Star Frontiers Lives On

Knight Hawks game release 0.0.16 available

2011-03-24T20:38:00.002-06:00

I've just pushed out a new version of the Second Sathar War and Knight Hawks combat simulator game. You can get the full details and the download on the main release announcement forum topic.

This version of the game adds mines into the tactical game allowing minelayers to deploy mines both during setup if they are the defending player and during their movement phase during the course of the game. I also added the users guide (which I need to update) to the download as well so you don't have to go searching for it on the forum site.

If you're interested in the more technical aspects of what I added, I'll be posting an entry on my Programming Space blog in the next few days. I'll post a link here when it is up as well. In the meantime, go download the game and have fun.

Crosspost: Saturn never fails to amaze

2011-03-16T11:34:00.002-06:00

This isn't specifically about Star Frontiers but it is space related and so I thought I'd post a cross link to my other blog, Programming Space. Here's a excerpt.

Jupiter is neat, you can see the banding from the storm clouds and if the air is still and you’ve got a good telescope (say 8 inches or better), you can see the Red Spot if it is facing towards you. Plus you have the Gallilean sattelites that are visible as well.

But there is just something special about Saturn and it’s rings that captures the public’s imagination. With a good telescope you can see the rings sharply defined around the planet and even see the Cassini division (named after the astronomer who first discovered it), the large gap in the rings that is prominent on any image of the planet. It’s always a crowd pleaser.

Follow the jump to the full post. Enjoy.

New Game Version

2011-02-21T14:28:00.002-07:00

I just pushed out a new version of the Second Sathar War game that I've been slowly working on for the last few years. The game comes in two flavors: A full Second Sathar War game simulation implementing the rules from the Knight Hawks campaign book and a stand alone tactical game allowing you to have battles with fleets of ships of your own design.

You can download the game (Windows and Linux) and find the full details at the Release 0.0.15 announcement page on the Star Frontiers Network site where I maintain information and discussions about the game.

This version fixes a number of bugs having to do with drawing your ship's path on the board and the selection of targets for you weapons. It also completes the implementation of the Advanced Damage Table with the inclusion of the Navigation hit forcing your damaged ship to expend all of it's MR turning right or left.

If you've ever played the Knight Hawks board game, download it and try it out.

Game Mastering

2011-02-11T15:15:00.002-07:00

I just finished reading this book, Gamemastering, by Brian Jamison. He has a website dedicated to the same topic as well. The book is available in physical form from Amazon or in PDF form from Brian's website.

As someone who has played in and run games off and on for several decades, I found this to be an excellent resource. It reminded me of many of the good and bad things I've seen over the years as both a GM and a player. The book gives tips and advice on all aspects of running a game from character creation, to adventure preparation to starting and ending a gaming session.

The advice and ideas are not tied to a specific game system or genre but are generally applicable to any type of game you run. If you run any sort of role-playing game, this book is a must read. You may not agree with or use all the ideas and techniques included in the book, but there are so many that you are bound to walk away with a few gems that will improve the game for both you and your players. I know I did.

Game Report - Exiting the Caves

2011-02-08T20:22:00.003-07:00

I'm playing Crash on Volturnus with my kids (ages 6, 11, 11, and 14) and they are currently in the Forbidden Caverns. They have a completely non-human party, two Dralisites, a Vrusk, and a Yazirian. Here's the game report from our last session:

They had just made it past the magma monsters in the previous session and had camped to get some rest (having been in the caves for 4 1/2 days at this point.

Upon awaking the party struck camp and continued ahead. After trudging through the caverns for nearly an hour the path foward split: continue straight ahead or take a branching passageway south. An argument quickly ensued with voices echoing off the cavern (aka kitchen) walls. In the end they two envirnomentalists (one of the dralasites and the yazirian) overrode the militant dralasite and they continued west. (Amazingly, they still remembered that I had told them right after the cave in that the Ul-mor were headed north. It has been nearly a year and a half since that session as we haven't had many opportunities to play.)

A few more hours brought them to the lake shore. As they were getting closer I told them that there were more giant mushrooms in the passageways and they again remembered that they had seen them all over the caverns. (It's amazing what kids remember even after many months.) After testing that the mushroom stalks would float, they cut oars out of the stalks and hollowed out the caps of the mushrooms to use as boats. And so, one character per boat, the little flotilla set out across the lake.

The original destination was the island at the south end of the lake. However, as I described the strong current that started to pull them south, the 14 year old (playing the environmentalist dral) freaked out and decided that heading to the island wasn't such a good idea after all and they put all their effort into getting to the far shore.

About half way across the lake, the vrusk (Military PSA and medic, played by the 6 year old) noticed a fin in the water that was coming straight towards him. Calling out to the others, he readied his machete. Just in time as a large jawfish (shark) leapt out of the water and tried to take a bit out of him. Both he and the fish connected, the fish biting his arm as he ran the machete up its mouth. Partially protected by his skeinsuit, the vrusk took 7 points of damage while inflicting 18 on the jawfish.

The jawfish didn't like that outcome and swam out and circled the little flotilla. While the other three paddled to try to get out of there, the yazirian (played by one of the 11 year olds) drew his laser pistol and emptied the clip into the fish (one 5 SEU shot). Despite his low skill, the rocking mushroom boat and the distance, he connected (rolled a 04) and scored 29 points of damage.

Angered by the blast the fish made for the yazirian's boat. Seeing the fish coming, the yazirian readied his machete to take a swing at it when it got close. Deciding to go after the boat instead of the contents the jawfish attacked his mushroom boat breaking it in half and causing it to capsize. Not willing to miss the opportunity, the yaz swung with the machete and scored an excellent hit doing an addtional 23 points of damage.

Having had enough, the jawfish swam away leaving the yazirian floundering in the water. His vrusk companion quickly paddled over and pulled him into his boat. The party made it to the far shore without any further mishap.

They continued away from the shore until they reached a branch in the passageway. Overriding the militant dral's desire to take the southern route, they continued to head northeast. Coming to a fourway branch they opted to take the northern route. After traveling just a bit longer they heard the sound of banging and crashing as if things were being thrown around or dropped.

Investigating closer, the found a robot sweeping the floor with his hands and throwing rocks to get them out of his way. Overcome with excitement to try to use their robotics skills, the vrusk and yazirian race forward to deactivate the robot. The vrusk gets there first but gets tangled up in the robot's arms and the yazirian reaches in to remove the access panel and deactivate it (much to the 6 year olds dismay at not being able to do it). Exausted by the long day's march and the paddling across the lake, the party decide to use this room as a camp and set up for the night.

After the vrusk repairs the damaged components, the yazirian takes a look at the bot and, disappointed that it is only level one and can't be turned into a combat robot, decides to make it a pack mule. They take some ion bonding tape and tape the yazirian's robocom kit to the robot so that our militant dral doesn't have to carry it any more.

In the "morning", rested and refreshed as much as possible, the team heads back to the four way branch. Once again the militant dral wants to go south but is outvoted. Heading west the group finds that the passage way turns north and runs parallel to the lake for several kilometers before turning east again. After a short distance, they hear the sound of a human singing up ahead.

Upon closer inspection, they see Phalen the Black singing to himself and roasting a rastie on his mushroom campfire. Hearing the last line of Phalen's song "Any thing that move I shoots with me gun." and seeing the laser rifle on the ground next to him, our environmentalist dral decides she is going to sneak up on him and stun him with her shock gloves.

However, our militant dral, who's been outvoted at every turn, decides that enough is enough and he want's to kill something (he was upset he didn't get to take a swing at the jawfish). While the other dral is trying to move forward quietly, he pulls out his laser pistol and fires a 10 SEU shot. He misses but alerts Phalen to their presence.

Cursing, the other dral moves forward at max speed while everyone else graps a weapon. The team wins initative (thanks to good die rolls and the high initative modifier of our speedy vrusk) and get to fire first. Our dral has closed the distance and swings with her shock gloves but misses. Switching his empty laser pistol for his sonic stunner, our militant Dral fires again but at 30 m range misses completely. The vrusk and yazirian decide to close the distance before firing and the vrusk readies a tangler greande. Phalen fires at the dral trying to punch him but misses with both shots (it's hard to use a rifle in melee).

Next round the team wins initiative again and once again tries to subdue the pirate. The shock gloves miss once more and the tossed grenade by the vrusk misses, bounces beyond the melee and explodes harmlessly some distance past the fire. After two misses at range, the other dral decides to close the distance and test out the crystal knife he's been making (he snagged a piece of crystal from the cave of fire) with the help of our two environmentalists (1d5 damage -5% to hit, it's still very crude). The yazirian has been staying out of the fight taking a defensive posture to try to dodge any shots the pirate may take at him. Once again Phalen fires at the dral with the shock gloves and misses.

On the final round, the team gains initative once more and the shock gloves connect stunning Phalen before he can react. The yazirian ties him up (with one of his many 10m ropes from the survival kits) and they wait for him to wake. They start asking him question but it doesn't really get them anywhere. He tells them his name and that he's been wandering here and there through the caves but is lost. He's lost his robot and doesn't want to turn into a fungus. This last bit of news (repeated several times by the pirate) freaks out our enviro dral and she wants to get out of there immediately.

After some debate (one dral wants to kill the pirate and the other wants to just leave him), they decide to leave the robot with the pirate but take his gun and powerpack. (The vrusk got the rifle and the yazirian got the power pack). The militant dral is against the idea of leaving the robot since he's tired of lugging the yazirian's robocom kit around but in the end they agree. They realize that while they were arguing, Phalen has slipped away.

Not wanting to stay where the pirate may come back, the team continues through the dark and twisty caverns for several more hours, finally stumbling out of the caves into the bright desert sand. Not far away, the Ul-mor are camped. Athru, their Ul-mor contact rides up to them and relates the events that had befallen the Ul-mor during the last few days. Our militant dral is probably most excited to see the Ul-mor since he is once again re-united with the Loper cubs (the baby dinosaurs as he calls them) which he had rescued while they were wandering in the desert. He had missed his "pets" while lost in the caverns. The team set up camp by the Ul-mor and the session ended.

News from the Frontier

2011-02-01T14:03:00.002-07:00

Just a quick note to mention a few Star Frontiers related news items:

A new episode of the Whispers from the Void podcast is on-line. Jump over to the podcast's website and grab any episodes you've missed.
Issue 16 of the Star Frontiersman Magazine came out at Christmas. If you haven't gotten a copy, grab one today.
A new remastered version of the classic Star Frontiers module "The Dramune Run" is also available on the Star Frontiersman website. Grab it from the module download page along with any of the other remastered modules you need.

I'm working on an update to the Second Sathar War computer game that I've been working at off and on over the years. Expect and update soon.

A New Podcast

2009-09-14T15:53:00.003-06:00

I keep saying this and it doesn't happen, but who knows this time it might be true: "I'm going to start writing here more often."

In any case, I just want to put the word out about a new Star Frontiers themed podcast called Whispers from the Void. The plan is for it to be a monthly to bi-weekly affair discussion various Star Frontiers related topics. Episode 1 is out, so drop on over and check it out.

Second Sathar War Computer Game

2009-06-06T22:47:00.002-06:00

Just over a year ago I did a post on Star Frontiers related software projects I was involved with. This one is an update. Expect to see more frequent postings on this topic in the future as things progress. This is where I'm spending a lot of my free time at the moment.

The Orbiter project has been shelved indefinitely at this point but the others are still going strong. Art and I have moved on to other areas that are slightly more fertile at the moment.

The KH Vector and Star Frontiers RPG game have been merged into a single project by Art Eaton who is doing that work. You can find details about the two projects over at the starfrontiers.org site.

My project, the Second Sathar War Game, has been moving along nicely, especially since February when I started my new job out in California. I'm up to release 0.0.10 and it now is a fully playable (although limited) game. You can read the full details under the Release Announcement section of the forums but the strategic game is almost fully implemented and a basic combat system for the tactical game is in place.

Over the next few months I'll be cleaning up the code and fleshing out the combat system. Stay tuned for updates. In the mean time, jump over to the site and download the game and take it for a spin. It runs on both Windows and Linux. I'd have a Mac version but I don't own a Mac to build it on.

New Online Campaigns

2009-06-06T22:27:00.002-06:00

So I was looking over the list of on-line campaigns that I had posted previously (over a year ago now) and realized there were a few new ones I should mention. One, which I'm running I announced earlier as well. Since that time there have been a few additional campaigns start up:

Second Sathar War Boardgame Campaign - I'm running this one as well. In this game we're playing out the Second Sathar War game from the back of the Knight Hawks Campaign book.
Wing Commander - In this campaign players are rookie fighter pilots just completing their initial training and heading off to their first duty assignments. It's run by Shadow Shack.
Wing Commander: Dominion - This is a campaign similar to the Wing Command game but here the player's are the bad guys, junior fighter pilot trainees for an evil dictator ship that has take over the Frontier. Also run by Shadow Shack and host on the same site as the Dominion campaign.
Black Hand Gang spinoff campaign - This one was just announced today and doesn't even have an official separate name. CaptainH, who runs the Black Hand Gang campaign is spinning off another campaign from the main game and is looking for players. In his own words "I have decided to run another storyline in this same universe that is currently centring around the establishment of a Zoo/Nature Reserve on Volturnus and I am looking for players that might be interested in joining this adventure/campaign.

This particular PBEM adventure will not be hugely demanding on time for players, probably weekly or even fortnightly turn arounds.

Whilst there is room for players with Military skills, I am primarily looking for SF gamers who are keen to run Tech and Science based characters. Environmentalists are highly sought after for this scenario.

Players may create new characters for this adventure or you may adopt one of several 'orphaned' NPC's." The link in the bullet title goes to the sign up page.

Most of the previously listed campaigns are looking for players so if you want to get involved, drop on over to their sites and sign up.

New Job

2009-06-06T22:14:00.002-06:00

Normally, I don't intend to post about my personal life here but this does have a bit to do with my involvement with Star Frontiers so it counts.

I work for NASA as a contractor. Back in February, I changed projects moving from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope mission to the SOFIA project. So now instead of working out of Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland (where I was telecommuting to work from Utah), I'm working out of Ames Research Center near San Jose, California.

My new job requires me to be on-site during the work week and for various reasons my family is still in Utah. So I commute each week, flying out to California on Monday morning and home to Utah Friday evenings.

What does this have to do with Star Frontiers? Well, during the work week, when I'm not home in Utah, I have lots of free time in the evening in my little studio apartment in Sunnyvale. Without the kids to distract, I have lots of time to spend on my favorite hobby, Star Frontiers. Expect to see rapid progress (some of which has already occurred) on my computer game and activity on my online campaigns.

Site Management

2009-06-06T21:58:00.002-06:00

Okay, this is going to be the first of a few short posts about things that have been going on (in no particular order) over the last ten months.

One major event is that I've given up hope of acquiring the starfrontiers.net domain. I've repeatedly attempted to contact the owner of the domain with offers to buy the domain from him but have never gotten a response. Even though his site has no content and hasn't changed since 2000, he continues to renew the domain every April. Maybe the e-mail address listed for him (martin at brenner.de) just goes to a dead inbox, I don't know but he has never responed to a single e-mail I sent him.

I did pick up the starfrontiers.info domain late last year from Larry Moore a few months after he dropped it. It's almost as good a domain for the Star Frontiers Network as starfrontiers.net. Maybe I'll just change the name of the site to the Star Frontiers Information Network and then it would be a perfect fit!

In any case, effective about a month ago, May 1st, 2009, the Star Frontiers Network moved to a home at www.starfrontiers.info. Drop on by and visit. Also, if you have links to the the old starfrontiers.homelinux.net domain, while it is still active and points to the site as well, I recommend you update your bookmarks and links. I'd like to channel all my pagerank and other search karma at the new domain.

I expect this will be the permanent home for the site. If for some reason, Martin finally responds and I can get the .net domain, the site will move one last time. But I'm not holding my breath.

I'm Not Dead Yet... I'm Getting Better.

2009-06-06T21:48:00.004-06:00

10 Months since my last post, I've got to get better. Blogging is just low down on my list of things to do. Anyway, here to writing more often.

It's not like there hasn't been anything going on. There are several things to talk about and they will be coming in some short posts over the next few days. However to give a quick run down:

Most, if not all, of the games I mentioned in one of my earlier posts are still going, if not strong and a few new ones have started up.
My computer game has been slowly coming along and is in a playable state.
My site, The Star Frontiers Network, has moved to a new, permanent domain.
I've moved to a new job.

Stay tuned for details.

Star Frontiers Network Site Moved To Its Intended Home

2008-08-04T14:41:00.002-06:00

Well, I finally got the Star Frontiers Network site moved to it's permanent home. It only took a month longer than planned due to repeated hardware failure.

I got the pieces to build a new computer at the end of June (it was my Father's Day present) that was going to host the site but the motherboard kept dying. After I got the pieces I set it up and started up stress test to "burn in" the components and make sure they were working properly. Well, it literally burned the motherboard, frying a capacitor. The weird thing was that it ran just fine for 24 hours without a problem. It was when I turned it off and rebooted that the capacitor fried. So that caused a two week delay as I had to send it in an get it repaired/replaced.

Once the mobo came back I hooked it all up again and fired it up (again literally). This time it didn't even last a day. While testing it out the computer locked up and refused to POST. Both times there was the smell of burning silicon. The first time I had the case open and actually saw the capacitor burn out. The second time there was no obvious sign of damage. Again, the mobo went back to the manufacturer.

This time I know they sent me a completely different motherboard as it was blue instead of green like the original. That was Thursday of last week and I haven't had any problems at all. So today I moved the site over. For those that are interested, here are the specs on the new box:

Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-SA (rev 1.0) BIOS v F5
AMD Phenom x4 9850BE (quad core 2.5GHz)
4 GB Patriot Exterme PC6400 DDR2 RAM
500 GB SATA HD
Sony DVD+/-RW drive
Integrated graphics

The computer is my and my wife's main home computer and so is running WinXP. The site itself is running on Scientific Linux 5 (a Redhat Enterprise Linux knockoff) in a VMWare virtual machine. The VM currently has 512MB RAM and 2 CPU's which is more than enough to run the web server. Until I moved it, it was running on a Intel Core Duo (2GHz) system and only had 256 MB RAM and 1 CPU and had no troubles. The new setup makes it a bit snappier. If traffic and load ever become an issue I can always add more RAM to the VM or eventually move it to a dedicated box. (If only I could be so lucky to get that much traffic.)

The site is doing fine. The Obar Enterprises game is in full swing with seven players and Shadow Shack is starting up a new game called Wing Commander where the players are star fighter pilots, or as he describes it in the forum description, "Welcome to Top Gun, Knight Hawks style!". So come on over and join in the fun or just follow along.

New Online Campaign

2008-07-04T09:12:00.002-06:00

Well, now that the Star Frontiers Network web site is officially up, it's time to get my new campaign going. It will be run as a Play By Post style game on the gaming forums on the new site. The title of the campaign is Obar Enterprises. The PC's will be an elite troubleshooting team working for Obar Enterprises, a small independent merchant company with a lot of contacts and a lot of resources. You can follow this link directly to the Obar Enterprises game forum or click through from the main forums page. We've got two players so far and are looking for a total of four to eight so if you're interested in playing along drop on over and check it out.

New Star Frontiers Web site

2008-07-01T10:43:00.003-06:00

So today was supposed to be the offical announcement of my new Star Frontiers web site call The Star Frontiers Network. The web site is ready. There are still things to do but it has the parts I wanted immediately. It's running on RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 (actually Scientific Linux 5) in a virtual machine under VMware using their free VMware Server software.

I ran into some technical dificulties however. I am getting a new computer at home to replace my 5+ year old one sitting on my desk at the moment and the site is going to run from there. My home ISP has decent upstream bandwith so there is no real point paying extra at the moment. Anyway, I got all the pieces for the new computer last week (I'm building it myself) and put them all together.

Here are the specs for those who are interested: AMD Phenom x4 9850 processor (4 2.5GHz cores), 4 GB Ram, 500GM HD and onboard graphics to start. the AMD chip has an unlocked muliplier which means I should be able to overclock the system (I'm hoping to get it up to about 3GHz but we'll see). I have plenty of thermal head room in the case, the overnight stress test maxed out at well below the thermal limits and that was without the second case fan installed and the primary one set to low speed. Anyway that is a different topic. Back to my problem.

I got the OS installed and started a 24 hour stress test to make sure everything is working. The test ran fine and the cooling was working with no problems. I shut down the computer to make a few tweaks in the BIOS (turning on virutalization support and what not) and when I tried to restart the computer it fried a capacitor on the mother board. So now I'm waiting on a replacement. The motherboard arrived back a the manufacturer yesterday so hopefully I'll be getting my new one soon.

In the mean time, I'm making an unoffical announcement of the site to those who (if any) read this blog. For now it will continue to run on my dual core laptop where I have been developing it. My laptop is usually on an connected to the internet (it is about 3x as powerful as my desktop and I use it as my main workstation) so you should be able to access the site at any time. You can find the site at http://starfrontiers.homelinux.net. Currently there are forums (devoted to on-line games and software development), text and audio chat servers, an issue tracker and the beginnings of a Star Frontiers links page (that's what I'm currently working on). So head on over, check it out and post comments and suggestions. When I get the new computer up and running the switch over should be transparent although I expect the site will be a little zippier on the newer faster hardware.

Real Life Chronocoms

2008-06-03T13:36:00.002-06:00

So I thought this was kind of cool. Real live just got one stop closer to Star Frontiers. A Hong Kong company just released a wrist watch cell phone. Add video taling capability and you've got a chronocom (It does play mp4 videos however). Some details can be found here: The Cell Phone Watch is Here.

Another Star Frontiers Blog

2008-05-29T21:38:00.002-06:00

Just a quick shout out to w00t (aka simple). He's got another Star Frontiers themed blog as well although it is not 100% Star Frontiers as he has other gaming topics as well. Read and enjoy.

Star Frontiers Software Development

2008-05-29T10:31:00.004-06:00

In the past year or so there has been some very active Star Frontiers themed software development. I thought I'd take a moment and highlight the projects going on that I know about (since I'm involved to some level or another in them). Details and discussion forums about all of these can be found at the StarFrontiers.org Forums.

Star Frontiers Knight Hawks Vector game - (Windows) This is "A real-time multi-player Knighthawks computer game" according to the blurb on the forums. It is an arcade style implementation of the Knight Hawks Vector rule set. In the game you can play against the computer AI or against up to 7 other players over the Internet. There a huge number of ships to choose from both UPF and Sathar. It provides some prebuilt scenarios as well as a scenario editor that allows you to create your own playing field and opponents for custom games. My main contribution to this one was playtesting but I did help out just a tad with some of the display code.
StarFrontiers Orbiter add-on - (Windows) This is a add-on for the Orbiter Spaceflight Simulator that implements the Knight Hawks Vector rules into a complete 3D spaceflight environment. This project is currently on hold as the main developers (Art Eaton and myself) are currently working on other projects and are waiting for the Orbiter Multi-player add-on to mature. An earlier version, written by Art and others can be found at the Knight Hawks Vector download page. The new version implements new ships as well as the combat rules of the game allowing for realistic Star Frontiers battles. I'll probably be coming back to this one later this year and finishing it up for single player mode.
Second Sathar War game - (Linux, Windows) This one is my current project. I'm implementing the Second Sathar War game from the back of the Knight Hawks Campaign Book into a computer game. I've almost got the single computer strategic version complete allowing you to keep track of the strategic logistics on a single computer. This version requires you to conduct the battles off-line, old school on the table top. Following that I intend to add multi-player support across the Internet and implement the board games rules. The board game rules will also be spun off into a stand-alone game for Internet play.
Star Frontiers RPG game - (Windows) Art, Imperial Lord and myself are working on a full blown RPG game based on the Star Frontiers milieu. Art is providing most of the heavy coding and Imperial Lord is working on the storyline. I'm just mainly providing wise cracks as the moment but have been contributing NPCs and will help out with playtesting and coding as things move along. This is Art's current main project and rapidly evolving.
Hover Races game - Related to the SF RPG is the hover races game that lets you race your hover car and (soon) hover bikes around a track.

Again, those are the ones I know about. If you know of others please post them in the comments. As always, the developers would love for people to download and test out the games and provided feedback. So go try them out and tell us what you think.

Boy have I been lazy

2008-05-26T12:33:00.002-06:00

Three and a half months since my last post. I guess this takes getting used to. There have been a bunch of behind the scenes things going on, some related to Star Frontiers and some related to Real Life, that have been of sufficent distraction to ignore this completely. Anyway, I'm going to try to do better and we'll see what happens.

Related to my previous post, on-line gaming has been pretty slow all year. Partially due to the fact that our super referee, Shadow Shack, has been under the weather and busy at work to the exclusion of all else. He's projecting a comeback in mid June so we'll hopefully be getting back into the swing of things. There are also a few more new games getting ready to start but I'll save that for a later post. On the other hand the Britmol's Tavern and Black Hand Gang games have been continuing, if slowly.

Anyway, that's it for now. I've got a post planned on all the Star Frontier's related software project going on and what to look for in the comming months on that front. That will be coming soon.

Online Campaigns

2008-02-05T09:59:00.000-07:00

While they seemed to have flagged over the holidays and not really picked back up, there are a number of online Star Frontiers campaigns going on at different sites on the web. Here's a quick rundown of the ones I know about that are still functioning. There are others that seem to be completely dead that I won't mention. Unless otherwise stated, these games are being run "Play by Post" using a community forum board to host the game play. (If you know of an active campaign that I missed let me know and I'll add it to the list.)

Pirates- Refereed by Shadow Shack, this is an inverse adventure of the orginal SF modules set on Volturnus. In this adventure the PC's are playing the pirates. Hosted at forumup.org.
Britmol's Tavern - Refereed by Parriah, the PC's are a motley crew caught up in intrigue between many rival factions and is centered in the Cassidine system. A fairly free form game where the players determine the storyline as much as the Referee. Hosted at forumup.org.
Black Hand Gang - This is a play by e-mail game with the synopsis posted as part of the mission diary. The players form the Black Hand Gang, a team formed on the original Volturnus adventures. They form a troubleshooting team working for the Eorna and spend their time in suspended animation when not out adventuring. The campaign is playing through all the standard SF modules. They are currently on a "Mission to Alcazzar". This one is on it's own site for the write ups but the game is played in a Yahoo Groups forum.
Port Loren Raiders - Refereed by Shadow Shack. This is a slightly more advanced rendition of the classic sample module in the Alpha Dawn Expanded Rules book. Hosted on www.starfrontiers.org.
Lost Worlds, New Frontiers - Refereed by Beowulf. The PC's are part of the security force on board the PGC's newest super luxury star liner (HS 20 from Knight Hawks) when the ship misjumps in the Void and ends up in an uncharted (but hauntingly familiar) star system with most of the command crew missing and the PC's trying to figure out what is going on. Hosted on www.starfrontiers.org.
Outer Reach - Refereed by Imperial Lord. This is virtual table top game. The group gets together using OpenRPG and plays out the games in real time. The PC's were falsely accused of subversive activites against the Outer Reach govenment and thrown onto a prision island. They've now escaped and are making their way off-planet to start a new life somewhere else in the Frontier. Hosted on www.starfrontiers.org.
Space Rats - Refereed by Shadow Shack. The PC's pooled their cash and bought a beat up old Destroyer hull they converted into a freigher and now ply the space lanes looking for adventure and profit. Hosted at forumup.org.
The Dominion - Referred by Shadow Shack. Set in a dark future of the Frontier, the UPF has fallen and been replaced by the Soverign Domain Authority. The Sathar haven't been seen for nearly 40 years but have started showing up again. The PC's play the owners of a small tramp freighter and escort fighter. This one has a definite Star Wars-esque setting. Hosted by MyFreeBullitenBoard.com.
Basically Speaking - Referred by Shadow Shack. This one is done real time in the gameroom section of starfrontiers.us. This is an alternate adventure to the SFKH0: Warriors of White Light module included in the Knight Hawks game, but is played out completely using the Basic Rules from the Alpha Dawn boxed set. The PC's play the boarding party of one of the other Clarion Milita Assault Scouts, the CMS Falcon. Hosted on starfrontiers.us.
Desert Island Planet - Refereed by Gergmaster. This game is just staring. The PC's are headed to a planet for an archeological dig that crashes on a desert planet, destroying most of their ship and supplies. Hosted on starfrontiers.us.

As you probabaly noticed, Shadow Shack does a lot of refereeing. Kudos to him and all the other referees for all the effort they put into the games to make them enjoyable for those of us playing.

Welcome Back to the Frontier

2008-01-29T12:41:00.002-07:00

Welcome to my new Star Frontiers blog. There is a small core of active SF gamers out there and we are hoping to find more. There are a lot of different projects going on ranging from rules revisions to computer implementations of various parts of the rule sets, most notably the star ships. I'm involved in several of these and will post on our progress. I'll also try keep abreast of other developments and keep you posted.

Just to get you started I'll point you to the two official Star Frontiers websites. Check them out and get involved:
www.starfrontiers.com - The offical Star Frontiers site
www.starfrontiers.org - Sister site to starfrontiers.com containing the Star Frontiers community forums.

The other place to check out is Bill Logan's fan site located at www.starfrontiers.us. There is a lot of content there as well including Bill's amazing Star Frontiers webzine The StarFrontiersman.

So, welcome to the Frontier and join us for some fun.