The most important thing to know about Chris Birch and Stuart Newman’s game Starblazer Adventures (629-page black-and-white hardback, $49.95) from Cubicle 7 is that it has nothing to do with Star Blazers, the Englished version of some anime or other. No, “The Rock and Roll Space Opera Game” is based on a 1980s British comic book series called Starblazer. This was an anthology comic book series set all across (various different futures of) the Galaxy and all across millennia, barely connected by occasional series characters or conceits — in short, exactly how an RPG setting should be: sketchy, large, and packed with familiar tropes, plentiful blank space, and contradictions. If you don’t know anything about the comic book series, don’t worry — it’s pretty much the exact same “default comic outer space” assumed by every Silver Age DC comic: there are domed cities, and space dogfights, and aliens, and post-apocalypses, and sentient computers, and robots, and space dreadnaughts, and silvery jumpsuits galore. With just a soupcon of wonders like the “Fi-Sci” (short for “Fighting Scientists”) and the Moonstealers to give it some zing, which you can ignore or replace or change, because most of the writers of the original comic did. I like to think of it as a setting based on a random six-foot section of my SF bookshelf, or rather of my SF bookshelf in 1979. Plus, there’s a lot of setting stuff given stats (or just name-checked) if you’re lost, and whole tranches of adventure generation, planet generation, and “campaign starters” in the back.
The other important thing you need to know about Starblazer Adventures is that it uses the FATE engine, as seen in Spirit of the Century, and does at least as good a job laying out the “FATE Space” ruleset as SotC did the “FATE Pulp” ruleset. It introduces some new fillips: Scale (for starships and doomsday machines and sentient moons and …) and organizational rules (for star empires and secret brotherhoods of space monks and Fighting Scientists) between them give you a mechanical (and therefore story) hold on anything from a dogfight to mass combat between twin planets’ armadas. “Plot stress” is a magnificent innovation, applying “hit points” to story elements — when your space station suffers too much drama, the reactor melts down! Last, Starblazer Adventures takes SotC’s story-driven character creation to the next level for collaborative story-driven campaign creation! It’s only two pages, but it opens up, well, worlds!
Topped off with a super index, and lovingly blanketed with original Starblazer comics art (which is so iconic as to cause nostalgic fits even in people who never read the original Starblazer comics), this is one monstrously usable, magnificently story-starting game book. You could easily port it to Star Wars, the Kree-Skrull War, old-school Star Trek, or any game of fightin’ robots, fightin’ spaceships … or, of course, Fightin’ Scientists!
