Design Room: Simplicity is Depth

There is a beauty to a simple, clean design that no amount of detail or crunch can improve. One can go on and on, providing tactical depth but adding nothing. At a point, you are taking away options just to give them back later, and the design becomes "rats in a maze," but the maze here is rules and paragraphs of subclass options. And with every new subclass added, you are taking those abilities away from those who thought they had them.

Oh, I thought as a druid, I was always a bit of a beastmaster. So you are telling me the new beastmaster subclass does that better? Oh, okay, I picked healing. I guess I am a little more inadequate these days. I just will never use my beastmater powers, since they will never be seen as good as the subclass that specializes in it.

In OSE? All druids are druids. If you want to do druid things, just make them up and ask the referee if what you are doing is druid enough. If it is a spell, well, then, it is automatically druid, and what you can do. You don't need subclasses "carving off" things you can't do with each new one added, either because you never knew you could do that and it was just taken away, or "someone else does it better now," and you have the specialization curse.

In the OSR, classes are how we have party specialization, not subclasses. I don't need rules to solve the non-problem that "all fighters are the same," since that's on me to solve. I will do that through my roleplaying, gear choices, social role, and stats. A party of four or five probably will solve the specialization problem through everyone picking a different class, or some using race-as-class to play an elf or a dwarf.

The game isn't giving me rules or subclass choices to make my elf different from other elves; that is on me. This is where my ability to play a character, roleplay, and craft a unique character comes into play. The player skill needed to do this is much higher than 5E.

5E solves the problem by cutting off parts of your class role, forbidding them from other builds, and making you a false specialist instead of a master of all. If I am the druid? I want to be the weather-caller, wild-shaper, druid of growth, beast-master, and harmony priest. I get that in OSE. Thematically, that is much easier for me as a role-player and much better for me to play my class role. I can call myself a "specialist" in one area, but there aren't any rules for that; it is just my choice.

I am likely the party's only druid, so I get to do it all.

Easy. Simple. Clean. Flexible.

We saw the "lie of specialization" begin to seep into the game with AD&D 2nd Edition and the kitbash design introduced in the compendiums. The game began to accumulate the debt of inferior game designers, and it diverged from the original clean, flexible simplicity it captured. 5E enshrines the lie of specialization and writes it into the structure of the game.

Without specialization, my druid is free to embrace all the tropes of being a druid, and I am freer to craft the character I want to play. Nothing is telling me "I can't do that since some other subclass is better than me at it."

D&D doesn't need specialization.

Class choice more than covers it.

D&D is better without specialization.

Design Room: Mutant Future

You can't really talk about Mutant Future without being familiar the early 1980's post-apocalyptic games such as Gamma World and Aftermath. Even TV shows such as Thundarr the Barbarian and movies such as Planet of the Apes or The Road Warrior apply here, and one could throw in the original Westworld, The Omega Man, THX 1138 and even Rollerball or Sleeper in this category.

And then there is the Fallout universe, a lot of which applies here, but I am careful about saying "this is like Fallout" because Fallout is almost too familiar to everybody. Fallout is also a lot less gonzo and wacky as the Mutant Future game, so there is a bit of superhero gaming mixed in with this genre, along with concepts familiar to readers of comic books like the old X-Men comics of the 1970's.

The premise is, "Let us think about that the future could be like, and then let's destroy it and create a new world out of that." We are two steps removed from "today" in these games, one in that we have little idea of the alternate future that was destroyed, and we have even less of an idea of the world that comes after that.

I love this genre because it is totally mind twisting, and you are constantly asking yourself if a place you are encountering is part of the unknown future-past or the maniacally twisted now. I get the "now" part a little better, since survival and the medieval-like state most of the world has devolved into you know from traditional fantasy gaming. A sword is a sword and a village is a village, people ride horses and the blacksmith bangs out horseshoes and other metal objects.

Then things get different. Bits of old technology are passed around, books, magazines, and small household items re-purposed in novel and different ways. You see a mix of the familiar in the everyday use, a record turntable used as a potting wheel, forks and knives, a necklace made of bottle caps, an old wind-up watch, horse carts with automotive tires, and bits of today and a possible tomorrow in everyday medieval life.

And instead of elves and dwarves; we have mutants, talking animals and plants, and even androids and robots living in these places. They live simply off the land, and the society is your typical fantasy medieval world - but the inhabitants are all over the place. A talking lion with bat wings and telepathy. A half-human cyborg. A six-foot dandelion man. And while there are normal humans to ground things, the weird and wacky live here, but yet the "high fantasy" world model mostly applies. Different kingdoms rules the land. Savage tribes live like primitives in forgotten places. Wars and conflicts between feudal kingdoms go on when resources are scarce. Bandits raid settlements. Treaties are made and primitive life, colored a little by strange changes, goes on.

The fun twist is the magic isn't magic, it is the remains of super-technology we do not understand. Also, the forces which destroyed the world mutate and change creatures and even the fabric of reality itself in strange and deadly ways. Swarms of man-eating ladybugs can plague the land. A giant mutated potato plant can lurk under the ground and feast on unwary travelers. A bat with radioactive eyes that eats metal can terrorize travelers. A psychic badger can sit by the side of the road and force people to leave their food on the ground and walk away. A crazed building-sized farming robot could treat all life as pests to be eradicated. Anti-gravity warbots, still fighting the war that destroyed the world, could be flying around out there, somewhere.

And the ruins of civilization are dangerous places that should not be traveled to. The weathered, radiation-blasted, overgrown, nature-reclaimed wastes of giant cities stretch on for hundreds of miles of destroyed land, with mountains of rubble overgrown by forests, giant fissures and canyons blasted through the earth, and changes so drastic they turn the familiar into something that was once organized and civil into a hellish and broken wasteland of civilization tossed in a garbage dump, turned over on itself by terra-forming bulldozers, and turned into a deadly jungle of the broken remains of civilization where deadly creatures live, radiation storms blast, and machines wander the wastes in varying states of disrepair. You should not be wandering around on a map of New York City with a couple spacy looking buildings, this place underwent a tectonic upheaval a couple thousand years into an alternate future from today - you wouldn't recognize the place before it got destroyed, and afterwards you should be worrying about the tectonic plate that created a mountain range, jungle, and ocean through the heart of the city.

Welcome to Mutant Future

This is Mutant Future, and this is also the same gaming genre as (to an extent) Gamma World. The one thing I like about Mutant Future is that it keeps the original WTF feeling of crazy science fantasy, where the later editions of Gamma World were more high-fantasy influenced with mutant replacements for dragons, fairies, elves, gnolls, and other fantasy tropes. If I want fantasy elements in Mutant Future I can always put them in, but if I want to keep things less D&D I can without having to say "kodo dragons and the fairy-like lils do not exist." Even for players familiar with Gamma World, Mutant Future is a lot more unfamiliar and unpredictable, and I feel that is actually a strength when playing in the genre.

Though this game is 100% compatible with Labyrinth Lord and the Advanced Edition Companion, so if you want extra fantasy based creatures - there they are. Roll some mutations on them and you are good to go. Or just take a normal animal or plant, give it an AC and hit dice, and roll some mutations and you are good to go.

Need an example? Let's take a giant green jellyfish, give it 5 HD and an AC of 7, make it float through the air, and let's roll some mutations - density alteration (self), psionic flight, poison susceptibility, and temperature control (freezing). So these things float through the air in large forms, freeze their food with psionic powers, and they can shrink down and become dense rocks when threatened - and they are also susceptible to different toxins. There, a new monster nobody has ever encountered before, and something completely unique and original.

The same thing goes for robots, technology, hazards, monsters, and everything else in the world. Remember this point, since this will come up later.

Sometimes I feel the unique and iconic D&D monsters (mind flayers, beholders, drow, etc) have gotten so tired and overused the appeal of having them wears off (sometimes, I still think they are classics, but there are other times I want something new). The familiarity may attract players since it is always preferable to play a game you are familiar with, and against monsters you know how to deal with. But those strange floating jellyfish that freeze-dry their food? If I saw those as a character I would have no idea what they can do until the temperature started dropping around my character and they started shrinking down into dense, tiny rocks that sat on the ground like a psionic refrigerator turret. And I wouldn't know what else they could do, or even what their weaknesses were.

I love these moments at the gaming table, where the group of players is sitting there slack-jawed and wondering if a floating green jellyfish is something completely innocent or the beginning of a total party kill. The smart players will find a way far away, while the not so smart ones will start poking and prodding the floating abnormality.

Anything is Right

The fantasy-game compatibility is a huge strength here, since it gives you more to pull from. Mix fantasy and magic in there and enjoy a strange Rifts like mix of everything. Maybe a sci-fi world collided with a fantasy world and all hell broke loose. Replace magic with technology and mutations, or re-color the existing fantasy creatures with mutations and technology. A medusa with robotic, laser-eyed and stunner-eyed snake tentacles for hair? Fine, do it. It is your game.

The only way I feel you can go wrong is by basing this more on grim and gritty realism, and move more towards The Road Warrior and The Walking Dead sort of realistic worlds. I feel when you de-emphasize the strange and fantastical, you lose a lot of the wonder and charm of the game. When you take out the "whatever goes" feeling, it becomes something any modern rules system can do, and you lose that wonder and danger of the unknown. You don't want to make this predictable. You want the ruined world to come alive through that "anything can happen" feeling.

I would avoid traditional high-fantasy magic though when mixing (unless this is a collision of worlds type game), and keep the fantastical powers more mutation and technology based. You want one source of power, and I feel you don't want to all of a sudden throw "magic powers" into the mix as an extra power source that makes everything easy. You want the source to "fantastic power" to be the same for everyone (mutant powers and tech), and avoid giving players the traditional "high fantasy easy out" where fireball, teleport, and magic missile take over the game.

Two Worlds in One

Save the "normal" feeling for the settlements though, since you still want that fantasy medieval model to apply to the character's home bases and the feudal civilization around them. I find this game's focus on medieval construction, travel, and commerce a perfect fit for this genre, since I can create a miniature "feudal world" that coexists alongside the "places of ancient ruin" and have those two worlds collide and compete. I love having little "kingdoms" and "tribes" fight for scarce resources and farming land while the dangerous ruins of ancient cities loom over them. I love having players worry about "that is the red eye kingdom's soldiers, stay away from them" sorts of things. I love having the drama of the survivors play out and influence the adventures of the players - and even have these dramas become adventures themselves.

For example, if you have a blue kingdom run by a benevolent robot king, you could make his battery running out and the kingdom going to hell a constant worry for them. You could have a totalitarian red kingdom run by a mutated houseplant who thinks he is Napoleon that is well-run but brutal and confiscates any form of technology from subjects or travelers. The conflicts between these kingdoms becomes the backstory and focus of the game, and the "strange world around it" becomes the source of power for the characters (and also unexpected new sources of conflict).

I like the "two world" setup for these games, and I have had many post-apocalyptic games break down because the entire focus of the game was on "go into the city and get loot." There was no other story there, and when the characters found the ultimate weapon and armor upgrade and could beat all the enemies, the game was over. With another story happening that players can invest in, there is a reason to gain character power to influence the outcome of the world's stories and factions.

Keep the cities dangerous though, so dangerous the kingdoms have given up on these places as hellish, forbidden, ancient places where no one should go. I feel you don't really want organized bands of scavengers in these areas, since you want the focus of the conflicts between the factions to center on the scarce resources outside of the cities and the competition for them. Those areas should be so dangerous if a large group moved in to strip it clean, the monsters, hazards, and robots that are there should wipe them all out. You want to keep that "forbidden place" myth strong in both the character's minds and also the inhabitants of the world.

The Shadow of Gamma World

One thing that keeps this game difficult for me is we were big Gamma World fans, so the shadow of that game always looms large over our thoughts. One of the easiest ways to deal with this, I feel, is to say, "Gamma World is dead." If you want to pull in elements from that world into your games that cross the dimensional barrier, do so, and keep it strictly to mystery and lore of 'another world that may have been.' Maybe survivors from that world crossed the dimensional barrier. Maybe their spirits float in the nether and all of a sudden, some of the familiar pops up in the new world.

But celebrate the new like this was a new game. Everything you loved about that world, sans some of the pieces of gear and monsters, is here in one form or another - plus more. In fact, I think this game is better because it is more "anything goes" than Gamma World, which was moving towards a D&D like "iconic monsters and items" sort of marketed and pre-made high fantasy experience.

But in another way, I feel it is a bit unfair to just compare this to Gamma World, since this game is more than that. Where Gamma World was more of a set experience with a defined list of iconic monsters and technology, this is more of an old-school science fantasy post-apocalyptic toolbox where your ideas are more important and celebrated than what the game's designers give you. I feel that is the difference here. Gamma World was more of a World of Warcraft type experience where you played for the lore and iconic features - and I say was because the game has spanned multiple incompatible versions and it is out of print (to the best of my knowledge). It is tough for us to let the game go, but let it go we must.

Your games need to be more than what's in the old books. You need to take what you loved about the old game, and expand and improve on those elements. Love the old Gamma World death machines? Make a better one in the new game. Make two. Call it something else. Don't copy - improve. Make something new. Do something different. Put your creativity into the game. Into this game.

This is more of a game where your creations should shine, your creativity is the reason to play, and your imagination is more important than all the pre-made stuff. This game is in print. This game has a free no-art version available for download. If we support this game, it supports a game in print plus all the future players who may discover it. I feel it is more socially responsible plus forward thinking to support the new and in-print games.

It is tough letting a piece of your gaming history go, but I feel it is ultimately for the better. The original spirit of our first gonzo post-apoc adventures can live on in our games (along with some of the things we love, pick and choose), but this just feels like a better place to be.

A Brand New End of the World

I like Mutant Future. I feel this is one of those new-era old-school forgotten classics. It is an open sandbox you can drop infinite ideas into. It pulls in the fantasy elements directly from Labyrinth Lord, and is 100% compatible with that game. Also, this game starts with a more based and low-level fantasy world than does other games - this game starts in medieval fantasy and then goes into science fantasy. The rules here start with that 'medieval world' assumption with castles, horses, carts, rafts, primitive commerce, and men-at-arms fighting battles. The default world and how it works (in my mind) is the same as Labyrinth Lord, with a couple differences. A feudal society living in the ruins of a more advanced ancient world - and be it magic or technology, this is the same story told by fantasy authors a million times before.

That is the strength of this game, but with the added bonus of being able to put your own imagination in the game through the strange and wonderful creatures, robots, technology, hazards, and places you create. It starts in a familiar place, and then it goes anywhere your imagination can take you.

Design Room: GangBusters

Get ready for a true classic, and one of my absolute favorites of the TSR box game era, and yes, this includes Star Frontiers.

GangBusters.

Where else can you play characters like Sam Spade, Al Capone, Little Caesar (aka Edward G Robinson), Dick Tracy, Elliot Ness, Nucky Thompson (Boardwalk Empire), James Cagney (aka White Heat), the Shadow, Phillip Marlowe, Nero Wolfe, Charles Foster Kane, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and the classy dames and gents of the era?

What other pen-and-paper RPG lets you live the life of an Untouchable, or better yet, a gangster fighting his way to the top? Or a reporter uncovering corruption, or a private eye solving mysteries?

This game let you do it all, from two-fisted matinee crime busting to big name gangsters to the entirety of Noir to private eyes, and more like radio shows such as The Shadow or Rocky Jordan. This system was perfectly at home handling Indiana Jones if you were so inclined. This was one of the greats of the time, released as a TSR d00 game with much of the same rules as the other games of the time, such as Top Secret and Star Frontiers.

And this was published in 1982.

It was ahead of its time then, and it was never matched since in the 33 years since.

Characters

One of the great things about this game is it incentivized experience points. If you were a criminal, you got XP for earning illegal dough. Private eyes got XP solving cases. Cops got XP busting crooks. Reporters got XP breaking stories. This was actually the next evolution of D&D and AD&D's "XP for GP" mechanic, and it gave your character a clear day-zero motivation. You knew what you needed to do. The experience system motivated you to get out there in the world and make your own story, instead of waiting for the referee to run one for you.

You can imagine a D&D style game with this experience point system. Thieves get XP for stealing wealth. Paladins get XP for destroying evil. Clerics get XP for supporting and spreading their faith. Fighters get XP for killing things. Mages get XP for collecting magical knowledge and using magic. All of a sudden, your character motivations become crystal clear, and players are chomping at the bit to get out there and do what they were born to do.

Spiritually, the game was closer to Top Secret than Star Frontiers, but it was a lot simpler than the former. There were some derived stats, some stats on different number ranges, and also luck and presence scores. A dedicated driving ability score was used instead of a driving skill, which let everyone get in on the fun of car chases. Also, the ability scores were very well described, it was clear what each one was for, when you should make checks, how you make the checks, and when to make rolls. I don't think another game of the time had such a tight set of ability scores that were so useful (with no fluff), and also, these scores begged to be used.

Presence was a charisma-like stat based on a 1-10 score. It was off the 1-100 range because it was integral to the 2d10 NPC reaction chart, which saw a lot of use when interrogating suspects, asking questions to NPCs, roughing up someone for information, charming a pretty lady, threatening a ne'er-do-well, interviewing a witness, seeing if your boss was mad at you, or any other social interaction. If you were a great GangBusters referee, this chart saw a lot of use behind the scenes, and it was a great guide for for how you roleplayed NPCs in response to player actions.

Luck was a percentage statistic based on a 1-50% scale, and you rolled it whenever you wanted to determine if the winds of fortune blew a character's way. It had obvious combat uses like surviving death or seeing if there was a pillow truck down below to break your fall, but it also had great non-combat uses as well. Did the criminal leave a fingerprint? Was there lipstick on the glass? Did your character just miss the gangsters waiting for him at the train station? Was there a taxi nearby? Did your camera capture the killer's face? Did you win at last night's numbers game? If another ability score did not catch it, luck was used to clean up - and you were either lucky, or you weren't.

It didn't really matter if your luck was poor, as you could make jokes about your bad luck at the table. Similarly, you could work with low statistics pretty well, or accept the fact that maybe this mug's career wasn't going to be too bright and go down in a hail of gunfire. The characters were simple, potentially disposable (like original D&D), and you could always come up with a new one pretty quickly.

The skill system was also worth noting, as it let you spend earned XP on a number of specialty skills, such as safecracking, boxing, accounting, or forensics-style skills. You had to spend a lot to get good skills, and you started the game with one skill. A skill's starting level was rolled randomly on the ability score chart, which gave you a lot of variance on how good you were. You could be lousy at what you did, or a genius. Again, you rolled with the punches and played the hand you were dealt, so having a lousy roll didn't hurt you as much as you thought. You could still increase a skill by 5% every level, so it didn't sting too much, and new skills were rolled randomly, so there was always a chance you would find something later your character excelled at.

Like the original D&D, you toughed out low scores, or got your character killed so you could roll up a new one. Bad scores were not an issue, and characters had this disposable quality to them, again like the original D&D. Who cares if your gangster character got plugged on the last bank heist? Cry me a river and harden up, back in the day we didn't have this fancy thing called player entitlement. Grab your dice and roll up a new one, and have someone "know somebody" in the gang and have the new mug walk in the door. Maybe you'll get a great guy next time, who knows?

Careers

What other game within 32 pages of the table of contents tells your character how to setup a moonshine still and start brewing hooch, crack a safe, or run a racket?

The careers in this game had great sections describing requirements, what you did, and how you earned XP. You could play three types of law enforcer (fed, prohibition agent, and beat cop), a private eye, reporter, organized crime member, or independent criminal. I was always jealous of how cool this game's careers were, and it put a lot of generic games to shame on the detail and options provided within each career.

Sure, you could do this exact game with a generic game, such as GURPS or any other, but you miss out on all the tightly-designed cool things each class gets to do. This is a perfect example of how a focused design increases the experience at the table, yes there are limited design choice and options - but that is a strength of the GangBusters system. You aren't distracted by an open-ended character design system that lets you spin up a zeppelin pilot or a cowboy and expect the referee is going to have a role for you during the game. You were one of the seven classes in the sandbox, and everyone had a reason to bump into each other.

The game also let you play anything, even having a player play a cop on one side and another player play criminal on the other. You split the time and went at it. You could have a PI at the table along with a gangster and a reporter, and the referee went to each player in turn and asked what that player's character was doing today. If things needed to be broke down into hours or combat turns, so be it, and it happened right then and there. If two players came into conflict, it was played out.

Of course, you could always team up, but it felt silly to have a detective agency with four Sam Spades on the case. You could do a team of investigators, as Scooby Doo did for years, and it also begs to be said that GangBusters had some of the most fun and inventive mystery modules ever published for a roleplaying game. This game did private eye stuff well, incredibly well in fact, and no game since has come close to providing that gritty noir feel of being a private detective. Other games try, but the supporting material for criminals, reporters, and law enforcement make living in the world of a GangBusters private eye second to none, because the characters around you have motivation and clear reasons to be who they are.

You could spin up a private eye in a generic game, but your supporting cast becomes generic game NPCs, and not the cool and motivated classes that exist in this world. A gangster in d20 Modern is just that, a NPC with a couple skills and no real motivation other than, "what the referee says." Here, you know what that bad guy is up to, what he gets XP for, and the game takes on a competitive death-match type of feeling. A simpler system clears up motivations and puts a focus on the interactions between characters in this sandbox.

Vehicles

There must have been some directive at TSR after Car Wars was released where every role-playing game had to have a vehicle combat system, and GangBusters has a fun combat system for car chases and running gun battles with vehicles. I liked the inclusion of this system, and also giving every character a driving score, because it made cars and trucks matter. You just didn't use your driving score for combat maneuvers, you could tail a suspect's car, race down a twisting mountain road at night, dodge a runaway fruit cart barreling into the street, drive a long distance without a breakdown, and we found many uses for the skill other than combat.

Why have vehicles? Bootleggers of course. There is a fun, almost Dukes of Hazzard style bootlegging car combat game hidden in here, and it is a crazy and white-knuckle diversion with running road battles between rival bootleggers, rival mobs, and prohibition agents. Our games saw quite a junkyard full of wrecked and shot up cars pile up, and it was fun.

Combat

This was one of the first games we played that used a fixed damage system for wounding. Conceptually, there was little difference between GangBusters and Star Frontiers when it came to combat, you rolled 1d100 and rolled under to-hit. There were no gun skills in GangBusters, your to-hit was just straight agility.

Did we want skills you could level up, like in Star Frontiers? We didn't really feel the need, since it was possible to increase agility via XP if you wanted to, and also having a detailed character build system would have taken away some of the "random thugs and mugs" system the game thrived upon. Skills were special knowledge and not basic abilities in this game, there was this "every man hero" sort of feeling that if you spun up a character in the game, you could shoot guns, drive cars, interact with others, and do most everything in the game.

That said, combat was fast and furious, and also a bit on the simple side. We didn't mind, it just meant you could have more fist and gun fights in a session. It handled large and small battles quite well, and a good referee could improvise stunts and give hit and damage bonuses and penalties for all sorts of crazy tricks and wild actions like standing on top of a speeding truck and shooting a tommy gun.

Sleuthing

If you wanted to be Sherlock Holmes, you needed to invest in skills like fingerprinting, ballistics, chemical analysis, art expertise, forgery, accounting, art expertise, and a bunch of other very Sherlock-y skills. I loved that the design team broke these skills out instead of lumping them under an umbrella "forensics" skill, as these investigation methods were new to crime fighting, and having them in separate skills let you train them up, know you can use them, and become an expert in one or more fields.

This game did a great job at the CSI stuff decades before CSI hit the air.

That said, these skills were useful to many character types. Criminals needed accountants and people able to forge and detect forgeries, reporters needed sleuthing skills, private eyes needed them all, and the cops needed skills like this to build evidence. We found ourselves building lists of what was said and what was found on cases, just like real detectives.

Snooping around was a huge part of the game, and remember, there were no cell-phones in this world, portable radios were of limited use, cameras were large and needed flash powder, and voice recorders were these typewriter-sized things with large tape reels. Technology was primitive, so you needed to be clever to get evidence, get statements, and work at building a case. This was cool, and it forced you to work how investigators did back in the day.

Even police radios in cars in the 20's were receive only (calling all cars!), and a peace officer needed to stop by a call box to call back to the station. By the 30's two-way car radios became possible, but still the call box lived on. Phones were switchboard operated, and the only communications technology were radio, primitive fax machines, and teletypes. The limits of technology were cool in this game, and I think even more cool nowadays. Living without a headset radio, cell phone, laptop, or pocket camera means you needed to be careful about communication, find phones, and also be able to interact with others and think on your feet.

No texting. No social media. No instant access to information or Wikipedia (you went to the library, public records, tax offices, etc). No instant communication. No Internet. No apps. No TV. You got the news from the papers or the radio. No cell phone cameras or pocket voice recorders. A game that forces you to think and solve crimes without a cell phone?

Priceless.

The Dark Side

There was a dark side to this game, especially on the law enforcement side. People in the government and peace officers could be corrupt. This is realistic, and it runs counter to the Film Board's rosy view of the era you get in movies. There was a lot of money going around with bootleggers and crime, and if you played an honest officer of  the law, you could run afoul of bad eggs on your side. The drama and tension of who you could trust was very compelling and it was a brave choice to put rules like this in the game. It would have been easier to whitewash things and present the sanitized view, but to put these rules in the game (especially with TSR's old code of conduct) was a very brave and commendable move for a historical pen-and-paper game.

Of course, on the criminal's side, they did not fare any better. You didn't have to wonder who was corrupt, because you were all crooks. But in our games, the double-crosses and the fights for power in criminal gangs reached epic proportions. Some players wanted to be Al Capone, and ruthlessly eliminated rivals (PCs and NPCs alike). Some players wanted to play both sides, and rat out the Al Capones to the cops. Others got burned by injustice, and we had at least one criminal player turn good-guy vigilante, like The Shadow, and work to thwart the other player's lives of crime outside of the law.

We had some incredible games with memories that last to this day.

The 1920's and 30's

I think the hardest part of selling GangBusters is selling people on the era. If you love the classic black and white films and radio shows of the era, there is no selling, because you just jump at the chance to play a game set in this era. Oh, and by the way, the Internet Archive's Old Time Radio collection is a great place to start enjoying these radio shows, for free, and please donate and support the project if you can.

Without that background, the game is a harder sell. You need to do a little research on how things worked, and while the game has some of that in the book, I would have loved to see a more complete treatment of the era and technology so people could get up to speed. It is almost like a fantasy world now, since we are coming up on nearly 100 years passing since this time in our history. I like to look at this gangsters and gun-molls world like a fantasy world, since you can't tie yourself too closely to history, and you have to let players feel that freedom.

The research for this era is fun and well worth the time you put into the task. I own a copy of the 1920's Montgomery Ward catalog with all sorts of household items and prices. I love looking at the classic cars of the era. Watching movies set in this time is always fun, and you get the look and feel of the time. The clothes, the manner of speech, and the slang all are classic and iconic parts of our history. There is also the struggle of immigrants, the undertones of racial divides, the role of women, how sin and vice are seen, to role of religion in society, and many other topics that continue to this day that wait to be added to games, if you wish.

This was one of those games that kindled my love of history when I was young, and there really isn't a game like it that I feel is this compelling in action and content and also accessible to a wide audience. That's how I was like when I was young, this game has cool action and history to get lost in? Sweet, I am in.

What Else?

I would love to see rules for ward bosses, mayors, and other politicians. That feels like a missing part of the game, but I know it would require a lot of source material for how big city politics worked. I would also like to see a vigilante class for crime fighters, sort of like our Shadow player, or maybe a 1920's version of Batman.

It would be fun to see a classic 'magic tricks' system, something that fits in with the time, like magic tricks, Eastern magic from India, and things like hypnosis - like the radio show Chandu the Magician or any of the other sort of magic and strange powers shows they had back then. This is purely an optional rule because I love the old time radio shows so much. And yes, I know real magic doesn't fit the genre at all, but there was a lot of mysticism back then, and this would purely be for fun.

For crimes, I wanted to see more on different types of gambling and horse racing, rules for running a speakeasy or nightclub, tax-free imports, murder for hire, and other types of crime as seen in the movies. Like any good HBO show, the game needs rules for prostitution and a generic 'dope' sort of drug for post-war games. I know, TSR would throw a fit should brothel ownership rules appear in the game, but I watch enough HBO to know better. The drug angle is interesting, because the game's focus could expand post-war into the late 40's and 50's with Godfather style drama. There were some noir films that got into bootleggers and how they reacted to moving dope versus booze, and that would be a fun conflict for criminals to wrestle with.

To balance all that, I would like to see more detail on law enforcement, with details like the car radios, procedure, DAs, evidence, grand juries, tax evasion, and other 'gotchas' the law used to take down big criminals. I like the details on how enforcement changed, how state lines used to work, and other changes brought about when the mob started to get cracked down on and went underground. There is a huge history of enforcement procedures I would love to see in a future version, along with possibly the comic-book side of fantasy enforcement with radio watches and decoder rings as seen in Dick Tracy and other serials.

I would love a 1945 to 1965 time frame in a New York like city as an alternate Noir-style setting, with the possible involvement of Las Vegas and LA as satellite settings. There is another fascinating shift in criminal activity during this historical period, along with a dramatic change in technology and law enforcement techniques and agencies. I would love to see this grim and gritty period covered and explored in an action-driven GangBusters style.

Focus

The game knew what it wanted to do, and every rule focused in on that fact. Some games, such as Traveller, provide you with a generic framework of rules to cover sci-fi adventures, but they fall short on giving you things to do. You end up with a game that does everything, but doesn't do anything. It's a great simulator, yes, but where are the parts of the game that call you to action? Do Traveller scouts get XPs for each new system discovered? Do mercenaries get points for successful contracts? Do navy officers get points for defeating enemy starships?

GangBusters is a game that limits your freedom, as you can't be everything. You can't be soldiers, boxers, movie stars, zeppelin pilots, or African explorers. But what you can be is so well done you don't care. Everything is there, ready for you to jump in and start playing, and your motivations and how you get ahead in the game as the class you pick is abundantly clear.

Contrast this with today's game's, which are character building games or games more focused on stories told by the dungeon master and finding hooks for your characters to be a part of them. Some games are simulators, and others are entirely story based. They want to do everything, be infinitely expandable, and take most of your time and resource to play and think about.

They are all-consuming, and they demand their fans to be as well.

Where are the toy-box games? The ones you pull off the shelf and have fun with for a night, and you don't need to learn a 600 page rulebook to play? They don't demand the system is the only thing you should learn or play, and they were built to have one sort of fun in mind. GangBusters is focused in a way the old Dungeon board game was compared to Basic D&D. This is a box full of fun pieces to play with, little gangsters and federal agents waiting to be pulled out and used, and private eyes and mystery men to criss-cross in the dark shadows of the next great mystery.

Also, this is one of the few games that openly put player versus player conflict as a center point of the game. West End's Paranoia would come later, but this was one of the first pen-and-paper games that openly embraced the idea that players would be in conflict with each other. Top Secret, D&D, Star Frontiers, and the other TSR games of the era? They all followed the "adventuring party" model of play with one group of players working towards a common goal.

Here, players could be working with or against each other, and there was this wonderful break from the party mentality where one player could be a private eye in one part of the city working on a case, and another a small-time thug working his way up through the ranks in another. It was a wonderfully non-linear and open model of play that followed each character on a story thread, let them meet, come into conflict, and even cooperate as players seen fit and fate thrust them together.

The Game Today

While you mugs are out there on the Internet, check out the original designer's blog, Rick Krebs, and show the guy some love, why don't you. It's not often you get to speak to a legend.

You see, the rights to the game reverted to Mr. Krebs, and he runs a little corner of the Internet devoted to the game he helped create. You can't buy or legally download the game in PDF, you have to hunt down a used copy somewhere and play.

It is my dream to see this published in PDF form somewhere and someday so countless generations can play this game. I akin this to the preservation of the films and radio shows of this era, and how better to keep the spirit of this time alive than to let people listen to the radio shows, see the movies, and play their own versions of these tales with about the best system ever written about this era.

I would love to see the boxed game come back. I would love to write a game covering this era as well, or possibly the 45 to 65 Noir post-war era. There is just so much here that is cool, even today in our modern and instantly connected world, and this game still speaks to me as a model of where we came from and how things have changed. It is, in its heart, a simple adventure game, but in another way it is more than that.

This is a game that took a conflict which brewed in society (crime, vice, immigrants, and law and order), and presented it in a fun and accessible form. It let us play out our 'cops and robbers' fantasies and it teached as well. It let us play Sam Spade, and for the first time in mass-market pen-and-paper gaming, it put down the +1 longsword and made us pick up a magnifying glass to look for clues. We had to roleplay, to think, to interact, and to judge character. It was very much like Vampire: The Masquerade in a way because it also dealt with factions and conflicts that needed to be roleplayed.

And it was, most importantly, fun. Let's raise a glass in your honor, GangBusters, for being one of the true pioneers in the pen-and-paper genre that set the stage for so many great games which followed.

Design Room: FGU's Aftermath

"What's that, a cast iron kettle? Great, put it on your head and duct tape it on, you need the armor."

Let's dive into the ruins of civilization with FGU's Aftermath game. Oh yes, you can STILL buy this one along with FGU's other products in their online store, and we have shopped there as well. Just use the link.

This one has the notorious reputation of being one of the only games in the late 70's and early 80's of rivaling AD&D for complexity. It doesn't just rival it, it severs AD&D's arm and beats it over AD&D's head, getting a further sever critical and knocking AD&D's head around a hex map clumsily superimposed over a square room.

And then Aftermath keeps AD&D's arm because it is such a cool weapon and also useful as food later.

I'm not joking. This game takes a -1 on a d20 off for every wall within a meter of you. I'm getting a -2 just writing this review, and a further -1 distraction just for using a second monitor. The complexity is brutal, with hardcore math and division being overlaid on top of a segmented combat countdown type turn with interlaced actions. You may take 4 segments to complete an action, in which a faster enemy (or a slower on who's turn has come up) getting a chance to act and lopping your head off.

Violent? This game has it in spades. In addition to all of the loss of limbs, this game had detailed weapon special effects charts for crushing, shooting, blow through, and other weapon special effects. These weren't as complex as say, Rolemaster, but they were simple and gruesome enough to insta-kill you 5% of the time when you were hit.

Before Fallout and the Walking Dead, there was this. And this was even more brutal than the offspring of both of those franchises. You could literally walk through an irradiated area with poisonous chemicals and diseases and not know it until your character starts disintegrating before your eyes. And that's just because you went scavenging for radioactive cans of beans. And an intelligent mutated rat gave you a nasty infection from a knife wound. And then the building collapsed on you.

And no, this isn't Gamma World, so the mutations from being irradiated were not fun.

If you were lucky, a homicidal walking robot would come along and sanitize your remains with lasers and flamethrowers.

We had a joke that the game's cover was in yellow and black as a warning label to players against referee sadism.

Character Creation

As long as you did not use the character creation rules out of Operation Morpheus, you were pretty well much okay. As your character got older, they tended to turn into massive skill lists with strange skills such as "Aircraft Maintenance 6%". It was also very much possible to play a primitive in this game without the "tech use" skill that lets you operate can openers efficiently. What you didn't know you could learn though, and skill books and trainers were at a premium.

It was the only game that made me see teachers and knowledge in a whole new light - these are absolutely necessary to society and survival. Teachers are to Aftermath what seat belts are to Car Wars.

With the Operation Morpheus rules, they introduced the concept of "smart people" who were frozen in cryosleep. They often woke up naked in cryosleep chambers underground next to Australian copies of Playboy. These smart people had something like five times the skill points, and they sucked as characters because they were so complex. They were good survivors, but just making one was a real pain since you could fill up half a sheet of paper with that many skills. Supposedly, they were trained and chosen for this mission, but we found them bloated and unwieldy (since you could already spin up pre-ruin older people with great skills).

It is probably a good thing the cryosleep chambers were underground and guarded by robots that would kill anything going in or coming out. You think you could sleep through this and have it good? Try fighting an armored combat robot with an M-60 machinegun while naked and wielding a rolled-up magazine.

Gear, Guns, and Loot

A modern assault rifle and ammo? That is your +5 Holy Avenger. Modern Kevlar armor? +5 Platemail. A resurrection scroll? A fully-stocked medical kit, and a doctor to use it. 100,000 gold pieces? Enough food and water to last the week.

You got to get your priorities straight.

You start out with no guns, and you are lucky to find pieces of rusty metal to grind into spears. Rocks are your friends and your ammunition. The armor you find is a mix between crafted medieval pieces of gear, riot gear, and sporting goods. A normal melee weapon, such as a sharp knife, is a real find. A gun that works? A treasure worth dying for. And the guns you do find are typically crap, like wooden single shot 0.22 plinkers that are rotted through and in desperate need of repair. But even a gun like that...is power. It is your magic item, your Excalibur.

Or you could loot all the good stuff off of enemies trying to kill you with it. This isn't like some D&D game where you roll the +1 sword and +1 chain on the treasure table after you defeat the bandit and you wonder why he didn't use it against you. No, in Aftermath, the term "treasure table" is replaced by "list of things they try to kill you with."

And if you see a pristine rifle lying there in a room untouched? Oh yeah, that thing is actually broken and booby-trapped by a grenade. Or the floor will fall into a pit of rusty spikes. Or there is someone watching with a poison tipped crossbow nearby. You get the picture. Loot is used to draw stupid people in, and it works both ways - for PCs and NPCs. That can of beans could be used to eat for a day, or it could be used as bait to lure some unwitting sucker in to get his stuff.

"Aftermath Guy" - Artist's Rendition

The World

The world ended in 1980. I know, that is 35 years ago, so this is kind of like a Fallout for the Miami Vice crowd, but trust me, the world ending in 1980 is pretty cool. There are no cell phone towers. Computers use giant tape reels, and the personal computer is something so primitive it has like 4K of RAM and no disk drive. You don't need to worry about computers. HAM radio and CB radios are how you communicate, if you had power and radio gear. Batteries suck in radios and flashlights, like an hour of power. There are no high-tech LEDs, just light bulbs. Televisions still used analog waves and tuning dials. Cable TV was high tech, and the Internet was some government computer system nobody used.

I know, this is very much like how Canada is today.

Okay apologies, but seriously, like parts of the idealized Great North, you know, those back woods cabins and lodges where there is no technology, they still have pay phones, and it always seems to be snowing outside? That. And if you were a grizzled unshaven mountain man with a hunting rifle, snowshoes, a 0.44 revolver, a machete, sticks of TNT and cans of beans strapped to your vest, and metal strapped to your parka you were boss.

It is very much Unshaven Survival and the game loves it. If you are a high-level character in this game you are ugly, hairy, smelly, and a beast of a monster with more scars and wounds than a map of the history of Europe. You carry a straight razor taped to your arm. You keep a scoped target pistol with hollow points in your boot. You own a club for beating squirrels. You keep a grenade handy should you need to blow yourself up.

Cigarettes are chocolate are your gold pieces. Food and water are how long you live. Everyone you meet is trying to steal your food and ammo, or they are trying to eat you. Survival groups are either neo-Nazis, paranoid socialist utopias, bloodthirsty bandits, or crazy survivalists who want to enslave you and put you into slave labor camps. Civilization after the ruin is a sick and cruel joke. Sometimes you are better off alone.

Technology is scary and its sole purpose is to try to kill you. Robotic soldiers, remote security cameras with guns and lasers, metal security doors that lock you in a bunker in the dark to starve to death, invisible IR beams and pressure plates that trigger deadly traps, rooms filled with gas, and genocidal computers wanting to destroy what's left of the world lie under the ruins of irradiated buildings.Technology hates you with a passion, and it is almost as if it senses and hates the fact that you are alive.

The best way to run this game is to take everything that is supposed to help you in our modern world and use it as a weapon against the players. Civilization, social order, technology, civilized behavior, law and order, medicine, computers, transportation, people, chemicals, and everything else that makes our life better is a danger to your survival. Things that hurt you in the modern world, such as hazardous weather, animals, temperature, exposure, and the basics of survival such as food and water? Even more lethal.

You have no friends, and you must learn to deal without.

"Robot Attack" - Artist's Rendition

Monsters

They had every monster in this game except the walking dead, although  making biological zombies would be a snap (and make life even worse). The only zombies they had were the irradiated horde, and the game covered a lot of ground with all types of animals, robots, and mutated rats. Due to the proliferation of city zoos, lions, sharks, rhinoceroses, elephants, bears, snakes, and all sorts of wildlife roamed the ruins of society to take out nature's extinction agenda on humanity. Like the I am Legend movie, actually. Oh yes, revenge was the name of the game when a tiger kills half your party and you escape by jumping into a flooded basement infested by plague-bearing piranhas.

And the animals have custom hit location charts, because that bear is going to be so pissed off when you shoot his tail clean off.

Robots? Yes, there are all sorts of robots in this game waiting to kill you, from metal humanoid can bots to Westworld-inspired replicants. They all seem to hate humanity as much as the wildlife does, so there is no Asimov inspired "serve humanity" BS going on here. I think all the robots in this game collectively decided that since humanity destroyed the world, humanity is unworthy of surviving. This even applies to robots such as ATMs or factory machines, which try to kill characters with alarming regularity.

Others mentioned but not spun up include aliens, three-legged walker death machines, and monsters from fantasy. There are vampires too if you know where to look. As if your life weren't difficult enough.

Adventures?

Basically survival. Scrounging for supplies. Hunting. Exploring. Looking for good stuff. Raiding other survivor's caches. Avoiding bandits. Judging the random people you encounter in the wilds and wondering when they will try to kill you or if you can trust them. Spotting people and animals from a distance and hunting them. Scoping out settlements and seeing if they are safe to go into. Getting your weapons confiscated at a gate to a settlement and wondering if you'll ever get them back.

Trust. Building relationships. Who you could trust, and how far that trust could be pushed in a bad situation was your currency. Good roleplayers could get away with a lot, and making friends when the chips were down you could go back to their camp and sleep off a bunch of wounds and a disease or two. Having those people you risked your life for help you, watch you when you slept, and kept an eye out on the camp. Don't think this game was all referee gotcha instakill, if played right, there was a remarkable human element of trust and uplifting and redeeming survival to it as well.

But  many times this game was about getting into a terrible situation where you are wounded, the temperature is dropping, rabid wolves are hunting you, and the house you took shelter in is ready to collapse. If you aren't barely alive, you're not living.

If your referee is cool, Road Warrior stuff. These types of games typically make resources more available, but gas becomes the thing you need, and you are scrounging again for car parts, tires, and oil.

The game does include some great scrounging tables, and the good modules typically have even more tables for loot. The entire game really is about scrounging, and sifting through piles of rubble while making sure no one is sneaking up behind you is the name of the game.

"Bear Attack" - Artist's Rendition

Our Experience

As disturbed as this may sound, Aftermath was our first generic game. That should tell you something about us when we were kids. We played science fiction with this game, GI JOE, fantasy, Car Wars, and all sorts of other genres. We simplified the turn structure and combat rules and things worked almost like any other d20 game does today, which should say something about the complexity of d20 games today, and nothing about our game design and simplification skills.

As you can imagine, science fiction was the most fun with characters flying out of holes punched through starship hulls with high-powered lasers and the character then exploding from decompression. Starship boarding actions were brutal and lethal, with grenades in starship halls causing more chaos than talking about Pathfinder in a D&D 5 forum. Blasters blowing apart bodies, lasers slicing off limbs, and flamethrowers torching the rest of the zero-g meat purees.

Modern spy games or GI JOE style military RPGs? File these under "fun with vehicle weapons against player characters." Your character learned a new level of hate for your enemies when the bad guys showed up in fighter jets to a fistfight. You ran, you dodged, and you put as much concrete between you and the bad guys as you could. It was pure action-movie bliss living on the edge of one lucky hit vaporizing your character.

It also made the CR system look like it was designed by a bunch of pussies. No, it wasn't fair. It was like a rage game in RPG form...but when you survived?

Absolutely heroic. A rush.

You were the man.

And you had to be an absolute genius and devious SOB to avoid fights and put the screw to the bad guys. You had to be good too. Not just "my to-hit is great and my character is optimized" but no, you had to have a spiritual guardian angel rolling your d20, know the rules, know where to shoot the enemy fighter jet with a pistol based on its make and model, and keep shooting until you got lucky. Your character had to train before they even got to the fight, spending hours on the practice range shooting everything from slingshots to bazookas. You had to lift weights and train every day, and your stats and skills mattered, even above 100% skill level.

You had to be the Arnold Schwarzenegger that Arnold Schwarzenegger would look up to.

Battletech with these rules was absolutely metal. It required a lot of conversion work, but it was cool, and gave you a new appreciation for man-carried SRM-2 rocket launchers. In the Battletech rules, SRM-2 launchers are near worthless. In Aftermath, they are an efficient way to end a bar fight.

Aftermath as our house system lasted for a while with us, and eventually we gave in and it was Star Frontiers that did us in. We realized that sometimes simple rules got the job done, didn't require huge character sheets and record keeping, and the game played just as well without all that detail. After that, the dominoes began to fall, and we went back to D&D for fantasy, and we started playing games to enjoy the design of their rules and systems. Star Wars d6 captured our imagination, and games like Vampire and Shadowrun showed us new ways of doing things while merging the experience with the rules.

And then our Aftermath books saw little use after that.

"Grenade Fishing with Bears" - Artist's Rendition

What Did We Lose?

Well, we gained an appreciation for the simple rules, the concise, and the cleanly presented experience. Every game couldn't be Aftermath, and in fact, many games were enhanced by the rules they used. We gained an appreciation for a game's rules to shape the experience of the players, instead of every world feeling like the same death-match meat grinder. Some games were lighter in spirit and made to play a certain way to enhance the fun, and we saw that when we converted back.

We gained an appreciation for how the rules shape the experience.

Some games, such as D&D 3.0 and 3.5 were inspired by non-RPGs, such as Magic the Gathering. To us, D&D changed at the 3rd edition, taking on a "rules interrupt" complexity of layered exceptions and special cases that felt more like MtG and less like D&D. The original beer and pretzels experience of D&D was gone, and the feeling that the original game's Monopoly-like rules and play experience was gone and it never really came back.

We saw D&D lose it's feeling when we converted it to a more complex system, and we saw it return when we converted the game back to its original rules from Aftermath. When D&D went 3.0, we saw it lose its charm and how it played. The OGR games nowadays that play like the original appeal to us more because that feeling is familiar. D&D doesn't need "story rules" or "balanced challenge ratings" for it to feel and play like D&D to us, it needs what it had, simple rules and dungeons where the fights weren't fair and you had to use your wits to survive.

The Game is Still Supported and in Print!

Aftermath really is a game that refuses to die. You can still buy this game and they produce new material for it to this day over on the FGU website. There is a survival guide that looks fun, and a much-needed modern arms guide. They even have a fantasy supplement with spells and monsters. That sounds fun, because I always wanted unicorns to impale ruins explorers with, and a dragon with a minigun and grenade launcher strapped to its head.

Surviving Aftermath

This game is strangely enough a huge part of our gaming history. We played it in its complicated original form, and then a simplified house system for many games. When we left it, we gained a great appreciation for how games played, and why certain rules systems were designed the way they were designed. We understood feeling and complexity, and saw how changing rules systems to something more complex affected players around the table.

I still hold a candle for this system, and I am happy to still see it being sold today. My players are happy these days are over with, like the Cold War that inspired this atomic-age relic. But still, a classic game and one that has been forgotten in today's world of...

...The Walking Dead.

..The Hunger Games.

...Divergent.

...The Road Warrior.

...Fallout 4.

How little we remember where our hobby came from, and I still feel this game was one of the greats, alongside AD&D back in the day.

Oh, and here's your arm back.

Design Room: Star Frontiers

It was one of the best half-a-games of the early 1980's. I say half-a-games because this is a science-fiction roleplaying game that was released without starship rules. We ended up cribbing starships from Space Opera and Traveller for our games until the Knight Hawks rule set came out, and by that time the damage was done and we were left with a mess of a shared universe experience.

This was one of the great d00 TSR roleplaying games back in the day, and it overshadowed everything else in the TSR d00 library, like Top Secret, Gangbusters, and others. It was also one of the industry's first real conscious breaks from the Star Wars behemoth, with a believable and complete sci-fi world that had nothing to do with Star Wars at all. Star Frontiers is science-fiction gaming's Greyhawk, an original universe that let characters explore and have fun without having an Empire or Jedis breath down their necks at every turn.

It was refreshing in a way, as you spun up a cool space explorer, grabbed a laser pistol, and began blasting aliens. You got to play with computers, robots, and technology, so it was a break from +1 swords and magic wands for a while. What's not to love about good, simple fun? Let's break this game down and look at it's design today and see where it hit, missed, and stood out from other sci-fi games of the era.

The Game System

The d00 game system of Star Frontiers was clean, fast, and it worked. Characters were almost dirt simple, a collection of eight ability scores (rolled in pairs) and a couple starting skills, a race, and some gear - and that was it, you were ready to go. Compared to some of today's college-textbook level character design systems this was great, and part of me still wonders why roleplaying games in this day and age have to be so damn complicated when it comes to character design. Yes, you want to provide options to players to design the character they want to play, and that can be done simply. But when you build these towers of point-design babel where you are worrying if you should put one point into basket weaving, and how many points you want to put into underwater endurance just takes a point design way to darn far.

Sometimes I did wish for a little better character customization in this game. We ended up adding 80 or so skills to make up for that, as the base game only allowed characters to excel at ability scores or skills. If you were charismatic, you had a high personality score and that's it. Same thing for leadership, intuition, and any of the other scores - those were your design and customization choices.

The game, like many other d00 games, started to break down once you had scores that started moving towards 100 and higher (with a +10% per skill level up to skill level 6). There was a -80 difficulty modifier, which technically supported scores above 100, but after a while, rolling against a 130% STR score became a futile effort of mostly auto-success skill rolls, and the system started to break down. It was fun with scores in the 40-80 range, and outside of that the dicing system started to break.

Mind you, this is a roll-under game too, as rolling high for skill checks was bad. Despite some designer's negative feelings to roll-under games these days, I still like roll-under games and it is not terribly hard to shift your perspective so you can see low rolls (for skills and tasks) as good, and high rolls (for damage) as good.

Overall, this was a fun game system, and it held up and was fast and furious action at the tabletop. Not a lot of game systems can say that nowadays, when they send you spiraling in a rules reference nose dive through a 600 page rule book to find out the difference between a "stunned" and "dazed" condition is because some game designer never asked the question "do we have too many conditions?"

You see this "fear of speaking up" in so many game designs nowadays, where game designers work in committees, and nobody wants to upset anybody else and get their cool rules sub-system cut because the game needs to be streamlined. Good game design means saying "no" to 90% of the crap that creeps into a game, and keeping things simple. Star Frontiers is a good example of a design that had a strong core concept, and a designer who valued keeping it streamlined and straightforward.

The Game World

While we liked the base Star Frontiers setting and the classic Zebulon modules, one of the huge pieces that was missing was a universe guide. They gave you names of worlds and a simple map, and that's it. I would have loved to have a star system generator, or even a random sector generator like Traveller had, but the game provided little in the way of creating new adventure locals and starmaps. You were supposed to make everything up as you went, but I wanted more referee support for designing worlds and places in space to explore.

Our game first became stagnant on the base map, and then it blew up and over expanded with all of our add on starmaps. We never really achieved a great balance to new worlds and making things interesting, and this remains one of my great "do over" wishes in my gaming career. We expanded early too, so we were using the spaceship rules from other games to explore the universe, so our star system maps went from 2d to full Space Opera 3d with 100s of LY of XYZ 3d distance, and then back down to 2d XY when we realized we didn't want all that math and complexity. By then, the damage was done, and our established star map was a mess.

Part of the problem was not having starships at the game's launch. Another part of this is that we were expecting Star Wars type adventure and exploration ships, and when Knight Hawks finally launched, they delivered ships that were closer to 2001 and NASA than TIE fighters and the Millennium Falcon. We couldn't escape the gravitational pull of Star Wars on what starships should be, so the more primitive starships with outboard engines (aka Star Trek) and no artificial gravity felt like a shock to us, and also we had been using other game's starships, so we completely ignored the Knight Hawks aesthetics and kept with our original borrowed designs.

Technology

Space Opera was our AD&D to the D&D game world of Star Frontiers for us. We borrowed so much from Space Opera, weapons, tech, sensors, hand computers, vehicles, heavy weapons, and so much more we were really playing a Star Frontiers rules version of Space Opera. We were kids, so we didn't know better, and everything was good. It was just more cool stuff to play with, so we dove in and had fun. Some ships from Traveller showed up and those were cool too.

You discount that as you get older and become a purist and a lore snob. When you think about it, kids don't care if you have light sabers in Minecraft, those are cool and they want them there. Does it matter that light sabers have no place or role or history in the so-called "world" of Minecraft?  No, not to a young mind, and that's how we were.

Later, yes, we did become purists and rules snobs, but we left our old choices in our game and lived with them. There is something to be said for tradition too.

That said, there is a lot of cool tech and gear in Star Frontiers to play with, and even a Car Wars inspired vehicle combat system that was fun, They had this strange hang up where they kept calling "lasers" as "blasters" or lasers and tried to make the same thing be both. Or perhaps it was the pull of Star Wars again and people wanted blasters, and the designer wanted "lasers". Why not just call them "blasters" and be done with it? You can see the hard sci-fi versus fantasy sci-fi conflict in this game, and it is a strange mix of genres.

The game wants to be "hard sci fi" (more so than Traveller, especially when Knight Hawks was introduced), but the players don't really care and want to have fun, at least in our experience. This leads to fantasy elements creeping in, like sci-fi melee weapons, flying monkeys, and alien worms with hypnosis. The game and designers could never make up in their minds, and it remains as a strange mix between fantasy and hard sci-fi. It is in a way sort of like AD&D being a mix between gritty and high fantasy, this was trying to be a catch-all sci-fi game.

In my feeling, Star Frontiers never got to a fantasy sci-fi level, and it remained as a Traveller+ sort of game. With our Space Opera modifications, it got there and it played how we wanted it to play. It was sort of a quandary with us where Space Opera had the better gear and starships, and Star Frontiers had the better rules.

Metaplot

Beyond the Volturnus series, the game just had a standard "bug eyed aliens" metaplot that worked better for security and war types of games. The Volturnus series was an incredible joy ride, and it remains a classic sci-fi planetary exploration and survival sandbox to this day. The game never (in our experience) got beyond that series of modules, while there were some interesting one-offs later, those felt too tied to Knight Hawks style technology for us to enjoy as much as we did the first Volturnus modules. I can remember counting the days until the next one of these modules were released, and improvising adventures on the small planetary map for all the trapped sci-fi explorers until it came out.

For us, when Volturnus was over, the game took on a military turn, and we never got back that cool "planetary explorer" vibe and feeling. You couldn't strand your adventurers on a new planet every time, and the game was waning by then and there we no new sources of fun, so we moved on to Car Wars and then Battletech. It was still our go-to sci-fi game, and chasing the Sathars became to focus of later games.

If the game were just Volturnus and you couldn't "go back home" and had to make your home there I'm feeling this would have been a stronger game. As it is, for us, when the characters went back home the game felt done and over with, pirates and aliens became enemies. There is something to be said about having a great start and basing the game from that point - if you had to explore the systems around the planet and make your home among the stars from there that would have been very compelling for us, and felt like a "fresh start" rather than saying goodbye to the world, leaving it to the mega-corporations, and wondering why no other planet in the universe was that 'fun' to explore.

Mega-Corporations

Speaking of mega-corporations, one of the lamest expansions to this game (for us) was the Zebulon's Guide to Frontier Space supplement, where TSR forced the "color bar" chart of Marvel Superheroes onto the game, changed all the rules, drew weapons with the worst Apple IIe or Commodore 64 art I have ever seen, and ripped up the game's story for some sort of Shadowrun inspired "corporate wars" plot after a galaxy wide "blue plague" apocalyptic event. The game became too much about what the game's mega-corporations were doing, and it felt like every time you discovered a new world, not far behind you were multi-national mining and development interests ready to make any of your discoveries or small mining outposts irrelevant with mass development - and worse, they would come in and start some proxy war over the new system with mercenaries and sabotage.

It felt like you couldn't compete anymore on the small scale, and you had to join or own a mega-corporation to compete. We didn't incorporate these changes, but the pressures were still there. The days of setting up a small mining operation and pulling molybdenum a couple hundred kilograms at a time from an asteroid and netting 50,000 credits were over, and any sense of small scale adventure were gobbled up by multinational corporations, banks, and shady armies of mercenaries.

It's like these space people had no ethics, and Star Law would never bust a space mega-corp CEO for running a mercenary army of space pirates in a far-off system. It became the norm in the game, and we felt Shadowrun's influence have too strong of a pull on a game that was supposed to be about space explorers and blasting things with laser pistols.

At that point, the last heroes left in the game for us were the military, and the space explorers part of the game waned as a backdrop. So our game shifted into the "protect civilization" mode of fighting off the "bug eyed aliens" and "space pirates" and an occasional "deal with corruption" plots. Yes, it became like the interplanetary political and military drama of Star Wars and there it stayed.

Character Types and Skills

One thing we loved about the game were the strong support for all types of character skills and "adventure time" - as every skill was important. You could play a medic and be needed on an adventure, along with being a scientist character or even a psio-sociologist. Really? You can play a space psychiatrist and contribute to the group's success? Yes, everyone was involved. The game also smashed the "space mechanics have no fun" trope that even the later Star Wars RPG from West End fell into, as a technician, your skills were needed, and you drove the vehicles and fixed the team's laser rifles and the party was good.

Of course, everyone had a couple military skills so they could shoot guns and hit things with electro swords, and those were cheap enough that even the medic could by a couple levels of beam weapons and get in on the alien-blasting fun.

Part of the success of the Star Frontiers skill system were all the detailed subskills laid out in the rules, and all the cool stuff you could do with them. In Traveller, so what you have Medic+1, you can't do anything cool with it beyond sit in the medbay. In Star Frontiers, you can treat poisons, heal wounds, do surgery, deal with alien diseases, and all sorts of cool subskills that referees could use to design challenges for adventures. This is a great example of the rules helping shape the challenges in the game world, and it remains a great part of the original game's design.

We made the mistake of adding dead-head and single-use skills that did nothing special (art skill, motorcycle skill), and that watered the game's focus down. The original skills are nice and tightly-focused, and they are detailed enough that the cover 90% of what you need.

Except crime skill and law skill, which we added to support our Star Law campaign, and we added subskills for those that did forensics, lock picking, forgery, and other cool stuff. Some of the skills we added were good, and a lot of the others were filler.

You Can Still Play This

There is a site out there, http://www.starfrontiers.com/, where you can download PDF copies of the rules, and it is in a sort of fan-supported version of the game. This was done with the blessing with TSR and it still continues today, as far as I know this understanding continues.

The Future?

Star Frontiers was a product of its time, where television shows such as Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica filled the airwaves, and that sort of heroic and noble space adventurer was the ideal. Today, things seem like a darker world mood, and our Dark Knight and the moral ambiguity of Game of Thrones makes the freewheeling space adventure game seem a little quaint and old fashioned. Of course in a game like this you can have bug-eyed evil space aliens, but in today's sensibilities you need to understand what the evil space aliens are angry about and send space ambassadors to endlessly discuss treaties and letters of understanding.

Sathar = Orc, got it?

Good.

That said, I'm not sure they could do another space game like this nowadays without writing a 600 page rulebook and making the game so expansive and rules heavy we would need a shelf of rules encyclopedias to sort it out. The tone would change too, to something darker and more nefarious like genetic manipulation and mega-corps, and the original charm would be lost.

Sometimes yes, I like my games simple and fun, and that spirit of adventure built into the game with no moral ambiguity or shades of gray. These are the heroes, here are some blasters, let's hop on our spaceship and get out there and save the universe, one planet at a time.

That, to me, is Star Frontiers.

Review: The Emerald Spire

The Emerald Spire Super Dungeon is Paizo's entry into the 'super dungeon' genre of adventure modules. What's interesting about this one is that each level is designed by a different superstar designer with the likes of the Paizo staff, Ed Greenwood, Frank Mentzer and a cast of others each taking a level and going with it. It's like an all-star Christmas album of dungeon design over sixteen interconnected levels.

The back story is interesting, and it accounts for the difference and variety in the interconnected lairs. Some of the levels have a related boss monster or story, so that is a cool thing - they are not all so different it seems disjointed. The dungeon levels are full flip-mat sized (they also sell flip-mats for all 16 levels), so this is a unique product in that it provides a series of battle-mat sized exploration missions. It is a great product for a regular gaming group that wants to play across a series of tabletop battles.

It's is an interesting break from other super-dungeon products that require you to map it yourself or play it by ear. This is a very nice "complete product" should you buy the maps. The flip-mat limitation puts a cap on the size of the dungeon levels, so if you like big and expansive dungeons this is probably not your thing.

The dungeon levels are well-put together, but they feel on the shorter side to me. They are your typical 3.x D&D style dungeons, with that tighter less creatures focus and deadly traps sort of thing, along with a fair amount of puzzles and other things to figure out. The shortness in the book for each level is a bit bothering, a couple of the levels feel like they could have been fuller, but a good game master can always improvise and add details on their own (as you should with any published module).

There is a 'fast transport system' in the dungeon that I am not sure I like, it feels like it was invented for expediency in an MMO-style nod. Back in my days, if the entrance to a dungeon was a mile underground we walked there dangnabbit! We took pack animals, carried supplies, and camped out in dangerous places with people standing guard. We hired retainers by the month, and good ones too, not these generic level 1 man-at-arms things you see so many of nowadays. Our wizards took bags of components with them too, because walking back to town was out of the question.

Or with high-level enough parties, we picked a secret teleport spot somewhere down there, and prayed each time we came back there weren't monsters in the room or someone waiting for us. There was a disadvantage in old-school adventuring to teleport happy explorers, party wipes from prepared bad guys waiting underground for magic-item and spell-book rich adventurer groups to return to their favorite port-in spots.

I am guessing because of the flip-mat "let's play level X tonight!" style setup the emerald magi-elevator was needed, but it is certainly a more modern design element, and one my old-school party would look at twice and decide to hoof it anyways. Besides, if we can use this thing like an elevator, who says the dungeon's big boss hasn't figured out a way to send us anywhere he would like? Old-school dungeoning paranoia saves lives and character sheets, my friend.

It's a fun adventure, but one side note. There's a sample town included, Fort Inevitable, probably one of the most strange fantasy town names I have come across in a while. Down the road from Fort Certain Thing and Fort For Certain, for sure. Or Fort For Sure, sorry. Anyways, it's a happy little adventuring base and hometown run by...a large garrison of lawful evil Hellknights. My player's first order of business? Clearing the town. I know, but you got this big dungeon up on the hill and...oh stop it, really? You attack?

Roll initiative.

But yeah, for a garrison of Hellknight cavalry with an open rebellion problem, I'm guessing this place shouldn't be such a great adventuring home base. But there are armor and weapons shops selling openly, and I'm sitting here thinking these would be the first places they would close down under an oppressive regime with that much firepower to throw around. The first rule of dictators is to disarm the population, it feels like an oversight, and I like my worlds based in a bit of realism gleaned from the events of actual history.

A bunch of adventurers setting up shop and snooping around the dungeon up on the hill? I bet the Hellknight commander lets them live until level five or when they pull up that first big treasure haul and then the adventurers are executed for heresy, treason, crimes against the state, insurrection, hoarding state resources, or some other trumped up charge so the Hellknights can take the party's loot and laugh up how great it is to be lawful evil. Besides, they wouldn't want a bunch of upstarts getting too powerful around here, would they?

It's like new school designers forgot what lawful evil means when it comes to kingdom politics and adventurer relations. Think of this happening in King's Landing in Game of Thrones. Yeah, not gonna happen without tons of bribes.

So no, Fort Inevitable isn't such a great base for adventuring after all, at least not for my group. It was a fun place to tear apart though, and it did take the focus off of the dungeon initially. My players aren't that naive, and I don't blame them because I like to run things hardcore and by the old-school spirit.

So in short, it's a fun adventure with a great flip-mat focus, and a little problem with the included home base should you decide to use it as-is.

D&D 5: Class Motivation is Motivation

One of the big problems our group has with D&D 5 is the characteristic system. This is a psychological profile that puts mechanical rules on roleplaying. Your character has five mental characteristics (two personality traits, an ideal, a bond to the world, and a flaw). If you roleplay according to these mental characteristics you earn a one-use, one-maximum "fate point" which allows you to get an advantage on any roll. Once spent, you have to earn another.

Now, you can roll random roleplaying characteristics, or choose your own. Now, most of my group are pretty good roleplayers, and here is what we chose for ideals:

Fighter: "I am brave and selfless!"
Cleric: "I believe in helping the sick."
Thief: "I take things as I see fit."
Wizard: "I believe magic solves every problem."
Paladin: "I shall destroy evil!" 

Those seem like great ideals, and they are fun for players to roleplay and try and live up to. But notice one thing about them - they are the class' default motivation. Of course the fighter is going to be brave and selfless, that's his job. Every time the fighter smites an orc he can ask the DM for a roleplaying bonus. Of course the thief takes things, and every time he takes loot from a monster lair he is going to ask for a roleplaying award. Every time the cleric heals, and every time the paladin vanquishes an evil monster, the sort of token roleplay comes out, and a bonus is asked for.

These bonuses are huge, they are instant advantage on any roll. The more you earn them, the better you do. Now, of course, you want people to be roleplaying and having fun and living up to character ideals, right? Of course.

The problem comes with ideals that are not so easily applied. There was a thief character in the starter set with a motivation like, "Does not want her aunt to know she is a thief." I'm sorry, that isn't that likely to come up during play, as a DM, really, you would be lucky if it came up once. If you are 50 miles away from home in the middle of a dungeon, I guarantee it may not come up at all unless another player is using it to blackmail your character. And the big boss of the dungeon isn't going to stand there cackling and threatening to tell on you to your aunt either because he saw you swipe that gold necklace. Maybe in a Disney flick, okay, but not in my dungeon.

Players who pick more generic and easily applied personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws will do better than others with more specific and harder-to-apply during the game choices. They will earn inspiration more often on roleplaying, use it more frequently, and be able to replace it faster.

I know if I were designing a character I would pick my characteristics so I could get maximum return on my roleplaying, and they would mesh up with what my class does naturally in the game. I would love to be the paladin who "loves to destroy evil" because I could ham it up in every encounter and recharge my inspiration point for the next battle. I would never pick, "Wants to rise to the top of my paladin order," because that isn't as easily roleplayed or have opportunities to use that motivation.

We don't use this entire character motivation system, to be honest. I find it to be one of those "mouse maze" player behavioral control sort of rules frameworks that turns what players should be creative and having fun with (roleplaying) into a structured "does this apply to me?" rules system. We skip it and use this house rule:

If you roleplay an action well, the DM may give you an advantage on the roll.

It's simple, it works, and it rewards creativity at the table and during play. There's no bennie points to game the system with, earn, and track. Better players who have fun, swing from chandeliers, slide across tables to attack multiple foes, or do other silly and action movie stuff get advantage in my games. If we are playing dark and serious Gothic horror, if players act like they were in a horror movie in the game, they get advantage for the roll they roleplay that well - we don't need a new motivation set telling us we are playing horror-type characters now. It also puts the player in control of how they want to roleplay their character, and the DM as the judge of that effort.

We don't need formal "king's rules" on how to roleplay and reward it. Combat, loot, character creation, build options, magic, treasure, monsters, and all that other good stuff? Give me more of that please.