Mail Room: Stars Without Number

Here comes a fun one, and also one I forgot was coming in the mail. The excellent old-school sci-fi game Stars Without Number (revised edition). This game was always a hard sell for my group, as we were years down the road with Star Frontiers, Space Opera, and even Star Wars and we did not have room for another sci-fi game in the mix. Now that I am alone, I am looking at  this game with more time and a fresh set of eyes.

325 pages of sci-fi amazing content. Random charts everywhere. A simple base system. No wonder I always see this game on the top of the best-seller lists at Drive-Thru RPG, this is the sci-fi OSR game to get these days and the revised edition sings a song of pure bliss among the stars. I dare say the game has more appeal to me than the incredibly hard sci-fi GURPS Space, just because I can grasp characters easy and the stuff I have to learn I can focus on.

So many sci-fi games have dies for my group at character creation, you want me to learn what now?

I have the full-color hardcover, so the book smells like ink and is just impressive on every page. I would have loved a glossy paper of a slightly heavier weight and a bookmark, but this is still great.

The game's default setting (one that is easy to replace with your own) has always interested me, and more so than Starfinder and other similar "galactic space reset" games. Here, there was some sort of hyperspace storm that cut off all planets in the galaxy from each other, and now things are opening back up slowly. This setting just seems so fun, and I could see playing a first contact game like a hex-crawl in space visiting worlds, establishing outposts, meeting world leaders, and watching how factions and alliances develop over the course of the game.

You could play a post-first contact game in an already settled area and have all the galactic side developed and fighting for control. You could play a mix, fighting the evil space empire, doing trading on the side, and then going out to the unexplored sector and do some hex-crawling if you want. You can make the galactic storm come and go at random, stranding travelers on planets for weeks or months before it lifts and life tries to return to normal again.

Mechs? Got em. Starship combat kind of like the FTL videogame? Got it. Psionics? Got them. AI characters? Check. Random systems and planets and random everything else? All here. You got a galaxy of random charts, rules, and content in this book and it is clearly one of the high-value grabs for sci-fi gaming, no matter what system you roll with.

And the game's flavor is really anything you want it to be. More like [your favorite sci-fi movie or TV show] - yes, it can do that, but it keeps with the generic "kitchen sink sci-fi" premise that D&D does well and really few games have done for sci-fi since the original Space Opera game, but on a lower level than Space Opera that is more focused on adventure and characters. A huge plus.

I had an loved the 2010 version, and this looks like more to love. I am seriously impressed, and this is going to be a fun one to explore. More soon.