Free Spacer is game with a few important conceits:
•You are a Free Spacer. You owe this status to a Faction. And every characters goal is to retire from Free Spacing, into (ideally) an important position in the Sector.
•Technology is very sophisticated and adaptable. Free Spacer's and to a lesser extent ship kit, is standardized and can be upgraded easily. You are the crew of a Starship, with jump (fold) technology.
•Factions are in a state of cold war, leaving a lot of room for adventure.
Beyond that the setting, and it's people, factions, solar systems, and species are all setup to be easily sandboxed. There are random tables for generating all of these. You can indeed generate random aliens in this game published by Random Alien Games.
A big point of the game, is this support for generating your own campaign setting. This and the "retirement" project (providing an end game similar to AD&D's domain play) harkens to OSR influences. It's engine is a little more new school:
The game uses a dice pool with d10s for generating "hits" and d6 threat dice (assigned by the GM) for misses. I'd call this the "Salvo" engine. You assemble all your dice into a "salvo" roll them all and cancel hits and misses.
You can spend "charge" to utilize benefits of your gear, and gain "charge" getting a lot of hits -- these charge up your personal or ship reactor.
GM's also have a "complication" resource that they can spend to change the odds, (add threat dice) or minor failure worse after a roll.
Personal Note:
It did take me a couple of solid passes through the rulebook to grok it, perhaps the text is over-structured, or I just wasn't used to this style of game.
But once I got it... man there is a solid game here. It reminds me a lot of the Dark Matter TV series, and I am looking forward to running it some more.
Your Thoughts:
Have you played it or read it? What do you think?
Comments
Free Spacer is game with a few important conceits:
•You are a Free Spacer. You owe this status to a Faction. And every characters goal is to retire from Free Spacing, into (ideally) an important position in the Sector.
•Technology is very sophisticated and adaptable. Free Spacer's and to a lesser extent ship kit, is standardized and can be upgraded easily. You are the crew of a Starship, with jump (fold) technology.
•Factions are in a state of cold war, leaving a lot of room for adventure.
Beyond that the setting, and it's people, factions, solar systems, and species are all setup to be easily sandboxed. There are random tables for generating all of these. You can indeed generate random aliens in this game published by Random Alien Games.
A big point of the game, is this support for generating your own campaign setting. This and the "retirement" project (providing an end game similar to AD&D's domain play) harkens to OSR influences. It's engine is a little more new school:
The game uses a dice pool with d10s for generating "hits" and d6 threat dice (assigned by the GM) for misses. I'd call this the "Salvo" engine. You assemble all your dice into a "salvo" roll them all and cancel hits and misses.
You can spend "charge" to utilize benefits of your gear, and gain "charge" getting a lot of hits -- these charge up your personal or ship reactor.
GM's also have a "complication" resource that they can spend to change the odds, (add threat dice) or minor failure worse after a roll.
Among other places it is available at composedreamgames.com/marketplace/random-alien-games
Personal Note:
It did take me a couple of solid passes through the rulebook to grok it, perhaps the text is over-structured, or I just wasn't used to this style of game.
But once I got it... man there is a solid game here. It reminds me a lot of the Dark Matter TV series, and I am looking forward to running it some more.
Your Thoughts:
Have you played it or read it? What do you think?