Starships & Spacemen

Starships & Spacemen is a role-playing game published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1978.

Starships & Spacemen is a science-fiction space-adventure system.^[1] The rules cover character creation, experience, the Space Fleet Service, human and alien races, psionics, alien plants and animals, equipment, spaceships and spaceship combat, and running the game.^[1] The focus is ship combat and problem-solving; personal combat is de-emphasized.^[1]

Starships & Spacemen was designed by Leonard H. Kanterman, M.D., with art by Rick Bryant, and was published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1978 as an 86-page book with two cardstock reference sheets.^[1]

Starships & Spacemen is now owned by Goblinoid Games, who released a 2nd edition of it in 2013 via crowdfunding.

Richard Bartucci reviewed Starships & Spacemen in The Space Gamer No. 18.^[2] Bartucci commented that "With all of the SF genre to draw upon, Dr. Kanterman has restricted himself almost entirely to a universe that has been so thoroughly explored and documented that further exposition is just wearisome."^[2]

Don Turnbull reviewed Starships & Spacemen for White Dwarf #8, and stated that "I like these rules, consider them carefully planned and well executed, and would certainly select them as the basis of the SF role-playing game would involve myself in if only time (and D&D!) permitted."^[3]

Andrew Rilstone did a retrospective review of Starships and Spacemen for Arcane magazine, stating that "At a time when many people had not worked out that wargames and roleplaying games were two different things, S&S offered something calculated to encourage roleplaying in a background that stimulated the referee into having ideas of his own. For that, it deserves some recognition."^[4]

• Different Worlds #8