This week saw the release of White Star: White Box Science Fiction Roleplaying, by James Spahn, published by Barrel Rider Games. It has already become a bestseller at RPGnow, apparently shooting up to Electrum status
(however many units sold that means) incredibly quickly. It's safe to
say it's the most popular OSR product to come out recently.
What's
all the fuss about, you might ask. The game's biggest selling point is
that it faithfully recreates tropes from classic sci-fi movies from the
late 20th Century, the time period when many old-school gamers were
growing up. I use the shortened form "sci-fi" for a reason. The game's
seven core classes owe a great deal to the original three Star Wars
movies (now known as Episodes IV-VI), and that influence means there are
a lot of low-level fantasy elements.
White Star is based on the Swords and Wizardry Whitebox Version, so it uses only a few classes, a few of which are actually races. The human classes are:
● Aristocrat (Princess Leia)
● Mercenary (no obvious equivalent among the Star Wars heroes, though one reviewer has suggested Boba Fett)
● Pilot (Han Solo)
● Star Knight (Obi-Wan Kenobi or Luke Skywalker after finishing his Jedi training)
There are also three non-human classes:
● Alien Brute (Chewbacca)
● Alien Mystic (A less powerful Yoda)
● Robot (the droids, obviously)
The
two alien classes are meant to be broad-based, so it's up to the player
whether their hulking brute has fur or scales or a hard shell, for
example. by contrast, the robot class is divided into three subtypes
with specific abilities.
Both
the Star Knight and the Alien Mystic gain powers (called Meditations
for Star Knights and Gifts for the Mystics) that are prepared and spent
like D&D spells, though the effects are all fairly subtle and
small-scale. However, the GM can always eliminate these two classes to
play a science-fiction game without magical or psionic effects.
There is also a brief list of aliens and creatures, who fill the function of monsters in old-school D&D. Most of the aliens are thinly disguised versions of races from sources like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Dr. Who. The creatures are somewhat more original, though a few (like the sandworm) are instantly recognizable from famous sci-fi works.
Your
opinion of this game will depend on how you feel about the
rules-lightest of OSR offerings . If you're content to have many aspects
of the game hand-waved with phrases like "whatever fits the style of
the campaign," with little guidance on what campaign style
considerations might go with what rules, you'll probably like White
Star. If you need more guidance from a ruleset, you may want to try
another game or look for supplemental rules systems from other sources. I
find myself somewhere in between, loving the flav or of the rules and
itching to design not only my own settings, but my own subsystems to
fill in the gaps.
If you like the system, the core book also includes a short sample setting (including one reasonably detailed space sector) and a prewritten adventure, allowing you to jump into running a session right away. This kind of value added in the base product makes White Star a bargain at $9.99 for the PDF, at least for a certain kind of gamer.
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