Rpg Review Stars Without Number Revised Edition

RPG Review: Stars Without Number Revised Edition

Overview

Sine Nomine Publishing has recently Kickstarted a new offset print edition of Stars Without Number Revised, the 2017 science fiction RPG based loosely on Dungeons and Dragons B/X edition rules. I’m also coming towards the end of a SWN:R campaign, so I have plenty of experience with the game. I thought it was high time for a review, even though the game is a few years old now, and with Dune coming out in cinemas, what better time to talk about science fiction!

SWN:R is the second edition of Stars Without Number. The game is intended for running science fiction games in a wide variety of genres, from cyberpunk dystopia to military SF. If there is such a thing as a “default” SWN:R game, it would be something akin to the typical Traveller game, with the PCs taking the role of adventurers with a small interstellar ship and a large hunger for profit and adventure.

SWN:R has a free version which contains everything you need to play. You will be able to create characters, design spaceships, and populate your sector of space with interesting worlds. Paying for the Deluxe edition grants extra options such as AI characters, mechs, and Heroic characters who are a cut above the ordinary adventurer.

System

At first glance the system would be familiar to players of old-school Dungeons & Dragons, using much of the same basic system. However the SWN:R has some quirks that separate it from D&D, particularly a system of 2d6-based skill checks and the addition of Foci. Skills are rated from 0 (trained) to 4 (the best in the sector).

A Focus, something like a Feat in 3rd Edition D&D, is a special capability that your character has, regardless of their class. A Focus can make you an excellent Gunslinger, Diplomat or Hacker, enhance your spaceship based talents as a Star Captain or Starfarer, or grant you a unique ability like Ironskin, which grants you the benefits of armour without having to wear any.

The classes are Warrior, Psychic and Expert. Alternatively you can play an Adventurer who has aspects of two classes, e.g. a Partial Warrior/Partial Psychic if you want to see the future and shoot a gun really well.

Psychic abilities come in 8 disciplines including Telekinesis, Precognition and Telepathy, and each discipline has a range of powers to choose from. An Adventurer with the Partial Psychic class can access only one psychic discipline, while a Psychic can access any discipline. Psychic powers are ranked by the skill rating in the relevant discipline, e.g. the technique Impact Sump, which allows a psychic to shrug off an instance of physical damage, requires that you have Telekinesis-2 or higher.

In general the psychic powers are interesting, but they can leave the Expert and Warrior feeling a bit left out. A full Expert has only one advantage over a Partial Expert/Partial Psychic, which is that they can re-roll a skill check once per scene. That’s a useful trick to be sure, but when compared with having psychic abilities, it’s not necessarily that tempting. Particularly since there’s a Precognition technique that lets you give yourself and allies re-rolls on skill checks.

The book contains plenty of rules for weapons and equipment, including TL5 artifacts which are so advanced that they fill a similar role to magic items in a fantasy game. There are detailed rules for purchasing a ship and outfitting it with a choice of weapons, defences and fittings. Tough choices have to be made with how to allocate your ship’s Mass and Power - if you want the enhanced sensors of an exploration ship, you might have to leave off that extra laser turret.

Starship combat has its own ruleset, which is probably one of my least favourite aspects of the system. It’s functional, but it relies on your PCs thinking and acting as a team, because it doesn’t always give each character something fun to do. The system is built around building up a supply of Command Points each turn and then spending them on actions by various departments on the ship. There are actions available for the Captain, Comms Officer, Pilot and Engineer but often it is best to ignore those options in favour of generating Command Points for the Gunnery Officer to blast away with. Viewed as a team activity it works well, but most of the time it’s the player or players operating the guns who will get to roll the most dice and make the most impact.

Setting

SWN:R is clearly designed to be fairly easily used in any science fiction setting. That said, the book assumes a particular background in which humanity expanded to the stars using “spike drives” and later, the more powerful “jump gates”. Humanity developed into an interstellar empire known as the Mandate, which fell apart 600 years ago when an unknown psychic event destroyed the jump gates, drove almost every psychic insane, and destroyed all spike drive ships in transit. This calamity, known as the Scream, completely splintered interstellar civilisation, and only in the last few decades have some planets recovered the ability to produce spike drive ships and explore their neighbouring stars. Other planets, due to lack of resources or social collapse, have ended up at a lower level of technology. An interstellar explorer might run into worlds of varying “Tech Levels”, from the stone age TL0 to the current technological peak of TL4. TL5 represents the technology which existed before the Scream, which has to be salvaged from abandoned ruins and derelict ships, since no modern world is capable of manufacturing such wonders.

This setting provides a backdrop for adventuring between stars, exploring the ruins of a fallen civilisations and getting involved in the politics of worlds that have previously been separated for generations. The setting also includes some technologies to rule out certain approaches to problems that PCs and their enemies would otherwise be likely to take. “Nuke snuffers” make nuclear weapons ineffective except for mining asteroids, “gravitic braker guns” prevent orbital bombardment and asteroid strikes, and “quantum ECM” shields ships, battlefields and government facilities from remote-operated drones and guided missiles. Planets below TL4 technology will need to purchase these technologies from others, and if they haven’t had the chance they may be easy prey for even a single spaceship with the right armaments.

GM Tools

The GM tools in Stars Without Number are excellent. There are a vast number of World Tags to help you randomly generate planets with interesting advantages, problems, and conflicts. Since each world is advised to have two tags, this allows for surprising combinations which the GM can use to create unique worlds. A Radioactive World that is also a Trade Hub, for example - would you discard that result, or find a way to make it work? Each tag comes with suggested NPCs, complications, items and locations. In addition to tags there is also a Faction system for pitting organisations and worlds against one another in conflict - be it overt violence, espionage or economic competition. A large number of plot seeds and useful random tables round out one of the most extensive, and useful, GM sections you are likely to find in any game.

Art & Production Quality

SWN:R is a good-looking book with highly usable layout and high quality art. The art is very “generic sci-fi”, feeling like it could represent any world, not necessarily the base setting of the game in particular, and there isn’t loads of art, the book is pretty dense with text. However the art is nice-looking and well-placed within the book. The print-on-demand hardback from DriveThru is not the best quality printing, and I’m looking forward to getting my Kickstarter reward of an offset-print copy which I expect to have brighter colour and better paper/binding.

Conclusion

SWN:R is an excellent purchase for any science-fiction GM, since the worldbuilding tools are usable in any game system. For anyone looking for an old-school D&D-based system for science fiction, the book is even more useful. Thanks to Foci, skill checks and psychic abilities, this book does drift away from some of the mechanical simplicity of B/X D&D, and that added complexity will be unwelcome to some groups. For me though it is a good medium-crunch system that works really well “out of the box”. It can easily sustain a long campaign, though the levelling system caps out at level 10.

Overall this is an excellent game and I have thoroughly enjoyed running it for a group of six players. If it sounds remotely up your street, I recommend you check out the free version and go from there!