colonists to their new world.
The author provides more tables in the GM Resources section, allowing GMs to generate a quick reason for a planetary financial crisis, or generate a business contact and rival NPCs for the PC far traders. There is also a table of stats for enemies such as primitive humans, low-tech thugs, and alien monsters. This section ends with four area maps for use in a scenario, and a Planetary Trade Profile sheet for keeping track of all the factors that goes into trading among the stars.
Overall Score: 3.6 out of 5.0
Final Conclusions
Overall, Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns is a wonderful supplement for the Stars Without Number RPG, providing a number of useful resources for adding the element of trading to a space-opera setting. While the book is a little lacking in the layout, and its illustrations are few, the cornucopia of random tables for generating all sorts of useful content for a campaign really gives the supplement its OSR feel.
And even for fans of other SciFi RPGs, there is still some great content available in this supplement, as many facets of Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns are system-neutral. The author does a great job of creating a trade system which is quite detailed, and also scalable to make far trading a major or minor element in a storyline.
All in all, the price is pretty good for the amount of cool game content provided in Suns of Gold: Merchant Campaigns – you don’t have to break your galactic bank account coming up for the credits to make this supplement part of your gaming collection!
Reviewer’s Note: This Reviewer received a complimentary copy of the product from which the review was written.
Grade Card (Ratings 1 to 5)
- Presentation: 3.25
- - Design: 3.5 (Solid writing; cool tables; a decent layout)
- - Illustrations: 3.0 (Great “old school” illustrations – but too few!)
- Content: 4.0
- - Crunch: 4.0 (Tables galore!; solid rules for far trading; Did I mention the tables?!)
- - Fluff: 4.0 (Great story elements found in the random tables; good ratio of rules and plot elements)
- Value: 3.5 (Decent price for all the cool content – and tables!)
