Back in the day, Star Frontiers was our game. My brother and I played that since it came out, and ran an epic campaign that lasted decades. What we loved about it is the game setup a sci-fi sandbox and let you go crazy with all sorts of adventures, starship battles, and exploration all across the universe where a small starship and crew could make a difference.
Contrast this with Star Trek and Star Wars, which can feel like the only way you can make a difference in the galaxy is with a giant battleship and fleet of capital ships. Yes, there is always the small smuggler ships and Edge of the Empire went a long way to restoring the small ships matter feeling, but every movie that comes out works against you in it puts into your mind that bigger and better is the only way to affect change in the galaxy.
Small Ships = Adventure!
This is also why I like capping the size of ships in Traveller to the original tonnage limits in book two to the 5,000 ton maximum, and the best drive performance you could get out of those "battleships" is only 1 or 2 G acceleration and jump 1 or 2 as well. Got a star 4 hexes away? Sorry, not going to encounter any ships larger than 3,000 tons there, and that ship would be loaded with Z drives. Small ships could frequently outrun larger ones, and you never got these 50,000 ton 6G acceleration battleship hot rods like we had in High Guard (that could also have jump 6). The game became Janes All the World's Navies at that point and a lot was lost.
Yes, Star Frontiers (with Knight Hawks) had battleships, but there were very few of them in the galaxy. You could outrun larger ships in a small ship. You had to watch for starfighters. The low-level starship game felt really good. Everything else came from that model of starship reality, and the planetary ground game was a direct result. How planetary militias worked. The exploration game. How ships got hired for jobs. What ships got sent to investigate mysteries and respond to emergencies. A small team in a smaller ship could make a difference.
If an outpost in a far away star suddenly goes silent, sending a small adventure class ship to investigate was the first choice. In a universe with modern space navies, the planetary government is likely to send a destroyer out there with a few hundred troops, with escorts, and your scale gets messed up. There is no reason for smaller ships and those classic one-party adventures.
If a sci-fi system does not balance ship size, speeds, and jump distances it gets boring quickly for me because the universe will go to the biggest ships with the biggest fleets. The small-scale sci-fi adventure I love is lost.
FrontierSpace
So I got FrontierSpace in the mail last holiday season, and I am just starting to give it a look. This uses the same d00 system that is instantly familiar to players of Star Frontiers, Gangbusters, or Top Secret - but the system is very different and has a cool action economy where you can attempt as many actions during a turn as you want, it is just the one after the first gets a -20 multi-action modifier, and that modifier sticks around, accumulates, and becomes your penalty to your defenses.
Lose initiative and want to make two resistance rolls to dodge attacks before you get to act? The first is at +0, the next is at -20, and your turn starts with a -40 action modifier for your first action, a -60 on your second, and so on. This creates a sense of tactical play over the turn and benefits high skill levels tremendously. It also creates a betting game where you can push your turn hard and try to slip in one more action or attack, and possibly pay the price later. The multi-action penalty resets on each combat turn, so you begin again at zero.
Otherwise, the system and mechanics are very similar to the d100 games we love. Simple, fast, and fun.
Standardized Ships
FrontierSpace comes with a list of standardized ships, and from what I can see, no ship design rules. One could say Knight Hawks also had standardized ship designs, but they had a design system that worked for civilian ships (the military ships were allowed to break the rules). I would have liked a complete design system, but that isn't a deal breaker.
Ships have standardized ranges and fuel consumptions, anywhere from 0.5 to 3 LY per day, one fuel is used for each LY traveled, and fuel tanks are from 20-80 units. There is no benefit for smaller ships, and the larger ships appear to be faster in inter-star travel with longer ranges. I prefer smaller ships being faster with longer ranges, but the ships look well-designed and built for adventuring. Not what I like, but not a deal-breaker again.
A Better Star Frontiers?
From everything else I read, the game feels very complete with more options than the original game in gear, skills, weapons, robots, vehicles, and development options. I am liking what I see a lot, and this looks like a more modern game that is well supported that I would support over the legacy game (even though I love that game).
I prefer to support the indie and newer games over the legacy ones, since people are making a living off of these games and efforts, the community can often develop new material for them, and there is a lot of potential for fan creations and support. With legacy games often you just buy the game for nostalgia and there is not new content being made, so there isn't a future in the game where the community can join in and produce new material.
The races are like the Star Frontiers ones, with a few being very similar. Nothing is stopping you from taking the classics Star Frontier races and using those, or playing the classic Frontier setting with these rules. You do get a few cool new ones, and robots as an option. You could use all the races together, this is sci-fi, so most anything can be dropped in and work.
The original Star Frontiers has some weaknesses, like the very low unarmed damage, and the high ability scores and skills feeling uninteresting as you can't do much more with a high score other than get automatic hits. At least here you can push extra actions and resistance rolls, so high scores can really work for you in FrontierSpace. The game here is much stronger than the original.
New Ships?
You could also use Knight Hawks ships here too, but the ship combat balance would definitely be affected by the multi-action system in FrontierSpace. It may come out better, overpowered, or worse. Same thing with dropping in Traveller ships, you get turns where you are firing three or four attacks with some of these ship weapons that were only designed for one attack a turn and things I bet can get very deadly quick. Still, if you allow pilots to dodge attacks with resistance rolls everything may balance out, but this is a "try it and see" thing.
I mention this because my first idea when I saw this game was to use Classic Traveller starships instead of the ones here to get the space game feel I like. The ships in Mongoose Traveller are a bit different, and tend to be more High Guard with percentage design rules than the classic table based ones. So this would be a Traveller-like map and star travel experience with a modernized set of Star Frontiers rules driving the action.
It may work.
Or I may put my hacking and modding urges aside and play with the ships they give me. This would probably be a better idea because if I am new at the game I need to understand the original system balance.
But I do like hacking and modding games.
More Soon!
I am excited about this game, and I got the other games in the series as well that use the same system for fantasy and spy games. This feels like the perfect game for d100 play, modern, supported, exciting, with an action economy that burns up high skill and ability levels quickly for some awesome action at the table.
I need to play a few games and check this out for sure. Who knows, maybe a replay of the classic Volturnus series with a new engine under the hood? Sounds like a great time.
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