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Star Frontiers Aliens
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Whill
Dark Lord of the Jedi (Owner/Admin)


Joined: 14 Apr 2008
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Location: Columbus, Ohio, USA, Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way Galaxy

PostPosted: Fri Nov 09, 2018 2:50 am    Post subject: Star Frontiers Aliens Reply with quote



Oliver Queen on Google+ made 22 mini-PDFs for Star Frontier species with stats converted to Star Wars D6. I invited him to post them here in a single thread or produce a single combo-PDF I could host in the Pit Library. Here are Google Doc links to the three PDFs for the core player alien species. These links could change too, but Google+ will definitely disappear while these links might not change if the owner doesn't change them.

Dralasite
Vrusk
Yazarian

I don't have time to hunt the remaining 19 species down. And I am not going to host a bunch of individual mini-PDFs on the Rancor Pit Library, but if anyone wants to compile them all into a new single PDF then please feel free so I could then put that up on the Library. Thanks.




EDIT: Star Frontiers Aliens (Star Wars D6)
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Last edited by Whill on Wed Sep 16, 2020 6:35 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Pel
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Joined: 10 May 2006
Posts: 983
Location: Texas

PostPosted: Fri Nov 09, 2018 11:45 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for the link! Just curious if anyone here ever played this game? I remember seeing ads for it, but don't recall seeing it in any comic shops at the time. If I recall correctly it was one of the last TSR products.
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CRMcNeill
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Joined: 05 Apr 2010
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 09, 2018 2:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Pel wrote:
Thanks for the link! Just curious if anyone here ever played this game? I remember seeing ads for it, but don't recall seeing it in any comic shops at the time. If I recall correctly it was one of the last TSR products.

They were included in the D20 Future variant of WotC's D20 Modern. I haven't heard of Star Frontiers before...
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shootingwomprats
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 09, 2018 4:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Here is the all-in-one file. I did it quick as I am currently very busy, so its probably going to have layout issues and look a little sh!t, but at least it's done I guess. When I get a block of free time and feel the inspiration I will go through and do a better edit. For now, here it is:

Star Frontiers Aliens D6 Conversion
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Whill
Dark Lord of the Jedi (Owner/Admin)


Joined: 14 Apr 2008
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Location: Columbus, Ohio, USA, Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way Galaxy

PostPosted: Sat Nov 10, 2018 12:39 am    Post subject: Re: Star Frontiers Reply with quote

shootingwomprats wrote:
Here is the all-in-one file.

Thank you.

Pel wrote:
Just curious if anyone here ever played this game?

Yep, I owned it and played it. It was a percentage-based attribute/skill system that only used d10s. The core of my early to mid-80s gaming group was myself and two brothers. The three of us took turns being GM (but mostly myself and the younger brother). We mostly played D&D, but we would take breaks to play other games. We had a handful of TSR games besides D&D/AD&D, such as Star Frontiers, Indiana Jones, Marvel Superheroes, Top Secret, and Boothill. I wish I still had all those games.

Pel wrote:
I remember seeing ads for it, but don't recall seeing it in any comic shops at the time. If I recall correctly it was one of the last TSR products.

Not even close. Star Frontiers came out in 1982. I added the image of the main box set cover to the OP of this thread.

CRMcNeill wrote:
They were included in the D20 Future variant of WotC's D20 Modern.

I think just the SF core races were adapted to d20 Future, but the SF setting wasn't included.

CRMcNeill wrote:
I haven't heard of Star Frontiers before...

Wha?! Not even heard of it? It was a neat setting with some cool aliens, but the game system wasn't spectacular. It was my first officially published sci-fi RPG - My group didn't play it until 1983, after the homebrew Star Wars game we made that year.

Many years ago WotC (the current owner of TSR properties), released most of the SF gameline digitally for free use by fans (likely they just officially sanctioned existing bootlegs). I nabbed a bunch of it out of nostalgia. Now it seems they have pulled back permissions on some or all of it so they could sell them digitally and print-on-demand.
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Sutehp
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Joined: 01 Nov 2016
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 10, 2018 7:02 pm    Post subject: Re: Star Frontiers Aliens Reply with quote

Whill wrote:


Good lord, I haven't seen this picture in decades. I never saw or read these books but I remember seeing this cover long ago. I don't even remember the circumstances behind that sighting. And it reminded me of this cover that I also saw long ago (I think in my 1st grade school library):



I never did read Star Gold. I think it was published way back in 1950 or something. I suppose I should make time for it someday.
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S-Foil
Sub-Lieutenant
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Joined: 21 Feb 2011
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 11, 2018 10:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Pel wrote:
Thanks for the link! Just curious if anyone here ever played this game? I remember seeing ads for it, but don't recall seeing it in any comic shops at the time. If I recall correctly it was one of the last TSR products.


I bought the two boxed sets second hand in the mid-90s and played a few sessions. It was originally published in the early 80s and largely seen as an answer to GDW's Traveller as it tried to cover some of the same game types. The rules are pretty straight forward and it's a very playable game. It did not have a very deep library though, all told there were about a dozen supplements and two boxed sets. Alpha Dawn was the main on the ground game where starships were an off-camera fast travel while Knight Hawks was rules for ship-based adventuring. Outside of the published supplements were some Dragon articles.

The setting was unironic silver spandex sci-fi. I always pictured things as Battlestar Galactica crosses with Space:1999 with a little bit of Star Trek or Forbidden Planet (big nominally benign Federation). I liked the campy sci-fi (I own all the Buck Rogers XXVc books) but it was at times hard to get my friends interested in the game.

The whole kit and kaboodle is available on DTRPG. I think WotC changed their terms with their trademarks with fan creations when they started selling PDFs so a lot of the formerly free (legal) scans of the official books are no longer available. I haven't really kept up on it over the past few months though.

So tl;dr it's a ok game and good but not super deep setting. There's enough to be a starter for a GM with time to homebrew deeper details. The rules aren't anything really special but the aliens are at least fairly interesting not merely rubber forehead aliens. The Sathar are enigmatic enemies from beyond the frontier and can make for a good mystery.
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Whill
Dark Lord of the Jedi (Owner/Admin)


Joined: 14 Apr 2008
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 11, 2018 11:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Out of nostalgia, the setting exists in some form in my SWU (in a satellite galaxy). I have had members of the three core PC alien races appear as background characters in my game before.
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Whill
Dark Lord of the Jedi (Owner/Admin)


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Location: Columbus, Ohio, USA, Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way Galaxy

PostPosted: Sun Sep 27, 2020 5:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

https://rancorpit.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8083

I received my beautiful purple POD hardback made from the entire contents of the original Star Frontiers Alpha Dawn box set. It was a lot cheeper than buying an original box set on eBay and the like, but it almost fully satisfies my nostalgia for my first non-homebrew sci-fi RPG. Most of the book is black-and-white as it was originally, but I elected for it to be color wherever the original was color, and it looks great. Lots of cool art. And I love my RPG hardbacks.

Below is someone's blog about getting hardbacks of this and also the second set that had all the space combat rules for the game, but I didn't order the second book because I don't remember ever having that when I was a kid. I only played Star Frontiers with my junior high D&D group a few times. I'm not sure why. I don't remember not liking it. Maybe we just liked D&D more. And I didn't get my new books to play the game now. Maybe it will have some inspirations for Star Wars, but it is mostly just for nostalgia, to put on my bookshelf beside my D&D Basic box set. I wish I could also get a reprint of the original TSR Marvel Super Heroes RPG, but it is not available for reprint and the original box set is likewise expensive now.


EDIT: Link removed because it now goes to a spam/scam website.
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