One of the hardest things I did recently was shelve all my old nostalgia games. I got to a point where I had a very nice collection of OSR games, plus a few new ones I wanted to try, but my legacy collection of games kept sitting there and silently demanding attention.
I love them, my brother and I played them for years, and those will always be a special part of my life.
But there is a point where I felt they were holding me back from having new experiences. Also, buying reprints of them and being in fan groups for them felt like that was holding me back from trying and enjoying the new stuff. I still am in those groups (and I do have a lot to add), but I want to make time to explore new games and join new communities.
And while I like having POD reprints of the classics, sometimes having them means they demand attention and they take time away from indie creators trying to get attention and coverage. While I love my classic games, I love the excitement and new ideas that this generation of publishers and creators are bringing to the hobby. Instead of giving money to a billion dollar corporation for a POD legacy game they no longer really support, I would rather give that money and attention to those fans and creators working in a basement somewhere to create new and fun experiences.
I realized I can't always be looking behind me, and that was holding me back from discovering games that I may love. Any game - even newer ones - can become an obsession like this too and prevent you from exploring and finding yourself.
I love you old games, but with limited time and attention I would rather give that to people out there trying to build something new and cool. So with that in mind, I wanted to collect some of my thoughts on nostalgia games and the systems I am using today that replace them.
FrontierSpace
What could ever replace Star Frontiers for me? The classic game my brother and I played for a good amount of our lives, kept us excited about science fiction, and was a great "other universe" from the tentpole franchises of Star Wars and Star Trek. One I am looking at now is the excellent FrontierSpace game from DWD Studios. This is a classic d100 style game with an excellent action economy and support for ability scores and skills over 100%.
Star Frontiers Unarmed Combat
The hand-to-hand game seems light-years better than Star Frontiers, which limits unarmed damage to the few points of your Punching Score, no damage dice, and has you hoping for a 01-02 roll or "ends in zero" roll for a knockout result in melee. Or getting someone in a hold with martial arts skill while others beat him for a few points of damage per hit.
I tried replaying the Volturnus modules with the original rules and the first "escape the starship" scenario fell flat because of the unarmed damage and combat rules. They game felt and played "wrong" to me, like there was something missing. This wasn't an OSR "then make it up" moment, the rules laid out options and none of them felt really great or worked well.
FrontierSpace Unarmed Combat
In FrontierSpace base unarmed damage is 1d5+melee damage bonus, and those with the warrior skill (basically melee combat) can buy a skill benefit and do 1d10+damage bonus. You can multi-attack too as much as you want as long as you can stomach the cumulating -20% extra action penalties (which also apply to defense).
The unarmed skill also has a great assortment of abilities and bonuses when fighting in melee (purchasable with development points, DP). They can gain improved dodging against being unarmed versus armed opponents, multiple attackers, and dodging ranged attacks. They can get a massive bonus when using two-handed weapons or dual-wielding, and even can conceal melee weapons.
All of these bonuses can be bought with improvement points as the character gains experience, so their skills improve in unique and interesting ways. If my player wanted to create a new skill benefit, maybe one based on a feat, power, or special ability from another game (for example, bonus sneak attack damage or blocking missile weapon attacks with a laser sword), that could be written up, balanced, and dropped alongside one of the existing ones they give you and purchasable as you gain DP.
There is a lot of customizability here, and with benefits existing for every skill, the system is incredibly flexible and adaptable to anything you could want or add to it. The melee game in particular feels a lot better than the original game this was inspired by.
In our legacy Star Frontiers campaign one of my brother's main characters was a melee fighter and Star Law Ranger. This set of rules would have made my brother very happy and his character a lot more fearsome than the Star Frontiers version. In our legacy campaign we ended up switching rules a few times to get that feeling, and the base game never really did a good job at making his character feel powerful. Here, he could customize his Star Law Ranger into being one of the most fearsome melee fighters in the galaxy and have the special abilities to back it up.
This is one of the advantages to playing a more modern set of rules written by fans of the original, you get so many of these "play improvements" that make the entire experience a lot more satisfying and interesting than the original game. You get a high degree of character customization. This game feels like a next-generation Star Frontiers to me.
The Setting
I love the original Star Frontiers setting, and I know I would port the original setting races into any universe I play with these rules. The original Star Frontiers setting said "the original races came together here" so there are a few questions hanging out here. Did they gather anywhere else? Where did they come from? Are there any others out there?
So there is enough latitude to create your own map and universe without playing on the original Frontier map. You could add new races and have them intermingle with the existing ones. You could also have a mysterious race of worms show up and find this area of space and salvage a lot of the original lore and conflict without sacrificing too much.
The included setting in FrontierSpace is workable, I like the fact there are are different governments to deal with and to have interacting with each other. One thing the original Star Frontiers setting lacked were different areas of space controlled by different factions, things felt very much a uni-faction with one Star Trek style Federation (UPF) running everything.
I suppose if pressed, I would do a more grand sweeping space opera style setting, with ways to return to the original home-worlds of the major races (via slow travel space arks), some home-world factions involved, and more main-map factions and areas of space. Maybe make some of the new races native to this "crossroads" area of space, and put an over-arcing metaplot in place. Something like the crossroads is an area of dense and heavy metals and natural resources, the only place like it in thousands of light-years of low-density space, and the resources extracted from here are critical to the home areas of space of the major races.
Without these raw materials the home worlds will stagnate and exploration will eventually grind to a halt within 100 years. Every so often a new mammoth space ark shows up from the home-worlds after a journey lasting hundreds of years, new factions are introduced, population for a new planet is awoken, and the space ark is loaded up with raw materials for the trip home that will take hundreds of years.
With this campaign setup you could drop the original Frontier setting in there as a home-world faction and area of space that is supplying colonists to this area of space and have that nostalgia hit while keeping things in the newer campaign setting fresh.
Technology
The technology level is different, the ships are a bit more advanced with antigravity and speedier travel, but since the timeline could be advanced or reworked, that isn't too much of a problem. Again, if this is a campaign set after the Frontier timeline and that area of space has been depleted of resources and we are playing 500 years in the future this all works.
Star Frontiers works best when it is "D&D in space" with a mix of modern-style RP, hexcrawls, dungeon adventures, and space combat added on as a fun, almost cinematic, battle where everyone gets to take part. You put too much advanced technology in there, all-seeing scanners, teleporters, real-time instant interstellar communication, and you lose a lot of the adventure elements the game depends on to be "D&D in space."
This is the same problem "too much divination and teleportation" magic that D&D has, and it applies to sci-fi as well. If character have no need to leave their starship, can scan a planet and instantly find the crashed and stolen satellite, and lock onto it and beam it up to the ship there is no need to get out of the ship at all. You have to start inventing reasons why "the scanners and transporters" don't work, or why "instant communication back home doesn't work here."
For good "pulp adventure sci-fi" there has to be work, travel, and going down there to see what is happening. You can't shortcut player investigation and face-to-face interaction with a button on a console.
With super-tech, you end up doing more work finding reasons to limit the unlimited than you do in crafting fun adventures. It gets tiring after a while, which is why everything needs a cost and limitations - magic and technology - in order to have that classic adventure experience.
To be honest, Pathfinder 1e with unlimited first and third party expansion-books ended up this way for us too, you can literally be a mage and solve every problem in the world with a near zero-cost spell. You didn't even need other character classes beyond a cleric for heals and resurrections.
Starships & More
To keep things simple I will probably use the FrontierSpace ships. I had ideas of mixing in Traveller ships, but that feels like too much of a jumbled mix of rules and ideas to work practically. If I go with the assumption this is a 500 years after Star Frontiers setting the only thing I need to keep are the Frontier races that I would like in my game, and possibly use the others in FrontierSpace as expansion material.
It is one of those things, if I am moving on to a new rules system, keep things as much as possible in it and give it a chance before changing everything. The few things I want to keep, some of the legacy lore, can be added easily. I don't need everything from the original rules except the races and the original setting still being somewhere "out there in the stars."
I still would love to do a Traveller-style campaign with these rules, but I may have other ideas for Traveller I want to explore. For now, keeping what I loved about the original Star Frontiers and upgrading to a new set of rules seems like the best fit for this game.
This game really is a better fit for Star Frontiers than the original, at least for me. This is one of those few non-B/X games that is on my "best games" shelf and I look forward to diving in.
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