“A science fiction game of interstellar exploration, growth and combat!”

Copyright 1976, Ken St. Andre and Flying Buffalo, Inc. Illustrated by E. Hogan.

A single 58 page booklet, 8 1/2" by 11", plastic spiral bound, with pink heavy paper covers.

tarfaring does not take itself very seriously. It is copiously illustrated with cartoons by E. Hogan, and he portrays a funny universe where people are loose about sex and drugs, and not terribly bright. Starships take varied forms: a giant hamburger, giant dowsing rods, flying saucers, enormous houseflies, and in one cartoon, "Hilda's Used Starships" offers a graffitti-covered U.S.S. Enterprise for sale: "...They only took it out once a week to explore strange new worlds..." While author Ken St. Andre admits being surprised when he first saw the art, the illustrations fit his light and breezy writing style well.

Starfaring is a strange offshoot to the development of RPGs. While one player takes the role of referee (or "Galaxy Master" or "GM"), other players take an unconventional role of "Ship Masters" or "SM"s. Each player designs and plays one starship, including the entire crew. St. Andre lists three different scenarios to play. The first is the standard exploration scenario, where each player takes her ship through a different Star Gate to explore what's on the other side, and bring information about it back home. A second scenario has players racing to find the best world for their homeworld to colonize. The third scenario has players fighting galactic foes. From the way the game is written, however, it seems best designed to play the first scenario, with one GM and one SM. Multiple players would make the situation into one of several different games played simultaneously unless players went through the same Star Gate and played cooperatively.

The standard game is simple enough. Ship Masters build their starship, crew and equip it. Their homeworld government gives them a loan to cover the costs of building and outfitting their ship, and SMs now have ten trips into the unknown to repay their loan, in installments. Their homeworld pays cash bonuses for discovering new habitable worlds, more Star Crystals, or heavy metal deposits that are the only things worth transporting by starship for trade. (Matter transmission works, but not for elements with higher atomic weights.) Thus, the actual nature of one's home society is almost irrelevant; one needs a homeworld only to figure out what they're looking for, and how much they'll pay for it.

Setting

It's fortunate that the game doesn't need much background because it's very breezy. Humanity achieves starflight by the painful process of slower than light exploration. Luckily, they discover a derelict alien ship around Barnard's Star which possesses FTL technology, courtesy of Star Crystals. Star Crystals come in three varieties: Brahma (energy sources), Shiva (energy modulators, powering energy weapons), and Vishnu (energy modulators, powering shields). After copying the FTL technology and abandoning Earth as too polluted, humanity exploded across the galaxy. Shortly after this, intelligent robots revolted and began to wipe humanity off world after world. Humans were saved by the gift of the drug LSDX-6000 from an alien race. LSDX-6000 gave humans psionic powers. Robots who were superior to humans in every physical way couldn't compete with a foe that could predict their every move and sabotage their machinery without even being present. Robots were wiped out, and humans were careful not to build so much intelligence into their replacements.

After defeating the robots, humans discovered how to open Star Gates, which permitted jumps across vast distances. Given a developing shortage of both Star Crystals and habitable worlds in their cluster, planetary governments sponsor bold citizens to buy starships and explore what lies beyond the Star Gates, with an eye toward exploiting what is found there.

While Starfaring assumes the galaxy is dominated by humans (St. Andre says most aliens in this setting are not interested in starflight, or have not achieved it by the time humans come upon them), the game encourages GMs and SMs to make up aliens and be as flexible as they want in crewing their ship. The rules mention humans, aliens, androids, robots, and shell people. Shell people, as in Anne McCaffery's The Ship Who Sang, are people who give up their bodies and have their brains emplaced in small life-support modules. They can be implanted in starships, or in other mechanical bodies. The advantage is that shell people live about ten times as long as they would have in a mortal body.

Building a Ship

Appropriate for the way it's set up, Starfaring describes ship construction before talking about how to generate living beings. Ship construction is fairly simple. Start with one of four hull sizes, measured in "bions", a unit that describes how many humans can live comfortably in that space. Hull sizes are described as Small, Mod, Large, or Exorb. Second, outfit the warp engines. These operate in normal space at slower than light speeds (Warp 1 is .1 c, Warp 2 is .2 c, and so on, where c is the speed of light) and FTL in subspace (Warp 1 is 1 parsec a day, or about 1240 times c, Warp 2 is 2 parsecs a day, etc.). The Ship Master then purchases Star Crystals to power her vessel. Star Crystals are fuel; they get used up. Ship Masters install their computers, either one master computer (slightly cheaper, but if damaged, it's curtains for the ship) or a set of individual computer functions. One may choose to have the computer essentially run the ship by itself, or Ship Masters may pay extra for human accessible instruments. All that remains is to find out how much the ship costs.

The rules advise GMs to be generous in ship construction, and sneaky during play. Ship Masters must be explicit about what their ship is capable of, and any special features they want it to have. GMs are expected to make SM players work around the limitations of the ship they designed when they are exploring.

One would assume the equipment list for outfitting the ship would come next, but it is actually thirteen pages later. Equipment is vague: weapons are listed as "handguns," "rifles" "cannons," and "small arms and explosives." Some of the interesting equipment on the list includes airbelts (a belt with a force field to let oxygen in, and keep harmful substances out), portable nuclear fusion reactors, and shipboard equipment such as psionic boosters, star finders, and subspace communicators. Drugs are rather unbalanced, including two that permanently boost a being's capabilities, and an addictive recreational drug that may boost psi unpredictably.

Creating a Crew

Character creation is equally simple. Individuals have six characteristics, generated in three different ways.

Mentality is 3d6 x 10. The score is equivalent to our IQ score.
Psi is generated by 3d6.
Psi Use is generated by 1d6. This is the number of psi efforts one can make before needing to recover.
Psi Recovery is generated by 1d6. This is the number of days it takes before psi can be used again.
Physique is generated by 3d6. It covers physical strength and beauty.
Health is generated by 3d6. This is one's hit points.

There are some interesting features here. One is physical strength and beauty is tied to a single characteristic. Second is that St. Andre says that Starfaring humans are slightly less intelligent than modern Americans; with a mean score of 105 for IQ, they could be slightly smarter. (Nitpick: since IQ scores are normed to one's specific same-aged peers, it is not possible to have a mean IQ of 105 unless Starfaring characters are selected out of a population that is very slightly smarter than the general population. But we digress...) Third, St. Andre says that psi powers have been on the decline for a long time. While all humans possess them, they lack the psychic strength of their ancestors, due to a built-up tolerance for LSDX-6000.

Robot characters, should somebody want one, have three scores, Mentality, Charge and Efficiency. Base Mentality is created by 3d6*50 (!), and the other two characteristics are both scored from 0 to 1.00. St. Andre recommends using a deck of playing cards, with face cards equaling 10, to create these scores. Of course, this leads to a skewed distribution of scores, with 10s being much more likely than the result of die rolls. The robot's effective Mentality is their base score multiplied by both Charge and Efficiency. Interestingly, this means they get dumber as they run down. Charge is spent on a per day basis; Efficiency appears to have no purpose beyond reducing Mentality.

GMs are on their own for creating aliens. St. Andre asks players to send interesting ones to him for a Starfaring newsletter.

As with the equipment list, psionic powers appear about a dozen pages later in the rules. St. Andre never says how character powers are selected, so we assume any character may use any power, provided they have enough psychic strength to power the ability.

Battles in Space and Other Inconveniences

Of course, a science fiction game must have opponents. St. Andre says the robots may be defeated and gone, or maybe not; that's up to each GM. However, he also includes the Slish, your basic octopoid Bug Eyed Monster.

Starship combat is pretty simple. St. Andre points out that ship to ship combat is likely to occur at great distances. Even with weapons that travel at c, in the second or so it takes them to reach the enemy, the target will have moved a considerable distance, even if only traveling at Warp 1 (.1 c). This means that getting a hit is all but impossible unless you've got precognition. Luckily, humans do, and Slish don't.

The mechanics of combat are very simple. A formula is used to determine a saving throw value which the defender must roll against or be hit. But there are a few problems. Must the defender beat the target number, or just equal it? Do the variables in the formula refer to the attacking ship's values (speed, gunners' mentality, gunners' psi) or defender's? While St. Andre shows a little bit of how his formula is derived, the inconsistent use of parentheses makes it impossible to know which values are multiplying and which are dividing. Using standard mathematical notation rather than what could be cheaply typeset would have helped. Presumably, an attacker's high Mentality and Psi helps to predict where the target is, while greater speeds and distances makes it harder to predict where the defender will be. The primary villains of this game, the Slish, have no psi abilities, which puts them at a disadvantage in combat. This is offset by their bigger ships, their tendency to fly in groups, and their tactic of firing five shots for every combat round. How can the Slish fire at five times the human rate? We don't know.

If hit, the target's Vishnu system absorbs as much energy as it can. This is explained later in the book, in the Encounters section. The Vishnu crystal must drain energy from the Brahma crystals to work; each point of Brahma drained will negate one point of incoming energy, up to the maximum rating of the Vishnu crystal. Presumably, the Vishnu and Brahma crystals are both depleted by this amount permanently, although the rules don't say. If the attacker has more energy than the Vishnu crystal could block, the defender's ship is holed, and additional damage may result. For every 500 points of energy that get past the shields, one die is rolled to see which subsystem is damaged. A ship can get chewed up pretty badly if a shot gets past their shields.

Combat isn't all that can happen to a ship. The chapter on Space Hazards has a random encounter table, but there's not much there. There's only a 1 in 36 chance of an encounter per turn--and St. Andre doesn't define what a turn is! Encounters in normal space are fairly basic: Slish, radiation, meteors, malfunctions.

One interesting thing that can happen is that ships that drop out of subspace near to unstable stars of spectral types O, B, and A may trigger a supernova—a fact humanity is unaware of. A shockwave of radiation first sweeps the ship, which may kill a number of crew, and reduce the Mentality of the survivors. Survivors may thus be too stunned to realize they need to escape to subspace before they're at front-row center for a supernova. A star that is driven to supernova in this fashion produces Star Crystals, a fact also unknown to humanity.

Subspace hazards are slightly more interesting. Debris are intelligent life in subspace that resemble rocks, but they have a suicidal ambition to become free hydrogen by smashing themselves into things, like starships. Kthulhus (sic) are the dominant life-form of subspace, and effectively suck the Mentality out of crew in their efforts to get rid of starships, which they find irritating. Starfaring also has Berserkers, robotic warships programmed to destroy all life, borrowed from Fred Saberhagen's books.

Creating the Universe

The book closes with random tables for generating star systems. Oddly enough, St. Andre doesn't use polyhedral dice, but recommends drawing from a deck of cards or using a randomizing function from a pocket calculator. Starfaring uses three-dimensional space, with an X-Y-Z coordinate system to locate stars. There are no suggestions for how referees should map three-dimensional space on two-dimensional paper. Once stars are generated, planets are placed. The system for deciding how many planets is based on a mathematical formula taking into account how far the star is from the Star Gate (why?), and how many stars are in the system (single, binary, or trinary), but this information is found in the next section, creating life forms.

Life forms are generated on three tables: quality of life (which determines the presence/absence of life forms, and their rough technological level), life cycle base (carbon, methane, chlorine, silicon, robotic, ectoplasm, or pure energy; forget for the moment that a carbon-based life form might still be a methane breather); and the dominant life form shape (bacteria, amoeboid, insectoid, etc.). The book closes with a square root table to assist in calculating hypotenuses for determining distance in three-dimensional space. The back cover has an advertisement for Tunnels and Trolls, Flying Buffalo's successful fantasy RPG.

Summary

Starfaring's odd design puts it in a sub-genre of RPGs, where players do not take the part of individual characters. Other than this, the main feature of this game are the funny cartoons, still amusing twenty-five years later. It's clear this game is a first draft, badly in need of editing. Some rules are explained or illustrated many pages after they are introduced, and some key game mechanics are not explained at all. There are no rules at all for what happens to crew members outside of their ship: no reaction tables for alien life, no rules for person to person combat, etc.

It's natural to compare Starfaring to Traveller, for they were released within a year of each other, and both cover galactic exploration. Traveller is gritty, trying to stay more or less within justifiable science, and permits a wide variety of adventures, even if there is a focus on trade or military situations. Starfaring is lighthearted, silly, with lots of hand waving for justification and few details, and almost completely dedicated to a single kind of exploration mission. However, the play of Starfaring is reminiscent of Traveller played solitaire: create a ship, go exploring a random section of space, and see if you can bring home enough money to avoid having the ship repossessed.

This game has little to offer besides being a rare curiosity for the collector. However, it may be worthwhile to note that it may have been the first traditional science fiction RPG with an "explore the wide universe" theme, beating Traveller to the punch by a year, and coming hard on the heels of Metamorphosis Alpha, copyrighted earlier the same year.

Personal Notes from the Curator

I bought this game as a cheap substitute for Traveller, and never played it. Rereading it for this review put it in a new light. I always used to think of this game as a Traveller knockoff, possibly because that's what I originally intended to use it for. But the play, such as it is, has a different focus than Traveller. Starfaring is probably closer at heart to the original Star Trek, where a ship populated by a few heroic officers and a faceless collection of minor characters explore distant and unknown reaches of the galaxy. It might make for an evening's diversion, but the amount of work required by a referee to make it playable, and the one player per referee nature of the game makes it an unlikely entertainment. I suspect very few people, even gamers who were in the hobby twenty-five years ago, have heard of this game. In fact, I have some doubts as to whether it belongs in the Museum at all. But it is a historical rarity, and we have the space.

—RAD