Star Frontiers
2020-12-26

Star Frontiers

It is the first RPG that I bought. If I remember correctly it cost me twenty Swiss Francs, it was 1986. A friend from medium school sold it to me, the illustrations were awesome and the box was in excellent condition.

The game was put to good use and provided my group of friends with long afternoons of fun. I was the game master, it was easy to get into the setting, there were flying cars, guns, public transportation, id cards, grenades, ...

I think our adventures were either city adventures, either hex crawls. I can't remember playing any spaceship based scenarii.

The city adventures turned into attempts at heists, give laser pistols to teenagers, what else to expect? It played on top the city map included in the box. That map was put our imaginations on fire, there was firing in all directions and antigrav cars rammed into buildings.

How could our characters survive and get out of town? I can't remember, but we played "SF-0: Crash on Volturnus" and there was another map, this time it was an hexmap. I think it was the first time I was exposed to hexagons (apart from the bathroom at a friend's place which featured hexagonal ceramic tiles).

The openness of the hexmap was a wonderful call to adventure. There was sand worm on the menu every night at the bivouac. Did we take turns watching the camp?

I realize now that "SF-0: Crash on Volturnus" was authored by Mark Acres, Tom Moldvay, and Doug Niles. It meant not much, random cool sounding anglo-saxon names. A few months later, a friend received a red box from his parents and we played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time. This friend was a way better game master than me, thank god.

I think I sold the Star Frontiers box to another friend. I am not much into science fiction. I was saving money for a medieval RPG (it was Légendes de la Table Ronde).

I mastered like an idiot, we played like idiots, but we had tremendous fun. And all the friends that participated to those Star Frontiers afternoons became game masters, each for a different game system.