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Thousand Suns Starships (2010)
Rogue Games
Date Reviewed: 7-3-2011
Critical Kobold Rating:
(4 out of 5 Dice)
Kick the Tires, Let's Take 'Er Out For a Spin!
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Starships
is the fourth offering in Rogue Games’
Thousand Suns rpg
line, and is a sourcebook dedicated to describing agricultural
processing in the colonies of the Imperial sector.
Ha! Just joshin’! Starships, of course, is all about the
great vessels of space, the lifeblood of interstellar travel,
commerce, and battle. These faster- than- light ships do the
exploring, scouting, colonizing, trading, smuggling and joyriding
throughout your campaign universe. The sourcebook greatly expands on
the minimalist starship information provided by the core book, and
there’s a metric tribble-load of campaign info that has nothing to do
with the ships themselves: material on the purpose, size, and
composition of space navies, crew training and positions and
responsibilities, skill use and technology aboard ships, effects of
FTL technology on campaigns, interstellar law, communications… oh,
it goes on and on. I waited two years for Rogue Games to deliver
detailed starship design and combat rules for their Thousand Suns
game, and pleasantly, it was worth the wait. (Which is good, cuz you
know kobolds are not the most patient goblinoids in the book. I put
my instant rice in the microwave.)
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Starships is broken down into four broad chapters. The opening
chapter examines the duties, size, goals, and make-up of a space
navy in relation to the type of campaign a game master wishes to
run. Naval academies and rank are discussed, as are the typical
duties and missions of both starships and personnel. A brief
overview of life aboard an interstellar craft is presented. How do
crews pass the time? How much room do they have to move around in a
frigate? How do marines train while aboard a battleship? What role
do lawyers play on a destroyer? Much of the info in this chapter is
also applicable to non-military craft, such as deep-space traders or
exploration and science ships. This means even PCs who aren’t part
of, say, the Navy of the United Republican Federated Protectorate
Organization Of Planets (NURF-POOP) can get an idea of how logistics,
salvage laws, and letters of marque may affect their own
interstellar taxi service.
The second chapter is all about standard shipboard operations and a
myriad of campaign details. There’s a LOT of info to consider packed
into this chapter, and GMs should give this section the most
attention before play. Some of the decisions made from this chapter
will shape the course of campaign play from start to finish. For
example, GMs are given options for methods of FTL travel appropriate
for their game. Do ships use individual warp drives, or does each
sector have jump gates? Can they jump from anywhere to anywhere, or
are there ‘jump points’ in each solar system? Do they travel through
worm holes? Do different alien species have different methods of FTL
travel? How long does travel take? Do your starships make really
cool special effects when they go to light speed? Consider all of
these well when designing a campaign.
The chapter then delves into such operational considerations as
scanner types and range, and methods for detecting other ships
lurking nearby or being sneaky and avoiding detection yourself. Is
jamming and cloaking technology available? What about
communications? Is there FTL chatter in your game, or do all
messages move at the speed of intergalactic mail couriers? There are
pages about ship maintenance both in space and at a docking station,
and options for fuel, power, and other supply considerations.
Equipment such as emergency tech, protective shields and defensive
countermeasures, cargo bays, tractor beams, airlocks, probes, and
many other operational systems are detailed and described.
This second chapter wraps up with a look at combat systems and
piloting, with explanations of common weaponry and tactics. This is
a nice lead-in to the next chapter, which deals with running combat.
So, this chapter tells you what items are useful for blowing your
wily opponents into space dust, and the next chapter tells you
precisely how to do that.
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The third chapter, then, is the combat chapter, which lays out the
game mechanics of fighting in spaaaaaaace. There are explanations of
initiative rounds and combat turns, rolling to hit and applying
damage, maneuverability, weapon ranges; all the things you’d
obviously expect to know about using your plasma batteries to turn
the invading enemy into slag. But the combat section has the most
optional rules of any chapter, useful for making your fights either
grittier or faster, large or small scale, deeply tactical or broadly
narrative, all as you prefer. And as a sweet deal, included are mass
combat rules, so instead of just one or two ships trying to
obliterate each other with rail cannons, you can have entire armadas
engaged in wiping each other out! “Mass crew” mechanics allow you to
populate huge megacruisers or entire fleets with a few stats
representing the experience and skills of the shipmen, so you don’t
need 1,001 NPC write-ups to engage in your invasion of Delta
Quadrant.
Coolly, there are rules for including the
PCs in the mass battles, so skills they use and actions they take
can actually have an effect on the mass combat turn’s outcome. This
allows the players who aren’t your weapons and tactical-ops officers to
still share in the fun during a high-orbit shoot out. Scanner crews,
engineering, communications, medical, everyone except maybe the
galley staff can get in on the action and have something to do
during red alert. |
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The last chapter provides a comprehensive ship design system. The
whole process is all laid out in simple- to- follow tables, from
choosing a hull to fitting it with operations systems, drives,
specialized components (brigs, labs, bays, hangers, heated pools,
etc.), crew, weapons and defenses, all the way down to choosing a
pair of fuzzy dice for the rear-view scanner. Basically, any ship
design is concerned with tonnage, power use, and cost. As long as
you can find a balance between those three things, you can design
any ship your heart desires. There is a differentiation between
military and civilian craft design and components, which makes for
interesting comparisons, and possibly adventures. (What if your PCs
want to get their hands on an old military corvette hull instead of
a civilian courier? Is that legal? How would they procure and outfit
that? And do you think anyone will notice the military grade linked
fusion guns on the bow?)
Of course, for those who don’t have that kind of time and need to
get off-planet before the local constabulary discovers your minor
indiscretion on Regula IV, a bevy of pre-designed ships are detailed
in the book’s appendix; almost thirty in all! Everything from
fighters to dreadnoughts, shuttles to starliners, and dropships to
trash haulers are statted and fitted for your immediate blast-off.
Now sit back and buckle up, and check out these cool special effects
as I kick this baby into hyper warp overdrive!
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