Even so, as a diehard TSR fanboy in my youth, there was no way that I could pass up Star Frontiers when it was first published in 1982. Star Frontiers was no replacement for Traveller, but it was a fun game, one my friends and I enjoyed. In fact, I'm pretty sure many of my friends preferred it to Traveller, because of its more "wahoo!" approach to science fiction. That's not a knock against it by any means, just a statement of my own feeling that Star Frontiers has a much stronger action-adventure orientation than Traveller. If that's what you're looking for, Star Frontiers delivers.
Issue #74 of Dragon (June 1983) included a lengthy article, "The SF 'universe'" by Tony Watson that came to a similar conclusion. Over the course of seven pages, Watson presents an extensive review of the game, examining the setting, artwork, components, rules, and introductory module. The review is quite thorough and, I think, fair. Even though it appeared in the pages of Dragon, TSR's house magazine, Watson's review is not slavish in its praise. If anything, it errs a bit on the side of being occasionally too critical of the game and its decidedly different approach to science fiction than Traveller or Universe, to which Watson frequently compares Star Frontiers and not always positively.
Watson's main criticisms of Star Frontiers are that it's strongly combat-focused, lacks starship rules, and that its overall tenor is more like Star Wars than 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of these criticisms, the lack of starship rules largely ceased to be an issue once the Knight Hawks expansion was released (ironically, not long after these article appeared). The other two criticisms are related, in my opinion. As I said earlier, Star Frontiers is more an action-adventure RPG than is Traveller. It's about adventures in space, fighting alien saboteurs and space pirates and surviving on a weird, inhospitable planet and the game's rules and presentation reflect that.
Watson understands this, which is why I appreciated this article when I first read it and still do. He does something I very much appreciate in reviews: he judges the success or failure of a game product on the basis of its intended goals rather than on what he might have wanted it to be. Star Frontiers wasn't trying to be Traveller or Universe but something else entirely and it deserves to be judged accordingly. It's a good standard and one I try to emulate (even if I don't always succeed).
I remember owning Star Frontiers. I remember some of the alien races you could play. And that’s about it. I think I remember a piece of art, either in the rules book, or some adventure module, where space pirates are depicted. One of them has a bandana on his head, a thin mustache, and an eye patch. Pretty much a stereotypical pirate. That killed it for me.
ReplyDeleteI played a modest amount of SF back in the day, less than LBB Traveller but more than other scifi games of the era barring FASA's Star Trek. I have some nostalgia for it even today, at least in part because I'm deeply impressed by how well its diehard fans have managed to keep putting out new content for SF/KH for all these years with no sign of stopping.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I played very little SF initially, and I absolutely hated the Volturnus modules they chose to open with. Felt like a parody of scifi, even more so than the gonzo Gamma World stuff had and the planet never fit in to the rest of the setting (and later adventures) properly - and barely ever gets mentioned, for that matter. Once Knight Hawks came out we played much more often, and quite enjoyed both the short campaign in the KH box, some of the later modules that integrated KH material (eg Dramune Run) and several homebrew campaigns where we integrated the Sathar War board game from KH with our RP game's events.
SF without ships has always felt pointless to me, and even with it the game falls far short of LBB Traveller even for the action scifi that you're citing as its strength. Traveller could do that just as well, while also having lots of other play modes and the ability to shift between them.
We played the heck out of Star Frontiers as kids and never really noticed the lack of spaceship rules. We just made up adventures that went along with the maps that came with it so we could use all the tokens.
ReplyDeleteHonestly the cardboard tokens probably sold it for us. Those and the ones from battle systems got a ton of use.
Yeah, it’s not just that Star Frontiers is more like Star Wars than Traveller is. It’s also more like Star Trek, which was probably closer to the goal. It would be moderately disappointing to play a full Star Wars game without at least X-Wings and Tie Fighters. But in Star Trek the ship was barely a ship; it was more a city in space. Any ship-to-ship combat in the style of the original series could easily be hand-waved through. Rules for that would just get in the way.
ReplyDeleteI bought Star Frontiers because of that article!
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