Joe's Half-Baked Ideas | Star Frontiers

Section
I. Introduction

This booklet is intended to update the
Star Frontiers 2000 project by providing a few more professions for players while
streamlining the skills list. It is a fan-created document and is free to
download and for other fans of the game to alter to meet the dictates of their
campaigns.

One of the wonderful things about the
original SF Alpha Dawn Expanded game is the uncluttered simplicity of its
character development rules, though players are limited by the skill options
they can chose in the form of Primary Skill Areas (PSAs). The Knight Hawks
supplement provided starship-handling skills, but limited those talents to very
high-level characters.

When Zebulon’s Guide came out in 1986, it
offered a more diverse set of skills and additional equipment, but upended the
ease of the Alpha Dawn system for a mostly untested set of rules that used
column shifts and color codes for determining the success of skill checks.

When I had rediscovered Star Frontiers
while seeking a game to play with my children who had grown tired of video
RPGs, I found remastered copies of the Basic, Alpha Dawn and Knight Hawks rules
online. As I prepared to use the game, however, the limited character choices
(PSAs) weren’t as appealing as I originally thought they would be for a
campaign. Yet, the Zebulon system was very flawed as well.

Conducting more online searches, I
found the Star Frontiers 2000 project with its rules to convert the Zebulon
rules to more of an Alpha Dawn feel.

Character attribute scores, such as
Logic (LOG) or Intuition (INT) or Personality (PER), etc., helped determine the
success for various skill checks. Previously, these attributes had little to do
with normal skill checks in the Alpha Dawn and Zebulon rules. Now, with Star
Frontiers 2000 there were no column shifts or color codes to worry about and it
had a very Alpha Dawn feel to it.

Yet, the designers for Star Frontiers
2000 had created mini-PSAs within each profession. A character could have a
certain set of skills that they could advance by spending experience points at
the professional cost. All other skills – including those in the same
profession – had to be advanced using the non-professional skill cost. This
solution still didn’t strike me as adequate and led me to tweak the rules a
bit.

This version, which I’ll dub “Star
Frontiers 2016,” includes several new professions based on optional PSAs that
have been published in the Star Frontiersman and Frontier Explorer magazines,
such as the Espionage profession, along with an optional Criminal profession
that was published on the Star Frontiers wiki site. In several instances,
related skills have been grouped together to provide even more of an Alpha Dawn
feeling, while still trying to provide some of the diversity of the Zebulon
skills system.

For example, in the Alpha Dawn system,
a character with a Technological PSA could purchase a computer skill which had
eight sub-skills including operating computers, writing programs, defeating
security, bypassing security, displaying information, manipulating programs,
interfacing computers and repairing computers. Under the Zebulon and Star
Frontiers 2000 systems, each sub-skill became a separate skill that a character
could purchase. However, abilities that seemed to intuitively flow from one to
the other – being able to manipulate a program while also being able to write
software and bypass security – were no longer linked. Granted, you had to be
able to have the “Computers: Access & Operate” skill before you could
purchase other computer skills, but it still didn’t have the insightful design
of the original rules.

With this version, there are six
computer skills – one includes “Software Engineer,” which is a more advanced
skill that came from Star Frontiers 2000 and I added “Computers: Forensics” as
a specialized skill for a specialist who can try to identify, preserve and
recover data that has been lost after someone has hacked into a computer
system. The rest of the computer skills have various sub-skills. Similarly,
many robotics skills have related sub-skills; animal handling has various
sub-skills, etc.

Hopefully this doesn’t unbalance the
game, but the proposed system here needs to be play-tested, but I hope you will
find it useful.

Joseph
Paul Cabadas

June 22,
2016