Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9701077" data-attributes="member: 7026617">Okay, let me see if I can find any suggestions here.This one's tricky, because most of the cases I know of are full-out generic game systems, not specifically focused on SF.  I also think it turns on just how generic it needs to be; the couple examples I'll point at have some baked in technological assumptions and sample races, but then, so did Alternity.The first example I'd point out is WOIN: NEW, the SF branch of the three game generic system the owner of this site created.A second I'd point to is Sabre SF 3e, but that one may fail your criteria about being supported and having a significant fanbase.A third one I might point at is Cepheus Deluxe, which is a Traveller offshoot but has less baked in setting and seems usable for a lot of SF games.  I'm not clear on how large the fanbase is, but its of recent vintage.I have a couple cases I could point at here, but they may fail the organizational criterion you mention above, since I think both of them are pretty organization-centric.I can give you some here.Fragged Empire is set in the far future, after an internecine war has torn apart what was once an interstellar culture (there are some strong post-apocalypse vibes to part of it).  The different "species" are all actually third (or in one case fourth) generation transhumanist creation made by the replacement species humanity made, except for one that's an accidental evolutionary result of a tailored bioweapon.In some respects similar you have Eclipse Phase 2e, which is a relatively near-future transhumanist game set after Earth was largely destroyed in a war with hostile artificial super-intelligences.  While primarily set in the Solar System, interstellar travel is possible using "Pandora Gates", apparently constructed by aliens and left in the system in the far past.  While the game defaults to playing as operatives of Firewall, a privately operated group attempting to stop x-risks (existential risks to transhumanity and its uplift and artificial intelligence more or less allies) it talks about other types of campaigns of a more private nature or groups under corporate or other organizational sponsorship.Termination Shock: a fairly rules-light game about a future where big chunks of humanity were rescued by aliens from conquest by their own artificial intelligence creations (which can only really operate near the solar system because of physical aberrations of that part of space).  Makes some serious effort to have its major aliens be really kind of alien, and the "humans as interstellar gypsies" vibe is a bit unusual in its own right.Monster of the Week is one of my few forays into the PbtA sphere and seems pretty well done for what it is.  You can get a distinct Buffy style vibe depending on the playbooks chosen.Part-Time Gods 2e has people playing characters who have been raised to divinity in various fashions, but are still trying to keep some connection with their mortal lives.  Add on books have provided rules for playing some Outsiders (various mythical monsters that may have originally been created as weapons to use against the old traditional gods before war tore them apart).There are a few others I have but they're either fairly obscure, ramble off into Shadowrun style cyberpunk fantast (Vault) or meander off into broader oddness (The Strange).Well, right at the start here, The Hero System comes to mind; it might have got its start as a the superhero game Champions, but its been presented as a universal system for decades now, and while its in sort of a latent stage, you can still buy all the relevant PDFs for the last edition (6e) and there's a relatively large remaining fanbase for it.Heroes and Hardships is a fairly recent foray into generic game design, and makes at least an attempt to do something new.  I find it a bit crunchy even for me, but that hasn't stopped me buying the pdfs of a couple supplemental books.And of course both well known and with (by the standards of anything but D&D) a fairly massive fanbase is Savage Worlds,  which besides its corebook and supporting fantasy, sf, horror and supers companions, there's a massive number of third party setting add-ons to be found, some of which go into the weeds fairly far in supporting subgenres.</blockquote>

Verification