Star Frontiers

This article or section is about something oldschool - and awesome. Make sure your rose-tinted glasses are on nice and tight, and prepare for a lovely walk down nostalgia lane.

Star Frontiers was TSR's science-fiction space opera RPG. It was shoved in a closet and ignored during the reign of Lorraine Williams because she wanted to push her Buck Rogers licensed-material and soak up the royalties. It had three releases: "Alpha Dawn" for player characters, "Knight Hawks" for ship-to-ship action including boarding parties and trade, and "Zebulon's Guide" for campaign setting fluff and politics. It had a more than respectable combat system with easy percentile rolls and modifiers, which included vehicle and aerial combat during the same six-second turns, using archaic weapons, melee weapons and futuristic melee and ranged weapons.

Characters

Unlike other TSR products of the time, they don't have a career "class" that dictates their aptitudes. Characters are skill-based instead, although the character picks a Primary Skill Area (PSA) that allows the character to pay half-price for advancing skills in that area (a concept TSR would revive decades later for the also-short-lived Alternity).

Attributes are percentile, and are allocated as pairs. The pairs are:

• Strength / Stamina
• Dexterity / Reaction Speed
• Intuition / Logic
• Personality / Leadership

Attributes are usually identical in pairs, though racial bonuses or spending experience points can change that.

Race plays a very important role in Star Frontiers. Most Star Frontiers NPCs use race as a shorthand for the personality to expect (except Humans, of course, because Humans are always the jack-of-all-trades/unpredictable race). There are five major races in the campaign setting, four of them are playable:

• The amorphous thoughtful Dralasites (+5 Str/Sta, -5 Int/Log, multiple limbs, Lie Detection),
• The gangly curious Humans (+5 to any single ability but not both in a pair),
• The insectoid dedicated Vrusk (-5 Str/Sta, +5 Int/Log, Ambidextrous, Sense Motive)
• The simian fierce Yazirians (-10 Str/Sta, +5 Dex/RS, +5 Int/Log, Night Vision, Gliding)

These four races are allied for setting and exploiting the frontier sector that is the default campaign setting.

The fifth major race is saved for the BBEG:

• The maniacally violent vermiform Sathar (-5 Dex/RS, -5 Int/Log, +0/+20 Per/Ldr, Hypnotism)

They are written intentionally as an enigmatic BBEG race for the GM to use for spooking the players or setting up a conspiracy. Finally we have four supplementary races released in Zebulon's Guide to Frontier Space the last supplements for Star Frontier before it got completely canned. Three of these races are brand new and are:

• The spiritual dwarfen isolationists Ifshnit (-5 Str/Sta, -5 Int/Log, Nictitating Membrane, Innate Skill)
• The bizarre parthenogenic individualist Osakar (+5 Str/Sta, +5 Dex/RS, -10 Per/Ldr, Highly Developed Smell, Advanced Linguistics)
• The prideful warrior kangaroomen Humma (+10 Str/Sta, -10 Per/Ldr, Spring Charge, Resist Poison, Prehensile Tail)

The final race is one that was released in previous supplements but wasn't given player stats until Zebulon's is the Mechanon who like the Sathar are really meant to be NPCs and villians, not player characters. Unlike the Sathar however, who have semi-reasonable stats for a player character, Mechanons' have laughably superior stats in the form of +20/10 Str/Sta, +10 Dex/RS, -20/+10 Int/Log, -20/+20 Per/Ldr. In addition to that they are Ambidextrous, have a built in laser pistol, Inferred and Starlight vision, and their Logic score is automatically set to 75 if it isn't naturally higher than that. Thinker Mechanons are a superior form of Mechanon with even better traits. In addition to the previously mentioned traits they get all forms of sight, a built in Poly-Vox, level 2 Persuasion, a base Logic of 95, and get a rifle instead of a pistol. Something you might have noticed while reading through these races is that a number of them also appear in Spelljammer, albeit with different names and cultures. While a official explanation was never given it's pretty obvious that they wanted to reuse Star Frontiers content in D&D as to not let it go to waste.

Star Frontiers New Genesis

Meanwhile in 2021, Ernie Gygax and a couple buddies announce "TSR version 3" in Lake Geneva, snatching some trademarks from TSR2 and embarrassing themselves so badly on Twitter they used the "someone we won't name was using our account" defense. A few lawsuits, a failed con and a schism into TSR3.5 later, they announce they're republishing Star Frontiers (despite WOTC still owning it and it's still in-print). The playtest demo has some real gems in it like:

• the not-black-just-dark-purple species named "Negro" has a max int score of 9...
• ...while the blue-eyed blondes species named "Nordic" has all stats with min of 13.
• uplifted species are mentioned, and "African, Asian, Mexican, etc" are examples.
• scolds the reader if they're "an SJW warrior pushing your values on others" (a warrior warrior?).
• "races in Star Frontiers are not unlike races in the real world. Some are superior than others."
• In the theology section, BLM and Antifa are examples of radical cults.
• Gender options are "Male/Female no bonuses, and no Trans." with a sidebar "should we make trans a race? transbots?".

Is the game decent? Who the fuck knows. TSR3 only sold the final product through one venue, claims it sold-out right away and "is no longer available, and probably won't be reprinted." A hardcopy has yet to surface on social media, and probably never will since WOTC is suing them again to cut that shit out.

Images

• 

  Dralasite, Human, Vrusk and Yazirian anatomy

• 

  map of the systems in the default setting

Links

• Fanboy site for rulebooks
  TSR once gave these fanboys permission to republish all the original material electronically, for free, then reneged so some of the links take you to DriveThruRPG
• Remastered Rulebooks "digitally remastered" and patched up rules, with modules, maps and links to Star Frontiersman fanzines.
  Gone, WOTC asked people to stop distributing things they own the rights of... or something