Traveller vs. Star Frontiers

Oh, now it is getting personal. How dare you compare these?

And I speak with someone who had a Star Frontiers campaign world go on for 30 years, I know which one won in our hearts. But the game never lasted long, got a silly remake with the color-coded "Marvel Super Heroes" results table and some awful 1980s Macintosh vector art with Zebulon's Guide to Frontier Space, and the game was left to die.

Wizards resurrected the corpse with d20 Future, and I hope they never touch this game again with the D&D rules, or they will most certainly ruin it and desecrate the fond memories I have. After what they did to Spelljammer, I do not trust them with science fiction. The game outsold Traveller in the 1980s, but we received no follow-up from TSR. We had a handful of adventures, no true second edition, no hardcovers (unless you count the PoD today, thank you, Wizards), and the game died by the 1990s and was a dead game.

Our love for Star Frontiers went on for decades. The system broke down due to skills and abilities that exceeded 100%, and the game struggled to handle higher-level play. We ended up replacing the rules systems with other ones, and that is where we left it.

Today, the spirit of Star Frontiers lives on in the excellent Frontier Space game, picking up where the original left off, and it has a much better action economy and system of rules in place. I would still use the Star Frontiers Universe and the Knight Hawks ship combat game, but Frontier Space is essentially Star Frontiers these days. There's no reason to play that game when we have far better options available, plus an open, community license. But none of these are 2d6 games!

Traveller is.

Compared to Star Frontiers, Traveller is massive. The game only went out of print a few times, and we had various versions reincarnated over the decades. Today, it is in excellent hands, with the first edition of the Mongoose game having an open license, and the second has a partner license, but the first-party support from Mongoose is phenomenal. The first-party support for Mongoose Traveller, second edition, is better than Wizards and D&D.

Traveller survived and thrived, and it is a robust game. This is the best and largest science fiction role-playing game out there these days. Compared to Star Frontiers, Traveller won the war. I still have a massive soft spot for Star Frontiers, though.

If I were starting a science fiction game today, what would I do?

Traveller would be the one. While Frontier Space is a fantastic emulation of the original comic-book-like game, and it improves on the rules in every way, I could do the same or better in a 2d6 game these days. I know, it is heresy, but the support in Traveller for so many campaign types, and the number and quality of adventures, means I have decades of things to do, and there is still more coming.

There are thousands of systems, numerous starship types, varied campaign types, a trading game, mercenary adventures, mass combat, ship combat, capital ships, a war campaign, science missions, and much more. You can run diplomats, spies, cyber-hackers, criminals, space pirates, freedom fighters, space law enforcement, bounty hunters, navy campaigns, scouts, entertainers, reporters, or any other modern profession-style campaign, but "in space."

Frontier Space is still here and supported. But not to the level of Traveller. Not to the depth of information, campaigns, one-off adventures, ships, and stars to explore, plus infinite universe generation. To be fair, Frontier Space does have random mission, installation, villain, system, sector, and planetary generation - so it is no slouch in this regard either. Both are far better than the original Star Frontiers. And the Frontier Space tables are entirely usable with Traveller, too.

Traveller wins on starship design, combat, and the wealth of designed and fully mapped starships. You can go heavy metal war-game with Traveller and have capital ship battles, and not just simulate them in narrative. What you design can be battled and tested. You can fight the premade ships. The space combat in Traveller is one of the best systems out there. High Guard even has fleet battle rules. It goes there, and you get a lot with this game.

And Traveller gives you an entire sector to create yourself. If you really loved the Frontier setting, you could recreate it there with a handful of stars on that map and still have plenty of room to explore. Of course, there will be neighbors around, or you could use the sector as a standalone place without the Imperium. 

So, who wins the Traveller versus Star Frontiers comparison?

Frontier Space needs to be in the discussion. Each game does something excellently. Traveller excels at both the macro game and the focused campaign games, and it has the best setting in science fiction gaming. Frontier Space excels at pulp space adventure comic-book science fiction. Star Frontiers has its classic setting.

 But, the winner?

The game you love.  

FTL Nomad

I get the feeling the 2d6 gaming world is abandoning the OGL in droves now, and the games being released reflect that reality. FTL Nomad is the evolution of the Cepheus Deluxe idea into a Creative Commons-based game, free from the OGL and adopting its own 2d6 rules and way of doing things. This is an excellent open system, and the game even comes with a SRD to download and use when you buy the book.

It is nice to see the 2d6 gaming sphere abandon the OGL and do their own thing, and while still supporting and selling the legacy titles, building a solid future on a better base license and more open, community-supporting model.

I am looking forward to this one. 

Midnight Boulevard

Oh, how I love the indie game market, since we get niche games for all sorts of amazing genres. Midnight Boulevard is a 2d6 game based on the classics of Film Noir, specifically from the book's list on the first page:

• The Maltese Falcon (1941)
• Double Indemnity (1944)
• Laura (1944)
• Detour (1945)
• The Big Sleep (1946)
• Out of the Past (1947)
• Gun Crazy (1950)
• In a Lonely Place (1950)
• Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
• Touch of Evil (1958)

That is a pretty narrow list of films, and it covers all the greats in the genre. The game gives very basic rules for characters, combat, vehicles, and equipment as it is only 29 pages long. The game does not need to go into detail, and if you ever needed survival rules, fire, poisons, diseases, carrying capacity, creature creation, or weather, you could pull them in from the Cepheus SRD, if needed.

 

If you are playing 2d6 games, you likely have a bunch of them, and you have a lot of rules to pull in from your compatible games. This is how we did it in the old days! If you want extra character detail, pull in the excellent Cepheus Light Traits book for a few special tweaks for your characters.

I wanted to see more in terms of art, style, tone, and how to put together a Noir Plot. Then again, if you are a Film Noir fan, you will already have a few books on these films in your library, and know it well, but it would be nice to see these things laid out to help newer referees or those discovering the genre. There are some tips, but I want a bigger section on the types of games, how to run a plot, more of the genre tropes, and the different types of stories and campaigns one can run. 

Oh, and I need The Killing by Stanley Kubrick on that film list, too. Speaking of campaigns, I get most of the games here will be one-shots, with multiple shots fired, and The Killing is a the perfect example of a heist plot in the genre, and a perfect movie to frame scenarios around. We have everything in this one, plenty of gun battles, double-crosses, a cast of iconic characters, and a complex job with many working parts the specialists all need to figure out and work through.

This is where simple 2d6 games shine. Since character creation is fast, people can get playing instantly. The character creation process also generates history and background, so players have something more to work with than a plain B/X character.

Also, it does not matter if a character gets killed, you could make a new one right in the middle of play in five minutes, come up with a quick backstory, and get playing. As the mobsters and criminal PCs get whacked, replace them with cop characters for those players to hunt the rest of the criminals down, and make it a PVP game.

And this isn't a set of 5E rules that requires far too much investment and involvement. What do you do with a level 20 mobster? How many powers will I have? How do I multi-class with warlock and paladin? 5E sucks for any other genre but its own superheroic fantasy one. D&D will always be D&D and nothing else.

But remember, crime does not pay. This is a game that should end terribly for all criminals involved, to keep with the genre theme, and just playing through this and "seeing what happens" is entertainment enough. If your players are mature enough to handle doomed characters, this type of game and genre will return a level of fun that far outweighs the scant amount of pages this is presented in.

Mail Room: Traveller

Today is the day the last of my Traveller books arrive. This was a pretty big order, and it includes a few titles I was holding off on, including the Fifth Frontier War books. My new display shelves are all put together, and I have a home for the books when the box comes. It is a good feeling.

Also some of the newer books are on pre-order, but I have the PDFs, such as the Traders and Gunboats book. Part of what makes this game so great are all the ship designs and maps you get. If you ever wanted to lose yourself in a random ship doing some strange mission somewhere in the universe, you can find a ship with an interior map and go there. No other science fiction game has this level of detail and support.

Also arriving today is The Borderland, a fun-looking sandbox campaign that provides a large area of independent space between empires, with some influence by the major powers, but plenty of local factions, governments, consortium groups, and intrigue to keep players guessing. This is a different style of release, not "macro" in a sense, but very micro and focusing on a small area of space and jump-1 ships.

That "jump-1" campaign style, with later upgrades to jump-2 and -3 means there is a JRPG style of progression and it keeps the players hungry for money to invest in a ship upgrade, while still giving them a wide variety of planets and places to explore with a jump-1 vessel. You don't feel "left out" as you do in some widespread sectors, and the campaign focus can be very tight and gradually expand outwards.

This looks like a fun book, the creative team took a strange area of space, with a lot of small systems between major empires, and did some thinking on "what makes this compelling?" Making this an area recovering after a massive war and long night, and leaving it untouched by major powers, creates a huge area of space that is open and allows smaller players to thrive and keeps the larger powers from wanting to cruise fleets around in this place. As a result, this entire area of space has that "Grand Theft Auto" sandbox style of feeling, where a lot of deals and intrigue is happening between small but important factions, and the little guy can make a huge difference.

Also, the fact the entire sector suffered such a massive war and period of inactivity means lost installations, shipwrecks, lost civilizations, isolated factions, and many other interesting "ruins and dungeons" are out there waiting to be found and explored. So many worlds are detailed, systems laid out, and there are maps and planets on nearly every page, this is such a high-value book for campaigns that need a home "off the beaten path" and it almost has a "space western" feeling and a lot of potential.

There are a few more books coming in this order, and my new shelves have plenty of room to welcome them. Part of me is happy I have standardized on Traveller as my science-fiction RPG and not a retro-game, Starfinder, or other alternative. This is classic role playing, not power gaming with unrealistic levels and hit point totals, with no magic to leave me feeling like there is "too much mojo" happening in the universe, and it keeps the game realistic and grounded.

You are not playing Traveller to "build a level 20 super-character." You play the game to immerse yourself in a realistic universe with grounded and believable characters. To find fame and fortune, a place in the universe, or die trying. The GTA-in-space comparison is strong here.

Also, everything that I loved about the classic Star Frontiers setting can be somewhere in this universe, and that exploration and feeling of planetary adventure are present and strong here. Some of the things can be additions of a home world here or there, and even the original adventures can be ported in and likely play even better under Traveller than the old system.

Plus, if I don't want Star Frontiers content, there is more than enough here that is strong on its own without needing any of that legacy nostalgia. I could be happy without any of it, and still have a ton of things to do and explore. There is enough here to build new memories and nostalgia from.

Why you play Traveller is because it is so massive, infinite, and detailed. There is no game like this in its scope and depth, along with the designers realizing that at times they need to focus in on a small area and make it compelling and fun on its own.

2D6 SF Adventures: The Long Jumps

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/514278/2d6-sf-adventures-the-long-jumps 

What an amazing collection of 2d6 science fiction adventures! This one is a real treasure, with 329 pages of adventures split up into twenty-five adventures. This can be used with any 2d6 science fiction RPG, from original LBB Traveller, any version of Cepheus, and Mongoose 1E or 2E Traveller. We have art in this book, too, though it is sparse, but of good quality.

What I love about these adventures is they are presented in a journal format that makes running them so easy. First, we get a boxed referee's overview that summarizes the entire plot and adventure. Next, we get numbered sections (with maps, tables, and charts), that proceed from one stage of the adventure to the next. Finally, we get an NPC list, star ships, creatures, and other maps to end the adventure.

Each section of the adventures is a smaller part of the story. While it isn't railroaded, it is the logical progression of a plot through the paces. Each section is like the parts of a TV show between a commercial break, with each one handling one situation or event, and then we move on to the next. The adventures give you time, and you can fluff out a section with extra adventure, side quest, and exploration activities if you want - or ratchet up the tension and put a ticking clock on certain doom.

The journal format is ideal for 2d6-style adventures. While fantasy games typically slop a giant mega-dungeon on you and expect you to figure it out, this gives us bite-sized adventure situations, one after the other, and they let you progress through them one at a time. This is well-written and put together, and the adventures are varied and different enough to keep players guessing.

And this creator has hundreds of more 2d6 SF adventures in PDFs! This really is a treasure of adventures for any version of 2d6 science fiction that you love, and I picked up this one first since it also came in hardcover.

Highly recommended. 

Cepheus Modern

As time in the universe goes on, eventually there will be a Cepheus game for everything. Today, we have Cepheus Modern, a generic modern-day, World War II to the present, 2d6 game.

The 2d6 Cepheus SRD is a great and adaptable system that allows you to throw together a career table for anything, making it a proper universal system with some assembly required. You need the career tables, gear, weapons, and armor to have a game, plus mishap and injury tables.

Careers define the game, so the selection determines the roles in the game, unlike GURPS, where anything is on the table and you are trying to explain to the table why everyone doesn't have ninja training. GURPS takes a strong group agreement on what the game is about, what types of skills are appropriate, and how characters should be designed. You need the theme, and the players need to work with you to make it happen.

In Cepheus games, you all sort of pick careers that will interact together, like if you were playing a mafia game, most everyone would be criminals. Or, in a spy game, you would mostly be military or agents. About half of the careers in this game are military or spy-based, so it feels like a "Tom Clancy" or "James Bond" style game, with commandos and agents running around and battling the bad guys. 

In Cepheus, the random career system takes care of the rest. You need to "make something out of what you get," which is part of the challenge of playing a randomized character. Some like the challenge, while others want complete control.

 But now, let's take a step back.

Cepheus Modern is an 86-page game. Most of these "2d6 small book games" are anywhere from 30 to 80 pages. Is that really enough game to have fun with? Are we going to get enough character complexity and rules options to give us "meat on the bones" to have a satisfying game experience?

I am a GURPS player, and I will always answer that question with a "no." Compared to GURPS, nothing ever has enough depth for me.

But, given the time and commitment to play GURPS, a 2d6 game is a far more versatile choice than a d20 game. Where in a d20 game you need a huge framework of spells, classes, powers, and rules, a 2d6 game can do a lot more in fewer pages. This 86-page 2d6 game does what a 5E-based game would take 320 pages to fully explore. OSR games would be about half that.

Anything 5E these days is so chronically overwritten, full of fluff, and talking itself in circles it is almost a parody of itself these days. The D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide has huge chapters, pages long, that talk in circles, and the best advice they can give you after all that is, "Just come up with a way to handle it yourself." Thanks for nothing, paid-by-the-word writers.

I would also choose a 2d6 game over a rules-light narrative game, such as FATE. There is more "meat" here for me to dig into. Rules and choices matter. Even though the characters and basic game rules are straightforward, there is a lot more to play with here than most rules-light frameworks.

 

Given that the original 2d6 Traveller and GURPS are sister games, moving between either is trivial. While they may not share the same rules, there are enough similarities here that if you know how to play one, you know the other, and even converting entire campaigns "once they get good" is a trivial matter. So I think of Cepheus Engine games as "rapid prototype tools" to see if there is fun in a setting or situation, and I always have the freedom to convert it all to GURPS later, if I want the depth.

And when it comes down to it, if all you gave me was a ham sandwich for rules, I could role-play using that. This is how 5E misses the mark so hard. It is not about the rules, creating excellent tactical combat rules, or fancy narrative systems! It is about what you bring to the table with your character and involvement with the story. You don't need rules to role-play, and they can get in the way.

If all I have is my 2d6 character, I can bring that to life.

As a referee, if all I have is a 2d6 combat system, I can make that as compelling as a rules-heavy combat game. If a 2d6 game gives me no "narrative tools," I have enough experience to make the game just as fun as if we had all sorts of pools, points, special dice, and narrative economy systems. Too many rules can get in the way.

It is 100% about the stories you bring to the table. 

Hostile vs. 2300AD

How many 2d6 science fiction games are there? Hostile is one of the best "hard science fiction" implementations of the 2d6 rule-set outside of the classic 2300AD. This has a rule book and setting book, and it is an amazing deep dive into a classic hard science fiction setting like Alien, Outland, Bladerunner, and other gritty, realistic science fiction universes.

At times this game can feel like the "not Alien" game, but you can play this without xenomorphs and just do dirty, hard-science, industrial, and corporate future games. There is a book devoted to xeno-lifeforms, and this gives a bunch of terrifying versions of the familiar monsters we see in the movies (including a xeno-snake), and is very imaginative for horror-based science fiction this game does so well.

Why play Hostile over something like 2300AD?

Well, my brother and I had a long-running 2300AD game, and that was amazing. I am getting the boxed set and will report back on that soon. 2300AD has its own flavor of hard science fiction, and it has this clunky, difficult travel, almost military operations feeling where you can't "land a starship on it" and there are the ways between stars and around planets is harder and very realistic.

A planet can exist and still be mostly unexplored, and you will need to fly a cargo plane out to a remote airstrip, unload a boat, move that to a river with a truck, and sail that up a river to get to an adventure site. In normal Traveller, you will have people flying their scout-couriers and landing them to use them as space RVs, and parking next to a dungeon to explore it. Hostile is also like this, where planetary travel requires a level of realism.

The 2300AD game explicitly says, "It (2300 AD) is not part of the Third Imperium universe. 2300AD stands on its own." This is also another major improvement, as the original game sort of had a giant Imperium out there ready to invade in a Frontier War, and this was all history anyways so nothing mattered.

Thank you! This feeling dogged us when we first got the game, and we had an agreement in place that "linking this to the main Traveller timeline is stupid, the universe its its own place and reality." We never looked back, and this is how it was. It was the right decision. 2300AD is its own universe, and own thing. 

If only the 2300AD core books were stand alone...

I ask too much. 

"Keep advanced alien races out of the setting." - Hostile, Setting Guide, page 10.

Hostile is humans only, with alien monsters and creatures. 2300AD has non-human intelligent aliens that are very different, even in outlook and physiology. Both games have more than enough room to add your own creations, but Hostile's assumptions assume humans are alone in the universe. 

If you want wolf-people and talking insects, play 2300AD or better yet, Traveller. If you want to convince walking cucumber aliens that active verbs are not verbal threats, play 2300AD.

You play 2300AD to love the universe and the original game. You are not expected to have xenomorphs. There is a cyberpunk edge to the urban centers. 2300AD is a game about first contact, reaching the stars, and a civilization learning to survive and adapt. It is a positive and hopeful game; it has its setbacks and bumps along the road, but the goal here is to build, adapt, communicate, and survive.

2300AD is perfect for hosting "first contact" games, even if they are your own.

You could do a "first contact" game in Traveller, but it would not be as intimate, close, and complex. 2300AD has hard limits on technology, and we don't have super-science. To access this new world, we need to use interface craft. We need to figure out linguistics and social sciences. We need to conduct archeological research to figure out who lived here 100,000 years ago and where they went. 2300AD has an action-movie side to it, but it is more nerdy and cerebral than Traveller. You can do scientific mysteries in  2300AD, because there are no easy answers.

Traveller enjoys the macro. 2300AD revels in the micro. 

Hostile is more of an homage to the classic 1970s and 1980s science fiction movies and those experiences. It is a retro-futurism game, cynical, dangerous, and industrialized in a human-centered universe. Hostile is a pessimistic and cynical game about how humans never change, how our weakness will destroy us, and the evil aliens of the universe exist as a form of puritanical punishment for our sins.

Hostile is a game where nobody wins.

 

2300AD is a hard-science look into a universe that tries to work together, yet keeps falling back to the Earth due to the human condition, divisions, and frailties. Even the art of 2300AD is cleaner and more positive-looking than Hostile. 2300AD is a lighter game in tone and outlook, but it still has that hard-science edge with backstabbing and betrayal possible. You can play an exploration campaign in 2300AD that does not always end in a 50-100% death rate, and have room to create new worlds and aliens to meet.

2300AD is like Alien meets Star Trek in tone and outlook, Alien in the technology level and Star Trek in the optimism and goals. We are exploring brave new worlds and making first contact with aliens. We are trying to work with our neighbors. We fight against the nature of man and our frailties, limits in technology, to try to be that better person and a better society.

2300AD is like a hard science fiction Star Frontiers, where the races have not yet learned to live together. You can meet intelligent life, and an entire campaign could be created out of a new jump route being discovered, and your brand-new alien race is on that next planet.

In Hostile, that does not happen. Hostile is like Alien meets Outland meets Blade Runner.

All of this is great 2d6 gaming, very close to Traveller, and it all plays well together. Or by itself. Both games are amazing and worth checking out; choosing which one to play comes down to personal preference and outlook.