Frontier Space (FS) is really such a great game. I like it better than the original Star Frontiers (SF) since the action economy is so good. The game is designed much better, and the entire combat system is fun. The character-building options eclipse the original inspiration, feeling modern while keeping that retro vibe - and even allowing you to DIY parts of the rules to your liking.
Want to do Star Frontiers the right way? Buy the POD copies of the original game and the adventure modules from DriveThru and play this. This game even does "Guardians of the Galaxy" style swashbuckling space adventure better than most of its contemporaries.
All of the original races in the original game are trivial to port in. The setting works. The modules convert easily. The gear and tech are even better and give you an "advanced setting feeling" to the original game.
If you like the starship combat wargame of the original, Knight Hawks (KH), it is not that hard to use that wargame with these rules - everything is percentage based in both games; simply make skill checks with FS and do the rest with KH. If you need the FS "starship ability scores," simply use the ones in FS, or use a modified skill roll by a character based on the ship they are flying. Freighters are slow and clumsy and throw a significant negative modifier on flying through an asteroid field compared to a starfighter.
Done.
You don't need many rules for much of this anyways, and making a ruling and moving on makes a better game system.
Want a collection of fantasy monsters and spells to do a Starfinder-style game? Pick up Barebones Fantasy (another excellent d00-lite system) and hack them. The monsters here could be reskinned to be FS alien creatures easily and give you ideas for special alien powers and attacks.
Frontier Space just does sci-fi easier and better than most systems. Many systems try to convert clumsy d20-style classes, level systems, and rules frameworks into space, and you get this mesh of rules and special conditions that feels like it should work better together than it really does. And what happens is the rules bloat and get incredibly huge. Only Stars Without Number breaks this trend, and they do it by throwing out most of the d20 wargaming framework and starting fresh.
Star Frontiers - as a classic setting - deserves better than it is getting today; with all the silly drama going on between a few companies that I care not to mention and the mess around Spelljammer. As a "star dungeon" genre game, Star Frontiers beats the pants off of anything from Hollywood or the big two game companies. The SF setting, and also the genre Frontier Space plays in, is this "modern space civilization" meets "John Carter of Mars" sort of mix that creates infinite heroic exploration adventures.
Very few games "get it" in this genre. You get games that want to be cyberpunk, space military, Alien, Star Wars, Star Trek, or any other "easy to emulate" genre. You go back to the origins of all of those, especially the black-and-white serials of Buck Roger and Flash Gordon, and you mix that with planetary swords and sorcery like John Carter - and you understand the genre. FS does all those genres too, but when you want to land your starship next to a strange alien ruin, get out the flashlights, grab your laser pistol, and go inside to check it out - no game does it better.
This is the ultimate "star dungeon" game with throwback nods to the 1980s and those great percentile systems.
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