Current location:	On the bridge of my Profit-class merchant
Current mood:	excited
Current music:	The hum of the planing engines coming on line...
Entry tags:	nce, rpg, starblazer

Starblazer beats the hype

I haven't been quite as excited about a set of RPG rules since... well, since the first arrival of Hero Wars, nearly a decade ago.  Starblazer, the Fate system brushed up for rollicking good space opera action, is gradually emerging from a year of speculation to hopefully change the world of SF RPG for good.  Having got my hands finally on a PDF copy just under a week ago, I'm frothing at the mouth ready to play this game with my long-gestated homebrew setting, the New Commonality Era.

Starblazer isn't like any other scifi ruleset I've seen.  There are no rules for how much your ammunition clip costs, or how much it weighs; no rules for how many cubic meters your cargo bay should be, or the wattage of your laser.  No gearhead stuff, no technical specification minutiae and pages of gravity calculation tables which Many Other SF RPGs so proudly display.

So what else is there in 600+ (!) pages of content?  A whole, complete, scifi game, that's what.  It's complete, as is, and arguably more complete than any other SF game: not only do you get characters, worlds, starships, and critters, but you also get rules for playing organizations, empires, humongous space beasts, giant robots, and piles more.  In one book.  A book that could kill someone if dropped from a first floor window, admittedly, but still one book.

I love it to bits.  And that's just the PDF.  It can do MY SETTING!  (YAY!)  Given that my setting is 1: extremely weirded out and 2: extremely far future, that's saying something.  I may have to expand on the Organization Rules slightly, but that's all; I've already been converting my current planetary and starship writeups to the Starblazer system and grinning at the devilishness which the Aspects system brings out in me.  Heh-heh-heh...

Most of all, and the main reason why 600+ pages actually is less of a trawl than, say, the 4e Players Handbook, is that the unified Fate system of Skills, Stunts, and Aspects is used across the board for every "game entity", be it a character, a planet, a starship, or an Empire.  It may feel kinda weird to be enumerating a planet's "Skills" or a starship's "Stunts", but the unified terminology generates piles of synergies and means you learn one single resolution system, and then get creative with it in different contexts.  Lovely - and much easier on the brain.  I get the feeling that even the 600+ page rulesbook will be little referred to once you've played a few sessions - the rules are that intuitive.

So what's missing?  Well, this is what will IMHO split the SF RPG community down the middle.  It's the gearhead stuff.  There really isn't any.  Sure, there are groovy starships, nasty rayguns, enormous spacestations, evil robots, etc: but there is *no* pseudo-scientific gobbledigook provided to explain it all away.  How do FTL drives work?  How long does it take to travel 29.6 Light Years?  What's the exact atmospheric composition of that unbreathable atmosphere?  Starblazer is refreshingly honest about this: for games rules purposes, none of the answers to the above questions actually MATTER.  Quite remarkably, for a book that size, there is very little "chrome".

Now this will upset some people.  However, IMHO, it shouldn't.  If one thing argued Traveller (for example) into a corner, it was its obsession with pseudo-scientific rationalization from day one.  It told you how big a computer was, and how much it could remember; it provided exact restrictions on how jump drive worked; and before you knew it, the OTU was inherent in the rules, and increasingly difficult to disentangle from future products.  More than anything, it got outstripped by current technology advances ridiculously quickly, especially the computer rules, to the extent that the OTU ends up dated as "the Seventies in Space", with no nanotech, no biotech, and computers the size of refrigerators with 64K of memory... (I exaggerate, but you get the point...)  Starblazer stays clear of trying to PHD the scientific descriptions - second-guessing the future is a pretty futile task at best - and as a core rulesbook is a complete playable game out of the box.  But it's also a toolkit for gaming in your own setting of choice.  Yes, you can play in the OTU using Starblazer; you can also play in the Star Trek Federation or the Star Wars galaxy with no real work other than speccing out your ships, planets, and organizations. 

What interests me next is the sort of supplements Starblazer is going to spawn.  It's very possible to please a heckuva lot of people here.  I would suggest two types of supplement will do the trick: first, a pile of scenarios in "generic" Starblazer style, ie with plenty of fun and action and about the same level of chrome (ie not much) as the rules; second, some settings books, with presentations of setting-based chrome contextualising the Starblazer rules.  So, for example, a "Star Trek Setting" book (assuming such were ever possible! :-D) would provide organization sheets for the Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans, Federation, etc, starship sheets for the Enterprise, etc, *and* it would explain that FTL is "Warp Drive", offer examples on how it works, provide descriptions of matter transport and replicators, phasers, etc, tying them all into the Starblazer core rules.  And then, on the other hand, a "Against the Dark Empire" scenario book would provide a suite of scenarios which were playable out of the box, but which could also be easily used in any setting the Story Teller was using Starblazer for.

As a development of the above, too: Starblazer isn't anti-gearhead per se, it's just that the core rulesbook doesn't go mad about it.  A "Star Trek Setting" could easily produce as much gearhead material as it wanted, if the setting demanded it, without upsetting the Starblazer rules.  I'll be very interested to see if we get fan-created weapons lists with weights, costs, and ammo capacity, appearing shortly; wouldn't surprise me at all.

Such is my two-penn'orth, anyway...

Right - back to reading, and writing up those planets and organizations!  Kudos to the Cubicle7 guys for producing a cracking, exciting, science-fiction game!

*****