Starblazer

So back in late October, I jumped in on a thread on RPG.net comparing Starblazer Adventures and Diaspora.  I got more than a little colorful with my praise of Diaspora, but before I got there I felt I had to give some background as to why I found myself personally favoring Diaspora over Starblazer Adventures.  Now, at least one person has gotten ridiculously exercised over that (and come on: it’s RPG.net, people), and I’ve seen it characterized as anything from “damning with faint praise” to the old RPG.net standby of criticizing the critic instead of the critique, calling my post “unprofessional”.  Whee! The internet — it’s made for hating!

But the internet’s also made for missing the freakin’ point.  I was unburdening myself there so anyone reading it could (if they chose to) understand the intense bias I bring to any evaluation of those two products side by side.  I was saying as best and clearly and honestly as I could that I can’t make a fair comparison.  The thread was specifically about comparisons, after all — I did what I could do make them, but it was a tainted effort from the start, and I said as much.  At the end of the day, I got to see the sausage made with Starblazer Adventures, and that is never a pretty thing. Diaspora on the other hand may as well have sprung fully-formed from the forehead of Brad Murray & crew. Here’s what I’m saying: because I got to see the sausage get made, I can’t look at it with the same perspective that I’d bring to any other game book out there (like Diaspora, among hundreds of others).  It’s not even a case of trying to compare apples to oranges. It’s a case of comparing apples to the life and times of an orange farmer (i.e., “ooh! yummy apple!” to “holy crap that orange was brought about through a lot of hard brutal work and praying to the gods that an extra cold winter won’t come along and destroy the entire crop!”).

And as for the “unprofessional” thing, well, it was my sense of professionalism that’s why I sat on saying anything about Starblazer for a year and a half.  I won’t — and shouldn’t — apologize for the full disclosure nature of the post, either; full disclosure and maximum transparency are key elements of who I am on the ‘net, and at the end of the day I couldn’t have gotten into that conversation in the first place without laying everything in my head on the table.  At this point in my life I’m just wired that way.  It’s why I disclose as much information as I do about Evil Hat, why the Dresden Files RPG website talks at great length about why the project has taken so damned long, and so on.  If that kind of transparency doesn’t fit into your vision of what a professional is, then I’m not one, and I wouldn’t want to be.

Back to Starblazer Adventures.  Another way the point’s been missed regarding Starblazer is thinking that for some reason I don’t like the game.  But I do, and I even said so in that post:

“I like SBA a lot — but in large part due to my history with it, I don’t *love* it.”

But so what if I don’t love it?  There are very few games that I love, and I’ll tell you right now that none of them are ones I’ve worked on.  I like a great many more than I love, I can assure you. I don’t love a lot of the stuff that’s done with the Storyteller system from White Wolf, but  I like the hell out of a lot of it.  Changeling: The Lost rightly rocked my socks, and so on.  (In case the point’s being missed there, I’m saying that something I “like, but don’t love” still has the power to rock my socks. Therefore sock-rocking is not of limits for Starblazer either!)

Still, I can see why my efforts to be clear and open about my biases might come off as damning Starblazer Adventures with faint praise. So here’s a short list of a few reasons why Starblazer Adventures is gunning for your socks with a plasma blaster set to fully-automatic rocking.

The subtitle: Let’s start at the beginning, then: Starblazer Adventures is subtitled “The Rock And Roll Space Opera Adventure Game” right there on the cover.  Would I use Diaspora to run a game set in the universe of the Heavy Metal movie? No, sir, I would not. I would use Starblazer Adventures for that because it’s got that kind of vibe right down in its tritanium-alloy bones.  Starting on page one, SBA pumps its fist in the air, throws the horns, and headbangs. It does not stop.  It does not stop for 629 pages.  Page 629 is the last page of the index, so understand that I’m saying this game has enough rock and roll enthusiasm that you’ll still feel your ears ringing from the music as you flip through those final page references.  SBA is loud and proud and it bloody well should be.

It is Shiva, destroyer of worlds: Or maybe that’s just what I’m inclined to think after waving around its hefty hardcover form.  I’m doubly to blame for the size of the thing: I participated in writing Spirit of the Century, which was long-winded as all crap, and most of which went into the SOTC SRD.  Nearly all of the SRD went into Starblazer, so even if brevity had been the Cubicle 7 gents’ goal, they were pretty much screwed from go.  But then I had to come along and be the layout guy for it, and I championed the idea of giving it a bigger, friendlier typeface than you normally get in a brick of a book like this, so I suspect some of its expansive page count is due to that decision.  But this thing is packed heavy with content, end to end (I’ll get into that more, shortly), and more to the point it is packed heavy with art.  I spent the better part of a month combing through (and cleaning up!) literally hundreds of scanned pages from the original Starblazer comics to get the spread of art in this book, and we put art everywhere.  This book has the crap illustrated out of it, and that’s not wasted space, either: every page is guaranteed to keep the horns thrown and the fists pumping in great part because that 70s-hip-cool-sci-fi art thing jumps out from every corner.  And lastly planets are in fact destroyed, perhaps multiple times, in the stories shown there.  So: it is the destroyer of worlds, full stop. Moving on.

It is highly Spirit of the Century compatible: Because SBA includes a bunch of content straight from the SOTC SRD, the two games can exchange content very easily. This isn’t necessarily true of many of the other Fate system games out there (including Diaspora and perhaps even The Dresden Files RPG).  Fans of Spirit of the Century would be right to look at Starblazer Adventures as an extension of SOTC into the fertile territory of space opera.  Other than a few additional core mechanics and a minor change to the dicing method, there’s very little to offer a speed-bump to someone familiar with either game if they wanted to try the other.  This is a good thing.  While I like reinvention and reinterpretation ala Diaspora, that’s not going to be for everyone, and ease of transition for a playgroup already comfortable with SOTC shouldn’t be ignored.

It’s ahead of the game: Evil Hat shared a lot of our current state of thought (at least as of 2007-or-so) regarding Fate, after a year-plus of Spirit of the Century being in the wild. This included sharing ideas that have also been worked into the Dresden Files RPG.  But Starblazer Adventures is out there, now, and it’s got lots of the good stuff.  I think it’s the first Fate game that published Lenny Balsera’s -2/-4/-6 consequences system for Fate, which has already supplanted the method offered in Spirit of the Century as the approach favored by the Evil Hatters.  Other ideas made it in as well (some of which I’ll cover below), and as such I regard SBA’s presence in the Fate community as an important vector for getting ideas out there that you’ll see again from Evil Hat.

It covers all the bases: Starblazer Adventures is a broadsword, not a scalpel, and that’s a good thing if you’re looking for a one-stop shop that’ll cover space opera in all of its possible forms.  The Starblazer comics did not have a single setting; those comics were home to hundreds of stories that were only faintly related to one another.  With that as the “setting” inspiration, Starblazer Adventures had a mission to accommodate all of the space opera style stories that could be told in that comic’s pages.  It absolutely succeeded.

Starblazer brings it all together: As part of making sure that all our base belonged to it, Starblazer Adventures brought together a number of ideas that have been floating around the Fate community and the heads of its developers. After I gave the Cubicle 7 guys an explanation of the Fate Fractal (everything in the game can be modeled like a character), and pointed them at Rob’s organization rules, they hit the ground running.  The result is a system of organization rules in SBA that offers a clean way of modeling characters and organizations all the way from starship crews, to planetary governments, to star empires, and all in a way that allows those entities to interact with one another easily.  Luke Skywalker takes on the entire flippin’ Empire? We got you covered.

It gets Fate back to its roots, in a good way: So back in the previous version of Fate, the one that existed prior to Spirit of the Century, stress tracks worked in a different way.  We had the whole numbered box thing going, yes, but those boxes were organized into tiers, and specific system effects would get triggered whenever a box in one of those tiers was marked.  In post-SOTC Fate, this all got abstracted out through the consequences mechanic. This was good, because it allowed for a lot more freedom of interpretation and effect, but it had a price of losing some nuance and depth, I think.  In earlier Fate, those tiers could be assigned different, specific meanings depending on what activity the stress track represented — one of the examples I wrote for that version of Fate talked about using a stress track to represent a game of chess, with each box representing one of the 16 pieces a player had, pawns on the lowest tier, king at the highest (taken out).  You just can’t do that in the SOTC version (not as easily or explicitly, at least).

Why am I talking about this?  Because Starblazer Adventures manages to recapture some of that texture, I think, with the Plot Stress concept.  This was the fruit of another conversation I had with the Cubicle 7 developers, part of the greater fractal conversation, when I pointed out that you could even treat parts of the story narrative itself like a character, such as giving a mystery a stress track and using it to represent the characters’ progress towards a solution.  What they created based on that conversation harkens back to one of the things I really enjoy about the pre-SOTC Fate iteration, but it plays well with the consequences idea of post-SOTC Fate. Is it done exactly how I’d do it? Maybe, maybe not — but that’s beside the point, because this approach is a solid one, and well-explained.  I do wish it had gotten more real-estate though — 3 pages wasn’t enough, even though it covered the concept entirely. More examples next time, guys!

It’s widely available: And if we’re doing comparisons, Diaspora flat out loses on this point. Starblazer is available for sale through several venues, including Indie Press Revolution, so it won’t suddenly vanish (as Diaspora did) due to a failure at the single point of presence for sales. Through IPR and other forms of distribution it’s something you can get (at least with a special order) through your local gamestore.  It’s not getting printed out after you place your order, so it’ll be on its way to you right away, and you can save on shipping by buying other products along with it (or by buying it through an FLGS).  Or if digital is more your speed, you can buy it in PDF form from DriveThruRPG (meanwhile, you can’t buy Diaspora in electronic form at all — but I’ll talk about that in a later post). That’s as it should be.

It has ongoing support: Cubicle 7′s on track to put out new stuff for SBA, and they’re looking to continue to support their “branch” of Fate by expanding the Starblazer core into the fantasy genre with upcoming Legends of Anglerre. (I hope I got that title right.) In terms of true blue serious-as-a-publisher Fate producers go, Cubicle 7 is the only other game in town besides Evil Hat.  That can’t and shouldn’t be ignored or downplayed.  While I do expect others to come along, and I hope that VSCA (Diaspora‘s publisher) continues on a path toward doing full-blooded publishing, the fact of the matter is if you want reliable, continued Fate to show up on your bookshelf, you’ll be getting it at least as often from Cubicle 7 as from Evil Hat.  Evil Hat, after all, is freakin’ slow when it comes to putting out Fate stuff; we do want to turn that around, but we haven’t yet.  Cubicle 7? They’re chugging right along.  It’s us that have to scramble to make sure we don’t end up playing the role of the caboose!

So. There’s plenty to like about Starblazer Adventures, and plenty of reasons to recommend it.  While it might not always land where my current tastes with Fate reside, that’s hardly a reason for someone to turn away from the product.  I approach most of my RPG bookshelf like a gold miner, digging away and hoping I’m gonna strike it rich.  Starblazer Adventures makes hitting paydirt easy; it’d be worth your while to stake a claim of your own.