SpaceMaster 2nd Edition

 

Spacemaster was my introduction to Rolemaster - I did not play Rolemaster at all and picked up Spacemaster 2nd Edition first. My book was the 1992 large floppy all-in-one version, which I still have in a box around here. The book itself is covered in clear plastic Contact paper, like some textbook, but that has kept the book in neat perfect shape for nearly 30 years - and that is saying something for a soft-cover floppy book.

I recently got the PDFs as I sort through dozens of boxes of rulebooks looking for my copy, and I still love this game. But why?

Many Better Choices Today

GURPS Space is cool and it does a lot. Cepheus Engine is another great sci-fi game, and it is OGL as well so it shall live forever. You can even find copies of Space Opera and Star Frontiers out there, and those are classics. Traveller too, in all its interpretations. Star Wars - for our group - shined with the old d6 System books. And many generic games do sci-fi just as well, from FATE to Savage Worlds to many, many others. HARP even has a HARP-SF book as a sci-fi role playing option while keeping you in the Rolemaster style rules continuity.

So why Space Master?

Specifically, the 2nd Edition of the game and not the later "SpaceMaster Privateer" version? For starters, the Privateer version was based off of RMFRP, so I get this feeling the skill bloat that makes me cautious of that game will get weighed down in those two-form skill sheets for 300+ skills. SpaceMaster 2nd already has a lot of skills, and if at all possible I want to keep them simple.

SpaceMaster 2nd also is closest mechanically to RoleMaster Classic, so all my experience with one will mirror itself nicely with the other. The two are compatible, so I can re-use my RMC monster books and put latex masks and some foam-rubber carapace on them should I need some creepy-crawly monsters for planets and asteroid caves with minimal conversion effort.

If I am currently interested in Rolemaster Classic, SpaceMaster 2nd Edition seems like a nice fit.

But the Other Games?

SpaceMaster to our group has always been sort of "the messed up version of Star Trek." Back when Trek was still idealistic and innocent of the modern tendency to smear the smelly brown goo of 2020 relevance all over our fiction and entertainment, SpaceMaster was the messy, corrupt, violent, dark, and twisted version of the Federation and the better society that failed and never was.

Corrupt politicians had private armies, ran prison ships, and started wars just because they wanted to profit or take out petty revenge on planetary dictators. Criminal syndicates ran wild and black markets for illegal goods were everywhere. If you were a star miner, you didn't file a claim, you just flew somewhere, setup shop, and mined whatever you found and prayed no one would jump you on the way back. If there were others mining the area, join in or blow them all up, your choice, there are no rules of conduct in this galaxy.

The way we ran it, it was really a mix of the worst of the cocaine-wars, Iran-Contra style deals, drug and gun running, wars as politics, media as gatekeeper, evil mega-corporation, and corruption filled 1980's and 1990's version of Star Trek as we could dream up. It was fun and the campaign lasted a long time.

The Crits were a Part of It

The number of violent and clinically specific ways you could die were a huge part of this game. You could be a corporate executive selling drugs on the side to your mining colonies, encounter a bunch of space thugs, and get blown to smithereens by laser fire in spectacular fashion. In a way the original Robocop movie influenced a lot of the gunplay and action, brutally specific and violent like a horror movie - but since many of the characters were horrible people there was a puritanical sense of just desserts to everyone's fate in this game.

Horrible space people died in horrible ways trying to do horrible things to each other.

The game was played PvP with factions, and when one got wiped out, we would create another and have the players who needed new characters work together there to attack the survivors of the first round. That would continue with backstabbing and all sorts of plots and intertwined fates, with the PvP aspects of how bad you could foil the others and mess with their plots taking center stage.

Some groups went off on their own for sections, to do mining or specific missions, but everyone was tied into an area of space that seemed like Miami during the cartel drug wars of the 1980's, so characters got stepped on and pulled into plots with alarming frequency. Often players found reasons just out of spite, but it was all in good fun and it gave players a reason to PvP so we loved it.

But again, the mechanics of the game supported our game world, and the brutal nature of the game helped create the world and conflicts. We could not get that with a d6 System Star Wars or GURPS version that easily, so SpaceMaster provided a great fit of brutal realism while serving as the sandbox for violent space mayhem.

More soon on this, and it is fun to read these again and reminisce.