Do you have recommendations for working class sci fi/space opera games?
I've been enjoying reading through Traveller and Orbital Blues and reading books like The Expanse about just regular people making ends meet IN SPAAAACE. So I'm curious if you know of any other games matching that regular people doing regular things but also exciting things threaten the status quo.
THEME: Working Class Sci-Fi
Hello, I hope you find something in here that suits your fancy!
Comet Express, by Dice Doctor Games.
Inter-galactic delivery is perilous
Dangerous people need dangerous goods transported to dangerous places.
This is where Comet Express gets in. The safety of our delivery crew is secondary to the successful delivery of your precious cargo.
Why would anyone in their sane mind do this job? Three reasons. One Money. Two Thrill. And Three, who said you were sane?
Comet Express is all about just trying to get your job done and go home - alive. You're all part of a trading company that values its cargo over its crew, with a successful job being determined with the condition your cargo is in by the end of the job.
What's interesting to me is that I don't see anything on the page that says that you can fail. Your roll determines whether or not you avoid risk; but from what I can see, you can do well, do poorly, or somewhere in between. It's typically assumed that at least some of your cargo makes it to your final destination.
What's also interesting is that your character dying is no excuse to get the job done. Character creation is meant to be quick and simple, so if you die, just roll a few d6 and you'll have a new grunt to move the payload.
I think that perhaps the biggest weakness of Comet Express is the lack of roll-tables for the GM. There's a few in this brochure-sized game, but most of the outcomes are rather vague, and still require a lot of improv. If you're a GM that likes to come up with everything on your own, this won't be an issue, but a new GM might struggle.
Pressure: Industrial Science Fiction, by Osprey Publishing.
A science fiction roleplaying game of bringing law and order to the dark and dangerous corners of the universe.
Pressure: Industrial Science Fiction Roleplaying is a rules-light, story-focused game of facing the darkness at the heart of humanityâs fragile and claustrophobic existence â both on Earth and among the stars. An entirely standalone title, Pressure also develops and expands upon the mechanics and setting introduced in the Those Dark Places roleplaying game.
As highly skilled agents of Special Operations Squads, players are tasked with cleaning up after the Corporations â investigating links to organized crime, neutralizing rogue weapons research, negotiating with rebel leaders on orbital stations, and hunting down whatever that black-budget excavation team âawokeâ out in the Procyon SectorâŠ
The universe is a dangerous and hostile place; the Hypercities and the Deep Black alike hide powerful foes. But you have the tools, the training, and the resources to face these dangers⊠you hope.
Pressure has a unique game system, although pieces of it sound familiar. There's Attributes and Skills that will add modifiers to your basic dice roll, as well as a stress mechanic called Pressure, which you will have to test yourself against every time your character suffers something shocking or disturbing. Already this sounds like a much better mechanic to me than a sanity or madness degeneration!
Thematically, this definitely looks like very hard sci-fi, with trained military operatives in space being the core focus. This is a space-horror game, although what kind of horror that is feels like it's up to whatever the table is interested in.
If you want to read a full review of the game, check out what Lowell Francis has to say about it on his blog, Age of Ravens.
Transit: The Spaceship RPG, by Fiddleback Productions.
TRANSIT takes place beyond our home planet, allowing you to traverse the unlimited depths of space and explore worlds outside our own galaxy.
Your role as an Artificial Intelligence is to inhabit an interplanetary vessel, manage your resources, and direct your crew. Youâll deploy your shipâs officers into the field, hunt down criminals, engage in interstellar combat, and deliver supplies and colonists to remote settlements.
You must rely on your resources to complete missions by acting through your ship, tech, and crew. Three different AI types â Combat, Command, and Support â lend themselves to varied and interesting game play, but itâs when an AI is paired with a ship that the real diversity in character creation comes to the fore.
TRANSIT is more than just an intergalactic skirmish game. When your interests and those of your crew are aligned, things can go very well, but when you and your crew come into conflict, they turn from asset to liability. Theyâll think youâre insane, but youâre just trying to survive and complete your mission. How did it come to this? What will you do next?
While skimming the reviews for this game, I came across a big fountain of praise for TRANSIT's index. I love a good index, and am often saddened when a game has a poorly organized index, or doesn't have one at all. A book that you can reference well is infinitely easier to use.
On top of this, TRANSIT feels like a really unique combination, as it's both a skirmish game and Powered by the Apocalypse. Those are two things I don't normally think would be put together! It's also got a really unique perspective, since you are playing ships, rather than the people inside them. Is your AI going to be human-like, or something completely different? Find out in TRANSIT.
Voidhunters, by Fox Tale Games.
It has been forty years since the end of the last Great War, in which the Espiri Empire consolidated victory against Salvatori forces. The war was hard-won â planets were bombarded, resources were leashed to build grand war engines and vast voidborn battleships, and though the embers are slowly burning out, the winds of rebellion are relentless in stirring dissent.
But the war is of no concern of you and your crew. You are voidhunters, freelancers tasked by government and private clients to search for treasure in the depths of space. Itâs dangerous work, but it pays the bills, and itâs always interesting.
From empty war hulks drifting powerless through space, to locked-down laboratories hiding unfinished weapons, tech and viruses, to the ruins of the Asar, the ancient space-faring civilization that came before your own, every episode of Voidhunters can take you and yours somewhere new.
Voidhunters feels a little closer to science fantasy, because it describes itself as a soft sci-fi setting, with magic and mechs. It's inspired by media such as Cowboy Bebop, Rogue One, and Firefly, where danger is supposed to be constantly present, while opportunities to be a hero are still around the corner.
The game uses d20 dice pools, and characters are a collection of Abilities, Skills and Talents. Ability scores determine your target number to roll under. Attributes & Skills give you dice. Talents are special things your character (and only your character) can do.
An interesting extra detail in Voidhunters is that matching your target number is even better than rolling under; it reduces the number of threats the GM can roll at you, and allows you to set yourself up for a better chance for the next time you roll as well. Otherwise, the GM will be able to collect threat dice to make things harder to do, or even more dangerous if they feel like it.
If you want a bit of action movie pulp in your space drink, maybe consider Voidhunters.
Free Spacer, by Christoph Sapinsky.
Free Spacer is a contemporary science fiction tabletop roleplaying game. It leverages the newest space sciences, takes into account biotechnology, and brings the internet to the rim of the quadrant.
As a Free Spacer, youâre a crew member on a small starship, an outsider, and a contractor. Youâll explore new worlds, investigate dangers, negotiate contracts, operate your starship, and do science!
As the Game Master, you have a wealth of tools at your disposal to build whole worlds and manage the machinations of sector factions in the ongoing Cold War. Youâll be able to easily run conflicts, spaceflight, fabrication projects, and other challenges, while quickly generating new locations and characters.
Play to find out how the crew gets the job done, the choice they make, the rules they break, and the length will go for their Patrons.
The author of Free Spacer says his principal purpose of the game was to make it feel like science fiction, and everything I'm seeing from it looks like hard sci-fi. The setting is a deeply imperfect future; no faster-than-light communication, a sector-wide cold war, and the need to negotiate contracts for every job.
The game uses 2 different kinds of dice: d10's and d6's. d10's contribute to your chances of success, while d6's contribute to your chances of failure. All of the rolls are player-facing, with the GM contributing threats and complications, which definitely feels a little reminiscent of Star Wars FFG, down to the non-binary dice results. You can succeed, you can miss, but you can also have a little bit of both worlds, which I think has the potential for nuanced storytelling.
Space Ambulance, by Bully Pulpit Games.
Space is a huge inconvenience.
Itâs big, itâs dangerous, and it is between you and anywhere interesting.
Once upon a time it was so outrageously hazardous that people traveling through it were killed now and then just for being there. Of course today spaceships are safe and sensible and no one dies in old-fashioned ways like âhull depressurizationâ or âreactor explosionâ. Today spaceships are smart - smarter than you and me - and they are carefully built with safety in mind. You are far, far more likely to be killed by falling out of bed than you are by a spaceship failure.
Sapient beings are amazingly fragile and incompetent. We touch things we are told not to touch. We eat too much, or too little. We make poor choices about who to make friends with. We fall out of bed. Sometimes, through no fault of our friendly and safe spaceships, we get in trouble in space.
When this happens, every second counts. You need to call an ambulance - a space ambulance.
Space Ambulance is a game about the dedicated professionals of the space ambulance services. You will explore the lives and loves of the crews, both on the job and off, as they perform dramatic (and not so dramatic) rescues, fill out paperwork, and await their next thrilling (or not so thrilling) call.
Space Ambulance advertises itself as focused on the drama between the characters, so I'm guessing it might be something like Grey's Anatomy - in space! Bully Pulpit Games in general intrigues me with a lot of the concepts they put forward, so I think that whatever you pick up from them, you're in for a solidly good time.
Xenopolitan, by Willy Elektrix.
Xenopolitan is an RPG about everyday life in an alien metropolis. Live the life of an extraterrestrial person with real world problems. Play as a human or extraterrestrial entrepreneur, student, artist, social worker, politician, reporter, criminal, detective, or anything else, and experience life in this galactic future-scape.
Setting: The year is 2099. Ingress is a city with 90 million people from thousands of different species and planets. It flies in the skies above Earth and is a hub for extraterrestrials conducting business with various Earthling corporations and governments. Players are denizens of this sprawling, cosmopolitan city, and their backgrounds and goals can be as diverse as the cityâs population.
Xenopolitan really does feel like an alien slice-of-life rpg. The entire book is dotted with in-world excerpts, like newspaper obituaries, reviews of various artists, and even dating profiles for NPCs!
The game uses Fudge Dice, also known as Fate Dice, if I'm not mistaken. It also uses a d10 as a Luck die, which doesn't really contribute to success or failure, but ether adds a benefit or a complication. The things you'll be rolling for appear to be rather mundane things, like figuring out how to break up with your girlfriend, or trying to pass your driver's test.
At it's core, Xenopolitan is about making it in a big, big city. Each character will have personal weaknesses and drawbacks that they'll have to work to accommodate or overcome, such as a criminal record, a responsibility to take care of someone else, an undocumented immigration status, etc. If you want to mix the speculative, goofy elements of sci-fi with the mundane, everyday struggles of modern life, you might like Xenopolitan.
Additional Cool Things...
Last Fleet, by Black Armada Games.
Arkyvr, a toolkit for Mothership that has players cast as a documentary crew.
Holdfast Station, by Lampblack and Brimstone.
Space Adventures Rec Post
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