While searching through the Players Manual of the 1983 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set for illustrations of goblins for today's earlier post, I came across this advertisement on its inside back cover.
As you can see, it's an ad for Star Frontiers, TSR's 1982 science fiction RPG. SF – a fortuitous abbreviation – was not the company's first foray into the genre, it was the first into what is popularly imagined by the words "science fiction," which is to say, space opera filled with jumpsuits, robots, aliens, spaceships, and laser guns. On that score, Star Frontiers delivered. Though I was (and remain) a Traveller man, I nevertheless had a lot of fun with Star Frontiers, especially its Knights Hawks starship combat expansion.
What's amazing in retrospect is how well supported the game was. Over the course of four years (1982–1985), TSR published a little more than a dozen modules for it, in addition to the aforementioned Knight Hawks, a referee's screen, character sheets, and then, finally, Zebulon's Guide to Frontier Space. That's more than Gamma World has ever received in any of its many editions. Despite this, TSR seems to have simply given up on Star Frontiers after 1985, while Gamma World kept re-appearing every so often (to increasingly little success, to be fair). Why was that?
Over the years I've entertained numerous theories, but I have no real evidence of any of them. The most likely is that Star Frontiers simply didn't make enough money to justify the effort. That's not to say it was doing badly, only that it wasn't doing as well as TSR hoped it would do, especially when compared to RPGs like D&D or even Marvel Super Heroes, both of which had a much higher return on investment during the same time period. TSR was never a particularly well-run business, it's true, but I suspect even they would recognize when their resources might be better spent on other more lucrative projects.
Again, I have no idea if this theory is true. It's just as plausible that someone in the company simply disliked the game and wanted it canned or that the main movers and shakers behind it moved on or could no longer devote much effort to developing it. Whatever the reason, it's a shame, because, as I said, Star Frontiers was fun and had some interesting setting and game mechanical elements. I would have liked to see how it evolved if it had been given the time to do so. Ah, well!
Fun system, but they over did it right away. Even as a 12-year old, I thought it odd that this planet we had crashed on (Volturnis?) had so many intelligent life forms - let alone life. There was a whole universe of stuff just on this one planet.
ReplyDeleteSay what you want about Gamma World, one of it's biggest appeals was it was mostly cross-compatible with D&D (except for the weird chart-based edition), which made it useful not only as a standalone game, but as a science fantasy supplement of sorts for players of the World's Most Popular.
ReplyDeleteStar Frontiers I recall as being a mixed bag. Derided by the Traveller players that I knew as "kiddie sci-fi," it had some weird gaps (no spaceships in the base game!), klunky rules, and a pretty decent, but not particularly inspired background. And the Knight Hawk rules were excellent, but required shelling out for another boxed set. I suspect Zebulon's was a last ditch attempt to try to "fix" Star Frontiers without rewriting the game from scratch, although I wonder in hindsight if a new edition might ultimately have been more successful.
I don't know how much of a factor it may have been, but Pacesetter Ltd. formed in late 1983 or 1984 and started cranking out product in 1984 including Star Ace, which was pretty clearly aimed at the same market niche as SF was. The company was made up of ex-TSR staff, and while it imploded in about 1986 they did bang out four boxed RPGs, over 30 supplements for them (including six or seven for Star Ace), and three boxed board games in that time. They probably didn't sell well enough to impact SF very much directly, but the combination of departing employees (some of whom may have worked on SF) and added competition selling in a format that might charitably be described as imitative of TSR's output might have led to an internal decision to axe SF if it was already underperforming.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, Star Ace is the only Pacesetter RPG that's currently unavailable. I believe it's owned by Phil Reed and Chris Shy, formerly of Ronin Arts - which, going full seven degrees here, James apparently did some freelance work for. The things you find when you poke around RPGgeek. :)
All that said, SF has a pretty darned solid and enthusiastic fan base to this day, and has managed to maintain a pretty steady e-fanzine output for many years despite some legal kerfuffle with WotC. They aren't anywhere near as numerous as the Traveller crowd, but there's a heck of a lot more of them than you might expect for a game of its age and relatively short period in print.
Lorraine Williams took over TSR in October of 1985. She wanted to use her inherited rights to Buck Rogers to pillage the company though licensing fees. She would not have tolerated a similar SF game absorbing company effort that could be going toward expanding her trust fund.
ReplyDeleteThat's a very plausible explanation.
DeleteOh right, I forgot she was in that early. That was almost certainly the real reason.
DeleteWhile I too saw the Star Frontiers advert in my friends' Mentzer Basic books, I never saw the game on sale anywhere in Scotland. Once or twice I saw Traveller, but after WEG's Star Wars arrived it was everywhere.
ReplyDelete...TSR had another go at science fiction with alternity, and space opera in particular with its star drive campaign, but despite a strong reception for what would evolve into third-edition dungeons & dragons' d20 system, alternity landed on the cutting-room floor shortly after hasbro bought out wizards of the coast...
ReplyDeleteLorraine Williams got control of TSR in late '85. TSR came out with Buck Rogers XXVC in '88. Since Buck Rogers has a lot of conceptual overlap with SF, one might suspect that they didn't want TSR splitting its own SciFi market, and so deferred spending any resources on SF.
ReplyDeleteWith Lorraine's relatives getting money for the licensing, and her no doubt seeing a chunk of that.
DeleteAs an RPGamer whose preference is for Science Fiction games of the Space Opera/Adventure variety, I always wanted to like Star Frontiers more than I did. It had a lot of the right components for a good - even great - SF RPG but something always felt off. The aliens were a bit silly and there weren't enough of them, there were no spaceship rules initially, and the setting seemed relatively small (something we change in our games).
ReplyDeleteOf course the biggest reason Star Frontiers failed to impress was that FASA Star Trek and later WEG's Star Wars did. We were far more interested in playing those games and settings.
Don't have the market share stats to back it up, but one factor may be that they wanted to have a TSR flavored Traveller, which seemed like the biggest rival in the RPG space. The flavor was probably influenced by Star Wars. And there have been lots of other suggestions as well. WOTC is mining it for parts though, at least where they overlapped with Spelljammer, with the alien races appearing in the latest version (with SJ names). And the nuTSR kerfuffle doesn't help with reviving it.
ReplyDeleteWe played a lot of Star Frontiers back when it was out. We never made the jump to Zebulon's Guide, we were happier with the mechanics as they were.
ReplyDeleteRevisiting it a few years back I found that a lot of it still holds up well. I love the equipment and the combat table worked well. I remember combat being too safe for our tastes when we were young but now I think that was a byproduct of letting players walk around everywhere with layers of screens and armor.
The skill system both delighted and baffled me. I loved how the skill groups worked in theory, but sometimes it required strange combinations if you wanted to play rules as written.
It was also stuck between two concepts of sci-fi. Textually the rules seemed to harken back to the earlier days of sci-fi with no artificial gravity and lots of science in the fiction, but then there was a lot of Star Wars whizz bang. I still consider this dual identity a feature, as incoherent as it could be at times.