Published retro futuristic rpgs

[w_earle_wheeler]

Shameless plug -- Tales Of The Solar Patrol, for GURPS, is "retro future", based heavily on the SF of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, with a tone taken half from Flash Gordon and half from Heinlein's juveniles.

Hey Lizard, Iron Lords of Jupiter was great. Is Tales of the Solar Patrol in the same vein?

What's the crunch to fluff ration of the book? I know I've had great luck using GURPS supplements for fluff resources in the past without ever using them with the GURPS rules system.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Another vote for Space:1889. It does an excellent job of extrapolating a complete campaign world from the works of HG Wells and Jules Verne as well as the early pulp writers.

Also, almost every "classic" version of Traveller could qualify as "retro," since its modeled on a "1950's-60's" view of space opera.

Similarly, Paranoia could fit the bill as a comedic take on dystopian futures so popular in the 1970's (Logan's Run, WestWorld, FutureWorld). Don't forget, though, that dystopias had their conceptual foundations in texts like Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, and even older fiction like Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1921 novel We or the classic sci-fi films, Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926) and 1936's Shape of Things to Come. The latest version of Paranoia has alternate rules for running the game as a straight-up (i.e. non-spoof) RPG for such storylines.

Of course, a good generic game can pull of such a setting. HERO and Mutants & Masterminds would be my first 2 choices, but I know many would swear by (or "at") GURPS for this task as well.

 

[Psion]

Some say I can do this with pulp genre and if any pulp rpgs that can this setting?

I bashed Spirit of the Century together with Lizards' Iron Lords of Jupiter for a game I ran at GenCon and NC gameday, and will run again at DC Gameday. It was good fun.

I really only had to make two changes:
1) changed academics into two skills - Earth Lore and Jupiter Lore
2) changed what the phases described (Spirit of the Century has you define what happened during the great war and after; I have players describe what happened in their time in the Rocket Corps prior to arriving on Jupiter.)

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

Not an RPG, but check out the collectible strategy game Rocketmen. Good clean fun

 

[Lizard]

Hey Lizard, Iron Lords of Jupiter was great. Is Tales of the Solar Patrol in the same vein?

What's the crunch to fluff ration of the book? I know I've had great luck using GURPS supplements for fluff resources in the past without ever using them with the GURPS rules system.

Similair, but not identical -- this is somewhat more heavily based on 1950s Heinlein and Asimov, the original Buck Rogers comic strip, and TV shows like "Space Cadet" and "Rocky Jones" than on the planetary romance genre, though there's plenty of opportunities for that style of play in the setting, with Mars, Venus, and four of the moons of Jupiter all having their own native races (sometimes several per world... )

Fluff/Crunch is about 80/20, I'd say.