Science Fiction Hobby Games Ing in Anonymous Collaboration
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Contents Foreword vii How to Read this Book ix Hobby Games and Science Fiction 1 Game Worlds 5 Game Stories 9 Role Playing Games 15 2300 AD 34 Aftermath! 36 Alternity 39 Amazing Engine 41 Ashen Stars 43 Big Eyes, Small Mouth 45 Blue Planet 47 Buck Rogers XXVCSample file 49 Call of Cthulhu 52 Castle Falkenstein 56 Champions 58 Conspiracy X 61 Continuum: Roleplaying in the Yet 63 CthulhuTech 65 Cyberpunk 67 d20 69 Dark Conspiracy 73 Darwin’s World 75 Deadlands 77 Eclipse Phase 82 Etherscope 84 Ex Machina 86 Fading Suns 88 Forgotten Futures 90 Fringeworthy 93 Gamma World 94 Godlike 96 Golden Heroes 97 GURPS 98 Heavy Gear 101 Hollow Earth Expedition 103 Justice, Inc 105 Mekton 106 Metamorphosis Alpha 108 Morrow Project, The 110 Mutant Chronicles 111 Mutants and Masterminds 114 My Life with Master 115 Paranoia 117 Psi World 119 Reich Star 120 Rifts 121 Savage Worlds 123 Shadowrun 125 Shatterzone 128 Shock: Social Science Fiction 130 SkyRealms of Jorune 131 SLA Industries Sample file 133 Space: 1889 134 Space Master 137 Space Opera 141 Space Patrol 143 Space Quest 145 Stalking the Night Fantastic 147 Starblazer Adventures 149 Starfaring 152 Star Frontiers 153 Star Trek: The Role Playing Game 154 Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game 156 Superhero 2044 158 Tékumel 159 Torg 163 Trail of Cthulhu 166 Transhuman Space 168 Traveller 169 Trinity 177 Twilight: 2000 179 Underground 181 Universe 183 Villains and Vigilantes 185 Wargames 187 After the Holocaust 195 Attack Vector: Tactical 196 Battlefleet Mars 198 BattleTech 199 Car Wars 204 Creature that Ate Sheboygan, The 206 Crimson Skies 207 Dark Future 209 Empire I 211 Full Thrust 212 Godsfire 213 Heroclix 214 Holy War 215 John Carter: Warlord of Mars 216 Lensman Sample file 218 Ogre 219 Olympica 221 Renegade Legion 222 Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers 224 Starfire 225 Star Fleet Battles 228 Starforce: Alpha Centauri 231 Stellar Conquest 233 Triplanetary 234 Warhammer 40,000 235 Web and Starship 242 Gamebooks 243 Choose Your Own Adventure 249 Fighting Fantasy 251 Board Games 253 4000 AD 258 Awful Green Things from Outer Space, The 259 Cosmic Encounter 260 Risk 2210 AD 262 RoboRally 263 Starfarers of Catan, The 265 Twilight Imperium 267 Voyage of the B.S.M. Pandora 269 Card Games 271 Chrononauts 275 Illuminati 277 Postal Games 281 Beyond the Stellar Empire 285 Starweb 286 Tribes of Crane, The 288 Glossary 289 Selected Bibliography Sample file 317 Index 323 About the Author 339 Foreword he subject of this book is hobby games. This is a phrase which has Tcome to refer to a whole spectrum of games with physical components (books, miniature figures, maps and so on) which dedicated enthusiasts play to adopt the personas of imaginary characters (in role playing games), fight fictional wars (in wargames), choose the plots of the books they read (in gamebooks), or simply so that they can enjoy a social game which may be set in the kinds of fantastic worlds they like to watch and read about (in board games and card games). More specifically, it is about games of this kind which are part of the science fiction genre (often known simply as sf), rather than being set in magical milieux or exaggerated versions of our own world. This is a tradition which has sometimes been overshadowed by discussions of games set in other kinds of worlds – especially those based on medieval fantasy – in previous books dealing with the hobby gaming industry. Sample file After some initial chapters discussing game narratives and settings, the majority of this book deals with individual science-fictional games, and with the histories and natures of their various forms, such as role playing games or wargames. It could be argued that such a work is obsolete in a time when multiple databases listing such games – many of them cited in this book’s own bibliography – are freely available on the internet. How- ever, the descriptions stored on these websites are typically highly factual, an approach made explicit by the rules governing such compendia as wiki- pedia. This book is instead devoted mainly to critical analysis of the works and traditions it considers, and is thus inherently subjective in a way which seems unfeasible for encyclopedic databases created by many hands work- vii viii Science Fiction Hobby Games ing in anonymous collaboration. In addition, this book is primarily con- cerned with hobby games as works of science fiction rather than as games, meaning that more time is spent on the fictional worlds they create and the links between them and other forms of sf than on the systems of rules (or mechanics) which define them as games. (Connections between works in different media are explored both explicitly and – by use of a specialized set of terms which denote such common science-fictional ideas as “long van- ished but immeasurably superior alien species” – implicitly.) This is not the attitude adopted by most web resources. As a result of this approach, games have been selected for inclusion primarily on the basis of their interest as works of sf, with their historical or commercial importance as a secondary consideration. Thus works which use science fiction purely as a source of generic background images, or which simply reiterate the themes and de- tails of the media from which they have been licensed, have in general not been given entries. It should also be noted that this book deals exclusively with works which have been published in English (as is true of the great majority of hobby games of science-fictional interest). The majority of the pieces in this book have been previously published, in a somewhat different form, in the third (online) edition of the Encyclo- pedia of Science Fiction, winner of the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Related Work. I would like to thank David Langford and John Clute for the gener- ous help which they providedSample as editors when file the original versions of these entries were being written..