Agnostic Sci-Fantasy Engine?

[Morrus]

Has no one mentioned Stars Without Numbers?

Yes. The OP.

 

[ninjayeti]

Have you checked out Esper Geneisis? It is a 5E based sci-fi ruleset and there are a free set of basic rules here. Personally I found it to be a bit too literal a translation of 5E - e.g., Engineers are basically just re-skinned clerics who do stuff through tech rather than divine power. But very high quality and maybe what you are looking for.

Starfinder is a great game that does a fantastic job of mashing up sci-fi and fantasy elements. I don't think it would be a major challenge to tweak it to fit your homebrew setting. Personally that is what I would go with.

 

[Blackrat]

So, there was the oft overlooked d20 Modern with its supplements. You could try to find those. d20 Future had several different tech eras and there was a couple of books that gave rules for magic and fantasy in the modern/future settings.

 

[rOLUNDE]

Doh! I totally missed that (obviously), haha

Well, let's see if I can actually contribute something then...

Other SciFi games that may or may not have been mentioned also include-
There's also Star Frontiers: Alpha Dawn a pretty old school sci-fi game, Star Frontiers came out about the time of B/X D&D.

There's FrontierSpace which apparently uses the same system as BareBones Fantasy and does include rules for Psionics. (I have not played this but BareBones Fantasy is a pretty fun system for getting up and running so this should be good too.)

There's the Cepheus Engine RPG I'll just grab this blurb from the Publisher-
"
From the Author of CFTL:
Cepheus Engine is based on the Mongoose OGL 2d6 sci-fi SRD; it is quite detailed and very faithful to the SRD. "

And then one I also see recommended A Lot but doesn't seem to have been mentioned yet is Mothership!
Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG you can get as a PWYW pdf there.
As far as "how hard is the sci-fi" it's basically made to copy the sci-fi genre of Alien and such, so pretty hard.
It does lack any form of magic though.

Savage Worlds has been mentioned but I'll +1 the heck out of it, as mostly you can do whatever you want with it, mostly.
And if you've never played it, I've seen this said and will say it here myself "it plays better than it reads".
IMO it really falls into the lane of "rules enough" as it has pretty much whatever you need a ruling for, but you can totally just fake it as you go along and the odds are if you check for an actual rule later it'll probably be what you just did anyhow.

So anyhow, hope there is something useful in all that.
Cheers!
~R~

 

[The Session Tapes]

Thanks everybody! I had given a passing glance to a lot of these, but none really twisted my tentacles; hadn't really looked deep into Genesys before now, though as I thought it might be too much work. Digging deeper (thanks to some good advice here and other places) I might actually give it a try. You've been a great help, thanks!

 

[Ulfgeir]

Another point regarding Starfinder. Yes, you can have spacehip-to-spaceship battles, but they are quite bland to say the least where it is so obvious what the only move is in each phase. And they all depended on what the pilot of each ship rolled for initative.

It is still a fiddly hack-n-slash game that just happens to be set in a space setting for framing. And where gear has costs that are exponentially higher the better the better the item. And nope, you can't use said items if you are not of high enough level.


One game that oddly enough imo might work as inspiration for things with different tech levels, is one that is extremely setting specific. And that is Atomic Robo from Evil Hat. It is based on the comic Atomic Robo (which is brilliant), and is of course FATE-based. But, this is important, it differ a lot from how Fate Core/accelerated works. It lends itself very well to pulpy stories, as it has to cover things that range from dinosaurs (well one of the villains claim to be one that has travelled forward in time from 65 million years ago to stop the large Hadron Collider form starting), to pulp stuff in the 20's to hardboiled action in WW2, and space exploration and other dimensions. And everything is "For Science!".

 

[aramis erak]

Cepheus is Mongoose Traveller's SRD made more like Classic Traveller.

It's well suited for the Traveller style of Space Opera. (Marc's been very clear that Traveller was intended to be Space Opera, not Hard SF, but some Traveller supplement authors, especially GT ones, never got the memo.) It retains the built in tropeset of Classic Traveller.

There are a couple adaptations of the MGT SRD to fantasy. Wanderer being the one coming to mind.

 

[dragoner]

I ran a "Steampunk Byzantium" game using M-Space/Mythras (RuneQuest 6), and Mythic Constantinople on a planet I made, even had some fun with Galley battles, and Dirigibles where they were blown off course to "Monster Island".

 

[Melfast]

Hey Folks,

Though were only about halfway through the current campaign of The Session Tapes, I'm laying the groundwork for the next campaign, and I'm looking for some advice.

I'm a bit burnt out on pure Fantasy, and was looking at doing a multi-century time jump into the future of my homebrew setting. The concept is essentially "what would happen if a high-fantasy setting developed futuristic technology?"

I'm just at a bit of a loss for what is the best engine to use for the setting. I've had Numenera recommended to me, but it seems really setting-specific and also a bit too "fantasy with some science bits". The tech/society level I was looking for was something more like Destiny or Star Wars, and less like a John Carter/Flash Gordon/Dune sort of Mythic Sci-Fi. Essentially hard tech but with some magic (which could just as easily be super-advanced science in the spirit of Clarke's 3rd Law).

I was circling around Starfinder, the only worry I have is that it seems a bit less setting-agnostic than Pathfinder was; so I had a few questions:

1.) How hard is it to make Starfinder fit a non-Pact Worlds setting? Does the game suffer as a result?

2.) Other than Starfinder, are there any similar "hard tech with fantasy tropes" systems out there? Someone recommended Stars Without Number to me, but I was a bit underwhelmed.

3.) Was there ever an official "Space Opera" update for Shadowrun made? I can't find anything, but that might just be because my Google-Fu sucks.

Thanks for any help you can give!

I know you mentioned you looked at the Cypher System with the lens of Numenera, but they recently published a Cypher System book called The Stars are Fire, which is all about using the Cypher System to play a variety of spaced-based Science Fiction games. It starts with hard science fiction with no FTL, and then has options to vary the type of game based on tech levels and how much space fantasy/super science you want to include. So you can set up campaigns in many different ways/themes. Bruce Cordell wrote it, and I like both his work and the Cypher System. You may find it fits your need.

Happy Gaming...

 

[GreyLord]

D20 Future...if you can find it.

Edit: If it isn't Fantasy Sci-Fi enough, it is compatible with 3e and 3.5 editions of D&D. You can utilize the Psionics handbooks of either version with it to increase the Sci-Fi Fantasy feeling, or if you wish you can go full on fantasy and include classes from 3.X within it.