Star Crawl

These Dungeon Crawl Classics 'zine games are fantastic. The art is primitive, but it has this DIY charm, and I love it for its jankyness. It looks like something drawn by a 12-year-old in a school notebook, but the sci-fi mod for DCC and MCC is amazingly well done and solid. The game is designed to expand, and if you wanted to create a custom weapons and armor list for a genre, it would be an hour's work, and your creations add to the fun.

These are 'zine games. DIY is part of the fun.

DCC is this game that easily expresses any idea with 3d6 stats and a dice chain. It feels like a core set of B/X rules and concepts that people can turn into anything from space games to sitcom simulators. The simplicity and unified dice-chain mechanic, along with the classes that contain genre rules, make a potent combination where all you need to do for genre simulation is come up with a few 10-level classes of the significant archetypes, loosely base them on DCC classes, and give them a few abilities to simulate the genre.

For sitcom crawl, just go to TV Tropes and base them on that. A day's work, at best, for those five types, and it would be a fun project.

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

So, Star Crawl? Is it a serious game? Does it have to be? It can or it can't - that is up to you. I could play Star Crawl Trek with this and zero-level funnel a group of red shirts on a humorous 'everybody dies' away team mission of death. You could do a semi-serious Trek-style campaign with this system, too, and toss in some randomness from a game like Stars Without Number for system generation, and you are all set.

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

Retro horror low-budget sci-fi? Star Crawl does that very well. I could play anything from Aliens to Roger Corman with these rules and have it work out great. Limit race selections to humans and ignore the zany art. I like the inclusion of psionics since that is one of those 1980s tropes for sci-fi where you always have the strange, mysterious psionic crew member that nobody trusts.

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

Could this be done seriously? I don't see any reason why it couldn't. The tone can shift quickly in DCC from zany to abject horror, and once you set the ground rules for a campaign, you play it how it plays. The rulebook may have silly pictures, but art like this inspires me to play this entirely seriously and with a grim and deadly tone more suited for games like Mothership. If I reimagined the rulebook with pictures like the above, this game would turn serious fast. I may need to hack in a gear list to give that part of the game more heft, but that is both possible and an enjoyable project to work on.

The Operation Bughunt game may be better suited to the previous genre, and this is another excellent 'zine game. What is more fun is both these games work together, with Star Crawl handling the more 'aliens and psi-powers' Trek, Lucas, and Firefly side of sci-fi, with Bughunt being the military-style James Cameron Aliens sci-fi. These two games' classes, weapons, and systems mesh perfectly with DCC or MCC, and they all work together. This looks the most slick of all the games here, but that is cool; they are who they are. Looks do not make something better, only different and cool.

I like both games; they are small enough to sit beside each other on my shelf and be used together.

Take a group of space marines or a Trek Crawl away team through Sailors of the Starless Sea? Fire in the hole! A survey team of space scientists in over their heads? Go for it! This is your game - not some group of game designers - and how you have fun is how you should play! The community comes up with fun stuff, which can also be added to your collection. Your stuff, homebrew, house rules, classes, and equipment lists are just as valid.

In fact, reskin any DCC module for sci-fi, and suddenly, you have dozens of complete adventures. Some are already sci-fi, like Purple Planet, so no changes are needed. Do the old 'disable or destroy the ship' trope and get going.

Nothing is stopping you.

Would Cephus Engine be a better game for this? If you like that Traveller 2d6 vibe and huge gear lists where every credit matters, then yes. I would stick with the DCC systems for something more rules-light and story-based, with simple class-based archetypes. DCC makes horror easier, too, since dying is expected and frequent, and character replacements are fast to create. Cepheus is more 'space sim' whereas DCC is more 'space dungeon.' This is still a fantastic sci-fi game and one of my top picks for that generic hex-crawl space gaming I love.

Sometimes, I look at these massive 5E sci-fi games and just get this feeling of designer-self-importance and pretentiousness that these hardcovers with hundreds of pages can deliver. 5E delivers some of the most slick and professional presentations in gaming, but most of it is filler, and it breaks easily when the multiclassing starts. 5E can never be play-tested enough to work correctly. And 5E is falling into that 'corporate gaming' place where the whole hobby begins feeling like layers of grifts.

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

The whole Goodman Games vibe is like this 'hippies in the back of a van' culture of roleplaying and gaming. It is communal, free-spirited, for the love of the hobby, open, chill, and relaxed. We all get along here, dude. All ideas and people are equal. All art is good. Your thing is your thing.

What defines good?

How fun something is.

If it looks like hand-drawn art, that is part of the secret groovy code. What matters is how it plays and gets along with others, not how it looks. Be chill, get along, respect others, and give peace a chance.

If something is broken? We find a cat to fix it, baby. Or we do it ourselves. Or find someone in the community to help. It's all cool, man.

To survive, our hobby must be more hippie, anti-corporate, groovy, and chill. We are in this together!

Do we need to wait for the store to sell us new classes and options for sixty or more bucks? Or a paid-for VTT with digital content? No way, man, don't think like that! We have many creative and cool people right here! Why do we need to send money to the fat cats on Wall Street? Our gaming hippie commune can do it ourselves, for cheaper and better. Write it out on notebook paper and staple it together, man. That is our rulebook.

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

It's all good.

Chill and have fun.

Do what you want to do.