Aside from surface similarities, Star Frontiers and Traveller aren't all that similar. Traveller has always had a somewhat serious, almost literary tone, whereas Star Frontiers seemed to have more in common with SF movies and television shows. I don't mean that as a criticism, since there's no one-size-fits-all RPG for any genre or subject matter – especially science fiction, which encompasses a huge swath of possible ideas, concepts, and situations.
That said, Star Frontiers could be more "serious," or touch on more serious subject matter. That's very much in evidence with 1985's Dark Side of the Moon by Jim Bambra. Like its immediate predecessor, Bugs in the System, this adventure was a product of TSR UK, whose approach to nearly everything, from subject matter to tone to artwork, cartography, and even layout was noticeably different than their Stateside counterparts, which had a pulpier, Saturday morning matinee vibe to them that was probably deemed more suitable for its "ages 10 and up" target demographic.
The adventure takes place on the world of Kraatar, a world in the Tristkar star system, whose primary colonists are the insectoid Vrusk – at least according to the Star Frontiers expanded rules book. Bambra, however, postulates that Kraatar was originally colonized by humans some 200 years before the present, where they established a self-reliant, agrarian society. A little more than a century later, the Vrusk arrived, bringing with them their high technology and megacorporations. As a consequence, the original human colonists experienced culture shock that displaced many of them from their rural settlements and left others disaffected and angry, as Vrusk corporations came to dominate the planet.
The adventure proper kicks off when Jack Lagrange, a human scientist and businessman who heads up Trojan Enterprises, is assassinated while receiving a prestigious award for his work in advanced organ and tissue regeneration. His assassins are two former members of the Vrusk corporate security forces and this revelation alone threatens to throw Kraatar into political and social turmoil. Riots then break out between humans and Vrusk after a Vrusk terrorist organization claims responsibility for Legrange's death. The characters, whom the module assumes are working with Pan-Galactic Holo-News, soon find themselves enmeshed not just in inter-species hostility but also a grand conspiracy in which little is what it first seems.
Dark Side of the Moon's reach exceeds its grasp. Bambra's ideas are mostly quite good, but the execution leaves a bit to be desired, starting with the somewhat ham-fisted way the characters become involved. As presented, the situation on Kraatar is somewhat nuanced, with plenty of blame to go around. Despite this, there's still a supervillain worthy of James Bond behind it all, plotting something cartoonishly horrific. That's not necessarily a terrible thing; it's very much in keeping with the general tenor of Star Frontiers. At the same time, I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed, because there's a lot of good stuff here about social alienation and non-human psychology that I wish had been further developed. Perhaps it was inevitable that such topics could never be properly explored in a RPG module, but I had high expectations nonetheless.
Dark Side of the Moon is still a solid adventure, one of the better ones produced for use with Star Frontiers. Unfortunately, it doesn't treat its chosen subject with the same degree of sophistication or polish as did Bugs in the System. All the same, it's yet another example of TSR UK's willingness to innovate and push boundaries within the products they produced. The division's closure was a real loss for TSR, which would have really benefited from the industry and talents of its British writers and designers in the latter half of the 1980s. That's an alternate universe I'd like to have seen ...
Yay, I played Traveller, and a little Starfrontiers, loved Starfrontiers art, alien player character races, and vertical stacked save energy on gravity Starships
ReplyDelete(Driven to comment, yet having nothing of substance to contribute) I got the expletive stung out of me while mowing under some mushy apple trees when I was about ten - crows peck at apples, apples fall on ground, deer tread on apples, bees come to the mush - and my mom bought me that original Star Frontiers set with the Farrah Fawcettish redhair-splayed image on the front. I thought it was cool and read it C2C twice. Then, fallow death. We were not into sci-fi beyond Star Wars and of course the rousing tingle of Wilma Deering and Princess Ardalla. Oh, man. I love the digestion of the space games and the creeping-Cthulhu stuff but somehow just never got a grip on it. Sort of like being a Judas Priest guy but having no interest in Iron Maiden. Is it a BMX versus skateboard thing? Most of the readers here seem to have found engagement in both.
ReplyDeleteOne of teh few SF modules I never owned. Pity, it sounds like it would have been much more to my tastes than most of the TSR-USA modules. Sadly, I'm pretty sure I never even registered the existence of the two divisions back then, let alone the differences in their output.
ReplyDeleteGoing by the synopsis I can't help but wonder of inspiration for certain elements was drawn from Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth setting, which had about 9-10 books written in it by 1982 including Nor Crystal Tears, which was pretty important for defining thranx psychology. The vrusk aren't thranx but there are enough similarities to make me think Bambra was at least aware of the books.
Huh. The wiki page for the book series claims Battlefield Press was doing a TTRPG in the Humanx setting in 2023. Didn't happen, but they've done Norwood's old Double Spiral War and a Terran Trade Authority game for several systems including SWADE and Cepheus, so I guess it's possible. They clearly have a taste for scifi rpg adaptions.
British writers helped revitalize the US comic book industry in the 80s with comics like Watchmen and Sandman, so it wouldn't be far-fetched to believe that British game designers could have had a positive influence on D&D. Personally, I am happy that most of them went on to write for Games Workshop and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay after the closure of TSR UK.
ReplyDeleteAgreed. I was just about to say the same thing. TSR's loss was GW's gain...
DeleteI never cracked open any Star Frontiers, but it sounds like it 'suffered' from the same thing as Gamma World - more science fantasy than science fiction. While you can never achieve 'hard SF' in a game with psionics, force fields and warp drive, I do like a harder *approach* than the almost-parodied tone of GW.
ReplyDeleteStar Frontiers didn't have psionics or force fields, and their FTL system more closely resembled hyperspace jumps (with zero elapsed time but large course alignment/acceleration/deceleration periods at either end of a jump) than Trek's warp drive. If anything Traveller has more space magic BS (gravity control, psi, nuclear dampers and black globes as field defenses) than Star Frontiers did, which has none of that.
DeleteWhich is ironic, because the intro module trilogy the game was best known for is set on a planet whose ecology is more ginzo than Gamma World IMO. There's a sort-of-hard scifi game in SF hidden under a big dose of gonzo weirdness.
I took James' comment about it being more like cinematic SF as including those tropes; thanks for clarifying.
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