HellHound
ENnies winner and NOT Scrappy Doo
One of my long-term dalliances in RPGs has been Star Frontiers. It was the first RPG I owned after D&D, purchased by my parents after I read a very positive article about it in Dragon magazine shortly after its release (of course the article was positive, I think now, since the magazine was owned by the same company).
The game box impressed me after the sparse contents of the red box D&D basic set - it contained sheets of punch-out tokens for all the major characters, races and so on, a huge map of the downtown core of Port Loren to play games on, and a bunch of maps of smaller locations on the back of that map sheet, in addition to the various rules. And the races were cool. I particularly loved the Dralasites, and my cousin was obsessed over those flying squirrel / combat-frenzy monkeys, the Yazirians.
In fact, in later years, I realized how well arranged the game was as I looked over the races again. The warlike race has a lower Strength and Endurance than the baseline, the amorphous race that can have lots of limbs if they have a high Dexterity equivalent start with a penalty to those stats, and so on. In fact, it was nearly worthwhile to play a human, unlike in AD&D where the demihumans had all the advantages unless you were expecting to play a game to level 20+.
Again, like with Top Secret, as a young teen a lot of the time spent playing this game was actually spent running firefights on the streets of Port Loren. We would grab our laser weapons or autopistols and blaze away at space pirates, mercenary raiding parties, or the ever-dangerous escaped blob-thing from the Port Loren Zoo (from one of the sample scenarios in the basic rule book).
I was reintroduced to Star Frontiers when my friend Glenn bought Zebulon's Guide to Frontier Space. While I loved the new races and weapons introduced therein, I realized that I prefer the simplified skill groups system and non-chart-based combat rules from the original game over the ACTION chart-style mechanics introduced in Zebulon's Guide. A few months later, our high school D&D group settled down for a one-day game of Star Frontiers using one of the published modules. Unfortunately, I knew the adventure and totally tricked out my gear to take advantage of my player knowledge of the game - protection against kinetic weapons sinec the enemies throughout the adventure use primitive weapons, machine guns, or are very large beasts who engage in hand-to-hand combat. I still enjoyed the game, but the combat focus of the adventure and the unfamiliar system turned off several of the players, and we never picked it back up for another game.
I again came back to Star Frontiers during a break between Vampire & CyberPunk games during my obsessions with those games. This time we played with my full (mature) gaming group from that time, and I fell in love with it again. Sooch even went out and bought me the GMs screen, one of the few products I had been missing at that time (well, except for the old maps and tokens which I had lost years before). Around that time I also launched my own Star Frontiers fansite, which won an award from Tripod back in the day (the hosting site), and which is now happily ensconced over at www.dreadgazebo.com as StarBase HellHound. I had grand plans of running a game of Star Frontiers in the theme of Top Secret, using none other than the layout and setting from Operation Sprechentestelle (the introduction module for Top Secret) as the adventure location, however transported to good old StarBase HellHound - an old space station where one of the two non-rotating torii at each end had begun rotating as the bearings had given out, and was thus not useful for the large trading vessels that dock at the station. The non-rotating torus is now the home of the station's black market, underground casino, and a place where political dissidents can be smuggled in and out of the system. The game never happened, but it remains cool to this day, I insist.
Then Wizards released d20 Future, which includes the races from Star Frontiers, if little else. Suddenly I wanted to run a d20 Star Frontiers campaign, but after a year of hemming and hawing trying to set it up, I surrendered to the fact that for Star Frontiers, I prefer Star Frontiers. In my efforts to get the d20 game together, however, I had bought an old Star Frontiers boxed set from an on-line merchant which included the maps and tokens (what I was looking for), but was missing the rule books. When I contacted them about the missing rule books, they told me to keep the box, and refunded the money.
And we resurrected Star Frontiers under the Guise of Truane's Star Vice - a Miami Vice inspired campaign set in Port Loren, with Dextra, the gelflings, and half-mad as players. We're talking Vrusk in white suit jackets, Yazirians with the most fashionable sunglasses and perpetual stubble, and a Dralasite with a toupee. It was a lot of fun, and the younger gelfling loves her dralasite character and occasionally asks us to play again.
As a game designer, the game didn't actually give me much, despite years of playing it. I still love it nearly as much as I love Gamma World, but I can't think of a single rule or concept that I took from Star Frontiers and introduced into other games or into the themes or mechanics of the games I have half-completed over the years. Star Frontiers remains one of my cherished games, probably because I like it best exactly as I found it, with few house rules, and nothing taken from it for my other games.
A footnote to Star Frontiers is the spaceship expansion for the game (and a wargame in its own right). Sci-Fi games need space ships and rules for space ship combat. Star Frontiers' were neither amazingly good, nor abysmally bad. The system worked, although the costs of acquiring the skills used in flying and gunning space ships made them the 'epic level' material for the game. In the end, they turned into background material for our games, and never made it into the foreground.
---
About three months ago a very close friend and one of the core team of the original Ambient d20 team committed suicide. This really struck deeply into me, and I haven't been able to concentrate on anything RPG-related since then - I haven't prepped a game, written a supplement, edited anything, or even put anything through layout. I even dropped off the RPG message boards I love, especially ENWorld.
So, I've started to think back over all the games I've played over the years and what makes gaming fun for me. And I'm collecting them into roughly 1,000 word posts about the various games, with the intent to write and post one every weekday that I'm not on the road, and then re-invest this energy into running games and writing again.
The game box impressed me after the sparse contents of the red box D&D basic set - it contained sheets of punch-out tokens for all the major characters, races and so on, a huge map of the downtown core of Port Loren to play games on, and a bunch of maps of smaller locations on the back of that map sheet, in addition to the various rules. And the races were cool. I particularly loved the Dralasites, and my cousin was obsessed over those flying squirrel / combat-frenzy monkeys, the Yazirians.
In fact, in later years, I realized how well arranged the game was as I looked over the races again. The warlike race has a lower Strength and Endurance than the baseline, the amorphous race that can have lots of limbs if they have a high Dexterity equivalent start with a penalty to those stats, and so on. In fact, it was nearly worthwhile to play a human, unlike in AD&D where the demihumans had all the advantages unless you were expecting to play a game to level 20+.
Again, like with Top Secret, as a young teen a lot of the time spent playing this game was actually spent running firefights on the streets of Port Loren. We would grab our laser weapons or autopistols and blaze away at space pirates, mercenary raiding parties, or the ever-dangerous escaped blob-thing from the Port Loren Zoo (from one of the sample scenarios in the basic rule book).
I was reintroduced to Star Frontiers when my friend Glenn bought Zebulon's Guide to Frontier Space. While I loved the new races and weapons introduced therein, I realized that I prefer the simplified skill groups system and non-chart-based combat rules from the original game over the ACTION chart-style mechanics introduced in Zebulon's Guide. A few months later, our high school D&D group settled down for a one-day game of Star Frontiers using one of the published modules. Unfortunately, I knew the adventure and totally tricked out my gear to take advantage of my player knowledge of the game - protection against kinetic weapons sinec the enemies throughout the adventure use primitive weapons, machine guns, or are very large beasts who engage in hand-to-hand combat. I still enjoyed the game, but the combat focus of the adventure and the unfamiliar system turned off several of the players, and we never picked it back up for another game.
I again came back to Star Frontiers during a break between Vampire & CyberPunk games during my obsessions with those games. This time we played with my full (mature) gaming group from that time, and I fell in love with it again. Sooch even went out and bought me the GMs screen, one of the few products I had been missing at that time (well, except for the old maps and tokens which I had lost years before). Around that time I also launched my own Star Frontiers fansite, which won an award from Tripod back in the day (the hosting site), and which is now happily ensconced over at www.dreadgazebo.com as StarBase HellHound. I had grand plans of running a game of Star Frontiers in the theme of Top Secret, using none other than the layout and setting from Operation Sprechentestelle (the introduction module for Top Secret) as the adventure location, however transported to good old StarBase HellHound - an old space station where one of the two non-rotating torii at each end had begun rotating as the bearings had given out, and was thus not useful for the large trading vessels that dock at the station. The non-rotating torus is now the home of the station's black market, underground casino, and a place where political dissidents can be smuggled in and out of the system. The game never happened, but it remains cool to this day, I insist.
Then Wizards released d20 Future, which includes the races from Star Frontiers, if little else. Suddenly I wanted to run a d20 Star Frontiers campaign, but after a year of hemming and hawing trying to set it up, I surrendered to the fact that for Star Frontiers, I prefer Star Frontiers. In my efforts to get the d20 game together, however, I had bought an old Star Frontiers boxed set from an on-line merchant which included the maps and tokens (what I was looking for), but was missing the rule books. When I contacted them about the missing rule books, they told me to keep the box, and refunded the money.
And we resurrected Star Frontiers under the Guise of Truane's Star Vice - a Miami Vice inspired campaign set in Port Loren, with Dextra, the gelflings, and half-mad as players. We're talking Vrusk in white suit jackets, Yazirians with the most fashionable sunglasses and perpetual stubble, and a Dralasite with a toupee. It was a lot of fun, and the younger gelfling loves her dralasite character and occasionally asks us to play again.
As a game designer, the game didn't actually give me much, despite years of playing it. I still love it nearly as much as I love Gamma World, but I can't think of a single rule or concept that I took from Star Frontiers and introduced into other games or into the themes or mechanics of the games I have half-completed over the years. Star Frontiers remains one of my cherished games, probably because I like it best exactly as I found it, with few house rules, and nothing taken from it for my other games.
A footnote to Star Frontiers is the spaceship expansion for the game (and a wargame in its own right). Sci-Fi games need space ships and rules for space ship combat. Star Frontiers' were neither amazingly good, nor abysmally bad. The system worked, although the costs of acquiring the skills used in flying and gunning space ships made them the 'epic level' material for the game. In the end, they turned into background material for our games, and never made it into the foreground.
---
About three months ago a very close friend and one of the core team of the original Ambient d20 team committed suicide. This really struck deeply into me, and I haven't been able to concentrate on anything RPG-related since then - I haven't prepped a game, written a supplement, edited anything, or even put anything through layout. I even dropped off the RPG message boards I love, especially ENWorld.
So, I've started to think back over all the games I've played over the years and what makes gaming fun for me. And I'm collecting them into roughly 1,000 word posts about the various games, with the intent to write and post one every weekday that I'm not on the road, and then re-invest this energy into running games and writing again.
