RPGs in SPAAAAAAAACCCCCCCEEE

[ShadowRaven]

Bah, I know the group. I think we would be all better off if we kicked the kids out, drove Am nuts, and just sat down and watched Crest of the Stars all night. Have you noticed how far off track we get when using a system we're all already familiar with? Something new, and we'll never get anything accomplished.

[Wrangler]

You could go for Jovian Chronicals, its not interstellar travel, but its pretty strong roleplaying in space genre.   Plus it has 'Mechs.  ;)

[bytor]

How about D20 Modern with the D20 Future supplement?  I’ve never tried it personally, but it might be one to go with if your group happens to like the D20 rules set.  I recall that the D20 Future book had rules for campaigns that might fit the bill

Traveller is of course a great option as well, and there seems to be a few versions of the rules to use……..original, GRUPS, even D20 (called “T20”, but essentially a heavily modified version of the D20 rules).

[Drop Bear]

If you go with (Classic) Traveller and decide to run Adventure 0 (or A 0 as it's known shorthand), A 0 is more a Campaign than an adventure and a good framework to hang Published and your own Home Brew adventures off of. I've bean running it myself since new years for a single player with a good amount of success.

It's bean many years since I've played or run a TNE Star Vikings game but they are lots of fun, you can mix it up one Tour your out doing Survey, Exploration & Contact, to spice things up throw in some Relic Technology Salvage and run in's with Pirates, The Guild and perhaps a Vampire scare. The next your off on a Contact/Diplomacy mission or running Smash & Grabs on Teddies Weapons & Tech Cashes and Cold Recoveries on forgotten WMD stockpiles.

the Wikipedia page is a good place to start deciding between editions as are the FFE homepage and the Travller Wiki pages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_%28game%29
http://www.farfuture.net/
http://traveller.wikia.com/wiki/Traveller_Wiki

[Lore]

Is CthuluTech still being published? It's mostly Earth based, but there are space-based plot hooks that could be exploited.

Supposedly. Unveiled Threats was the last book released, back in November 2010.

The newest source, Dead Gods, was supposed to have been released in March 2011, but it's been stuck in limbo for much of the time since. No new release date has been set.

[Matti]

I just remembered another one:
Heimot
Translated by Google

We can scratch that over: I e-mailed and got response that game is sold only in finnish language and there won't be any translations in near future. So that game is finnish exclusive right now. Maybe I should buy that for myself...
*Looks at pile of unread (BattleTech) books
Maybe not yet ::)

[Doug Glendower]

Cosmic Patrol?

[gooseman]

nerd you talk like having a character killed off during creation (before the game starts) is actually a good thing.

I would argue that being able to be killed (or horribly crippled when not intended as a plot hook) during charactor creation is more of a bad thing

Which brings us to the VERY FIRST house rule I was ever involved in. If your character did not make the survival roll, you were immediately discharged from service with a one point reduction in one of your physical attributes, determined randomly.

[StCptMara]

Which brings us to the VERY FIRST house rule I was ever involved in. If your character did not make the survival roll, you were immediately discharged from service with a one point reduction in one of your physical attributes, determined randomly.

Exception: If you REALLY did not like how things were going already, let the character die and start over with a sense of relief because,
if you hadn't died....well...Steven Hawkings had better mobility and communication CAPABILITIES then you...(honestly..that is
what I always really saw the 'Aww...I died in Chargen' results as...a convenient lie you could tell the GM)

[gooseman]

Exception: If you REALLY did not like how things were going already, let the character die and start over with a sense of relief because,
if you hadn't died....well...Steven Hawkings had better mobility and communication CAPABILITIES then you...(honestly..that is
what I always really saw the 'Aww...I died in Chargen' results as...a convenient lie you could tell the GM)

No, we didn't have that exception.

[StCptMara]

No, we didn't have that exception.

I would HATE to make a traveler character in that group, then....(Seriously! I never rolld 'dead', but I would get
every OTHER bad possibility, it seemed....)

[gooseman]

I would HATE to make a traveler character in that group, then....(Seriously! I never rolld 'dead', but I would get
every OTHER bad possibility, it seemed....)

Not to worry, it was about 30 years ago.

[Wrangler]

Not to side track the thread too much.  Which Traveller is the current one anyways?  I've been always confused on which one it was. 

A guys ran a really slick game at con i went through,  Monitor showing characters, the maps, while players got dossiers of their appointed characters they were playing.   I never asked which one it was.

[worktroll]

Traveller.  The ORIGINAL Traveller RPG-three little books in a black box.

I must concur with my learned friend. Although it does make me smile, remembering a bunch of teenagers sitting around role-playing people in their 30s and 40s ... Happy days.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

Exception: If you REALLY did not like how things were going already, let the character die and start over with a sense of relief because,
if you hadn't died....well...Steven Hawkings had better mobility and communication CAPABILITIES then you...(honestly..that is
what I always really saw the 'Aww...I died in Chargen' results as...a convenient lie you could tell the GM)

Honestly, I always considered it to be a sign of a bad game system if it was possible, via random rolling, to wind up with a character who was game-breakingly crippled in some way during character gen.

[Lorcan Nagle]

Not to side track the thread too much.  Which Traveller is the current one anyways?  I've been always confused on which one it was. 

There's two "current" Traveller editions: Traveller 5th ed (T5), which is published by Far Future Enterprises and developed by Marc Miller (the original Trav developer), and is in Beta.  FFE also sells ebooks of older Trav editions on CD.

The other is Mongoose Traveller, which if published by... Mongoose and is developed by a couple of their usual writers.  It follows the original Traveller's style fairly well.  It also has an open game license so anyone can develop for it.  Mongoose do a line of generic books for it, a series based on the official Third Imperium setting, and sourcebooks based on other SF universes.

On top of that, there's also GURPS and D20 Traveller mods, I'm not sure if they're still in print or not.

[gooseman]

Not to side track the thread too much.  Which Traveller is the current one anyways?  I've been always confused on which one it was. 

A guys ran a really slick game at con i went through,  Monitor showing characters, the maps, while players got dossiers of their appointed characters they were playing.   I never asked which one it was.

http://www.farfuture.net/hardcopy.html

Yummy Classic Traveller! (And T:2K also)

[Jackmc]

One very significant thing about the GURPS adaptation of Traveller is it occurred during a time when Steve Jackson Games incested a huge amount of effort into reducing the initimidation factor of the game which most tend to consider to be in the character creation.  Correspondingly, the Gurps:Trav books have character templates which are pre-gen archetypical characters without all their points spent.  The result is that regardless of what you do, you end up with a charcter that is competent in the core area while havign a fair bit of personalization without being overwhelming to finalize.

Plus, they have the extravagant level of support one would expect when a rich man (Steve J.) indulges in a personal pet project with cost not being the primary consideration.

-Jackmc

[Dave Talley]

I am or was a big fan or Gurps in general
was about to start a homebrew campaign may years ago
using couple H Beam Piper novels as a starting point

that would have been fun

[Force of Nature]

A really old RPG that I played way back in the early 80's was Star Frontiers. IIRC, you could start out by being one of five races. Human, some type of flying monkey race, a shape shifting blob race, a large multi legged bug race and one other I can't seem to remember offhand (Sathar?). Lot of good scenarios with that game. Easy to pick up.

Then in high school a friend of mine got the RPG Space Opera. It was okay.

Force

[Jackmc]

and one other I can't seem to remember offhand (Sathar?).

Nope that was the bad guys.

-Jackmc

[Lore]

A really old RPG that I played way back in the early 80's was Star Frontiers. IIRC, you could start out by being one of five races. Human, some type of flying monkey race, a shape shifting blob race, a large multi legged bug race and one other I can't seem to remember offhand (Sathar?). Lot of good scenarios with that game. Easy to pick up.

The flying monkey-race are the anthropoid/ape-like Yazirians, the shape-shifting blobs are the amoeboid Dralasites, and the insectoid Vrusk are the requisite "bug-race."

Zebulon's Guide to Frontier Space introduced several other races, including:- the Ifshnit [basically, space-dwarves], the Osakar [parthenogenic quadrupeds], the Humma [which were, essentially, kangaroos], and my personal favourite, the Mechanons [thinking robots].

Nope that was the bad guys.

-Jackmc

Enemies of the United Planetary Federation. But there were rumours that they had secret allies somewhere.

Regardless, the sathar usually weren't a racial option for PCs.

[Drop Bear]

Not to side track the thread too much.  Which Traveller is the current one anyways?  I've been always confused on which one it was. 

ATM T5 is in Bata test, Mongoose is printing books for their version, SJG still has a valid license and many of their books are still in stock and though it's thin on the ground has some online support.

Classic Traveller is in Reprints and on CD-ROM, MegaTraveller & Traveller: The New Era are also available on CD-ROM.

the D20 License for T20 has expired and the books have bean pulled, don't know the status of Hero Traveller.

Classic (CT), Mega (MT) and Mongoose (MgT) are the easiest to convert between each other.

[TS_Hawk]

FASA had one called Renegade Legion: Centurion I believe that was the RPG setting for the Renegade Legion games

[Lorcan Nagle]

The RenLeg RPG was called Legionnaire - it was pretty good.  Centurion was the tank combat game.

[Korsar]

Let me throw one or two odd ones in...

1.) Diaspora - It's based on the FATE system, which means it can get quite metagamy, but, as I discovered recently is a lot of fun to play. Especially because you and your buddies get to design your own universe at the beginning. Don't worry, the process shouldn't take longer than one session.

2.) Ashen Stars - I haven't played but it is based on the Gumshoe system which I really, really like. It's more investigation based, so this might be a little problem

and for fun:

3.) 3:16 - A little Indy game that you can use for a few evenings in between. Basically it's "shoot the alien, conquer the planet, R&R, repeat ad nauseam"  ;D

[Ruger]

Star*Drive?

Ruger

[Lore]

Star*Drive?

Ruger

I'll gladly second Star*Drive. Certainly one of the best settings ever published for the space-adventure RPG genre.

[deathshadow]

Toon man... Toon.

[Sledge]

Looks like Traveller is both most recommended and highly accessible. I guess that intro adventure should be a good guide to see if we like it.