“TSR’s Star Frontiers game — the ‘playable’ one” from 1982
TSR’s sci-fi RPG of the eighties, Star Frontiers (find at Amazon.com*), performed quite well for a few years, with boxed rules and adventure modules following the then-standard product format. The game didn’t survive into the nineties, though, and I am surprised that even to this day we haven’t seen an official new edition launched or supported. A shame, but at least we have the old materials to entertain us.
And, as way of entertainment, here’s a 1982 advertisement for Star Frontiers from an issue of White Dwarf magazine. Why the publishers thought that they needed to punch down at a smaller publisher’s game is a question I would love someone to answer. It’s clear they’re referring to Traveller in the ad, but it’s my opinion they didn’t even need to acknowledge the existence of other sci-fi RPGs to promote their own.
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We used to play this a lot. A friend of mine played a Rastafarian Dralasite.
Hadn’t seen this one before–those ships in the top half look WAY airbrushed!
I actually loved Star Frontiers and with the addition of Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space, I felt it made the leap from a ‘Basic’ ruleset to an ‘Advanced’ Ruleset and I still have a lot of my stuff from the ’80s. The key problem I felt then was patchy support and an inconsistent product range. Seemed as though TSR couldn’t decide at what level to pitch it: hard SF or space opera. I believe the design of the system was born of a failed Star Wars bid at the time (LFL’s licensing fee was still too high), so they came up with their own IP. Looking at it with 21st century eyes, though, it seems clear that many of the seeds for franchises like Mass Effect, Babylon 5 and Farscape can be found in the nascent ideas bubbling (but not fully cooked!) in Star Frontiers. Their Alternity StarDrive work (under WotC) was a lot more polished, but a wholly different creature embodying a slightly more grimdark sci-fi.