Setting Unknown - A Solo Endeavor

Right now, I am in the planning stages of a new Star Frontiers campaign. I do this to myself every year. I want to play a game exactly at the point where the NFL and NHL heats up. I can ignore hockey for a bit, but this SF Campaign is going nowhere until Feb 12, after the Super Bowl.

I decided to do other things, such as ship design and planets. I mention Typhon, the planet where the PC will start. I'm in the brainstorming mode for the planets, which is handwavium for "the back burner". The fact is, I don't plan on having the players hang out there for very long. 

Ships are another story. The players will have a pair of gigantic shuttles, Hull Size 2. This is just a tad smaller than an assault scout. The shuttle is barely able to make a jump, the primary issue is it's just too small for supplies. For this reason, the two shuttles are paired with Hull Size 5 Electronic Warfare destroyer. 

This variant of Destroyer makes sense in game terms, it would have been helpful in the War but now that the war is over, something has to be done with all of these extra ship hulls and engines. Without the electronic warfare gear, the hulls are basically free. As they have also been stripped of their major weapons, the sale of these ships to civilians is fine. The characters won't be civilians for the most part, but why give them an inordinate amount of guns? 

What makes these ships very special is their double engines. They have both Atomic drives and Ion drives. The same for the Kon-Tiki shuttles. Why? The Ion engines allow each Destroyer and Shuttle to mask themselves or others. That would have been great during the war, but in the hands of the players, allows a quick ship that doesn't need an engine rebuild every time they jump. I want them to feel like they are on their own, even when they aren't.  

Anyway, back to "Setting Unknown". 

I was thinking of playing Star Smuggler again. I have been playing too much Endless Sky and Escape Velocity, for a theoretical review of each. I have played all three games a zillion times. I want to go beyond rule mods and stuff, hence a new setting. One that is currently unknown. 

I stole some images from Endless Sky and Wikipedia. This ship is a combo of the
nose of the Arrow and the tail of the Hawk from Endless Sky. The shuttle is a headhunter.
The Dreamlifter is for scale.

The main protagonists have a 20-meter ship, or 400+ tonnes*. This is basically on the order of the 747 Dreamliner. Like the characters for my SF campaign, they have a smaller shuttle. The Dreamlifter can carry about as much as its empty weight. (From reading Wikipedia. YMMV.) As you can see, the shuttle won't carry a lot, maybe 20 tonnes. 

(*The future might be metric.) 

I figure in the future, we can do better within limits. I will assume that the ship weighs 100 tonnes and can carry 300 tonnes of stuff. If you are empty, you can go faster. If you are loaded to the maximum weight, you move normally. If you are overloaded, you can't make an FTL jump. All extra equipment beyond what a spaceship comes with is subtracted from cargo space. 

The standard crew for a spaceship is the 5 man band - Pilot, Co-pilot, Navigator, Engineer, and Payload Specialist. If you have weapons, the pilot can fire forward cannons and missiles, and the Co-pilot and payload specialists handle everything else. To move, you must have at least a Pilot. 

FTL in this Setting Unknown is teleportation like Battlestar Galactica. Rule one, it takes a day to pump power into the capacitors to make that jump. Rule two, you can have a lot of extra capacitors. Generally, ships are ready to jump at all times, assuming they aren't doing anything special beforehand because they have more than one capacitor. 

Jumping into a system is generally not dangerous as long as you don't jump to a busy point. Jumping to the surface of a planet is bad because you will likely miss your target by a couple of meters in a random direction. BOOM! 

Jumping FROM the surface of a planet is easy as long as your target is empty space, except the authorities will hunt you down for causing a calamity on populated worlds. 

Bad, but fun.

I have no idea how combat, movement, economics, or anything else will work but I have some ideas I'll share in the coming posts. 

I don't know what to call this class of ship. Help me out in the comments below. 

I am now back on Facebook which is a big change. I am not using the whole "Link in the comments", so my only way to attract followers is word of mouth. You can also see me on Mastodon.Social and Dice.Camp in addition to MeWe. My last outlet, one that I am going to start working hard on this year is Ko-Fi. 

Recovery in or of Star Smuggler

In my last post, I hypothesized that the player could recover from the loss of their Antelope spaceship by pulling together a small team of pilots, medics, and engineers to scavenge in the Ruins found on so many planets. 

While this is basically true, it takes a very long time. I used Random.org's dice generator to rapidly roll hundreds of dice. The primary limiting factor is loading a hopper (25 CU) or using an orbital shuttle (50 cu) to move goods around. The problem with this method is it takes a lot of time and money to do so. You can cache items to speed the process but the scenario becomes a little ridiculous and tedious. 

If you are down with embracing the ridiculous you can reduce the tedium by purchasing items like repair units, fuel units, or GM bots right in the Spaceport. Once you have spent every penny on these items all you have to do is sit on them until you receive a good sales result. Picture Duke sitting on a pile of craters right in a hanger waiting for someone to happen by in need of item x, which he has cornered the market on. On Regari, a roll of 6 sales results in a 1.5 base price modifier. You are converting 1 secs. spent into 1.5 secs. per cycle. In a month or two, you should have enough to purchase a new Antelope. 

If only you get over the fact that Duke is sitting on a pile of thousands of repair units or fuel units...

The reason this isn't an obvious solution is you cache a tremendous amount of items inside the Spaceport for a very short period of time. Like thousands of CU worth of goods. The rules don't place a limit on the number of items you can have only a limit on items you can move.  

It is a very unsatisfying solution because it kills the game engine's balance. In fact, using this method breaks the economic restrictions that the game places on you. So long as you do not engage in any other activities such as RRR, there is zero risk due to a lack of opportunities to make contacts or otherwise experience negative effects. 

Now I have further expansion possibilities because there must be a mechanic to offset the easy solution of not engaging in play to win. In solo play, this is not as dangerous as the solo player is playing for exploration not cheating their way through the money problem. It's just easier to fudge the rolls or be a bad timekeeper. 

If you want to adapt Star Smuggler to an actual multiplayer game, then you need a solution to this possibility. 

I think that creating a table of random events that can occur when you do not move or engage in activities would work to resolve this unique issue. The Star Smuggler system has many different built-in: scenarios that range from flavoring to pushing events that can speed world-building while not obviously punishing a lack of activity. A party of characters will need some downtime to stay centered on tasks, but a random table of events can spark new plans and ideas. Think of it as exposure without railroading like a solo game has to do. 

Another cool idea for multiplayer options is to use randomly generated systems to express change. As time goes on a Spaceport could morph into a colony, city, or slum. This wouldn't happen overnight, but a referee could present the changes over the natural weeks and months which are hardcoded into the game system. The referee could even change the star charts as exploration opens new routes or even open up completely new systems. 

This solo game system is remarkably robust for such a simple thing. A necessary limit in the system is how scattered the rules are within the events. For example, there exist psionics, grenades, and combat droids however, if haven't read every event you wouldn't even know. Also, combat is super tight. There are relatively few ways you can make changes without upsetting the game balance. 

However, in using this as an actual RPG ruleset, the referee knows exactly what to expect. Change can come in other ways, such as the expansion of planetary systems, new events created by the players' choices, and the referee's goals for the game. 

Most of my amazement and fascination with this game is how tightly integrated and edited it is. I spent a few days going through every event and rule, mapping out where each went to find loops or mistakes. There are a few loops, but as near as I can tell no actual mistakes which is a testament to how well thought out it is. 

There are a few relics and oddities in the rules and events. For example, events are sequential from e001 to e199 but then hop to e400 before ending at e441. That leads me to believe that the game might have meant to have 200 more events. The rules do the same thing, flowing from r201 to r242 before hopping to r300+. Maybe there are 60 or so missing rules entries. Were that true, someone painstakingly edited them away without the benefit of a computer. 

There is another option. Two people could have been working on the set at the same time and divided the entries between them which explains the gap. One person finished before the other but in order to maintain the document refused to reference unnecessary numbers or renumber what they had. Not surprising if you are using pen and paper or worse, a typewriter.  

Personally, I believe this second option to be the more possible one. There is a subtle hint in e005. It is the only event that straight-up duplicates events: 

"If you disable the controller and capture it, the event takes 1 hour and roll 1d6: 1-e117, 2-e017, 3-e059, 4-e117, 5-e017, 6-no effect." 

This does not occur any place else in the rules. Omitting tension-building choices which hop through an intervening event before directing the reader/player back to make a different choice at the initial branch. This is a common trope in "choose your own adventure" books. It is different than duplication.  

I believe in this case one of the e117 and e017 events was supposed to lead elsewhere but do not because those events were either edited away or simply not written. 

A similar thing happens in the rules section for combat. The events and rules call out "sidearms" and "heavy sidearms" while a few areas mention "explosive weapons" and "armor piercing" weapons. I personally believe that this is the result of two authors being on the same page, but not the same word. Or perhaps they intended for there to be a couple of classes of weapons that were discovered to be unbalanced, like a machine gun or blaster rifle. Or maybe "too much like game, movie or TV show x." 

It is pretty clear that the author used their personal experience at the game table to create a solo game. I find it kind of satisfying to reverse the process and use the ruleset for a multiplayer game. 

What do you think? 

Down for the Count - Stunners

It's finally happened, I got nailed with Covid. It's perhaps a mild case, as there are times when I feel ok and other times when I can't even stay awake. 

So what to do with all of this enforced time off? 

Star Smuggler, of course. The game is free from the link, just don't redistribute. 

I want characters to have a stunner. It works like a sidearm, except if you hit the target they are stunned for one round. If they have already moved or shot in the round, there is no effect. They can move and fight in the next round automatically. 

Continuing with the sidearms rules, if you roll a 6 on your to hit roll, it is critical and requires one more 1d6 to be rolled. If you get a 1 or 6, the target is knocked out for the rest of the fight. Shooting into melee is possible, but just like sidearms, you can hit your friends with the same stun effects. 

A stunner does no damage to non-living things, which makes it U-suit, robot, and vehicle safe. 

There is a heavy version of a stunner, the only difference is it can pass through U-suits. Not damage them, but pass through as if they don't exist. The heavy stunner is operated exactly like the previous entry. If a heavy stunner (and only heavy stunners) is fired at or through a personal force shield, both the force shield and the stunner must roll for breakdown. Heavy stunners don't work on armored targets, this is the upper limit of the technology. They don't blow holes in things, which is their advantage. 

Stunners cannot hit people inside a vehicle UNLESS the target is shooting out of the said vehicle. I suppose you could make some fun rules for if that person topples out the window, but I would leave that alone. In a solo game that's too much detail. 

Stunners are available when you make a roll that indicates sidearms or heavy sidearms are available. They cost the same as their lethal equivalents. They have the same range of tech levels. Anyone can use a stunner, but only Duke, Gunners and Bodyguards can use heavy stunner. This means you can have armed Drivers and Medics. 

There is an electronic version of a stunner called a scrambler in e18. It forces a breakdown if it hits a vehicle, robot, etc. Normally, this device cannot be purchased. 

I have not figured out a reasonable modification for a hand-held melee stunner. Hand-to-hand is a different mechanic, where every odd-numbered positive number is a hit. Rolls of 7, 9, and 11 do something special such as KO a target or disarm them. Hand-to-hand is an odd beast because you hit on odd results, but the character can have even or odd skills and modifiers. My COVID-addled brain can't handle the math.

"The sum of two odd numbers is always even",
"The sum of two even numbers is always even"

It's simple enough to be confusing. I guess you could flavor hand-to-hand combat by simply assuming that people have access to hand head stunners, which accounts for all of the knockouts in melee. I'll think I'll leave good enough alone. 

Party of 6 for the Castle - Experience

In my last post, I ran a series of characters through the Ghost of Lion Castle using the Basic and Expert D&D and Rules Cyclopedia sets. This was a solo run so I totally determined the outcome of adventure. The party crossed a half dozen challenges in the form of traps. Ultimately, they found the main entrance and two dead bodies loaded with loot. 

Thematically, this fits in with the character's backgrounds. The young characters want adventure while the two older characters want to safeguard them, but Nicholas and the Dwarf are also treasure and relic hunters. The younger characters did find some relics in the form of two magic journals and two maps. 

This is a case of character backgrounds and details meshing with the shared campaign world. 

What did not come to pass was the distribution of treasure and experience. I skipped the first due to lack of time, that will be the first thing I do in the next session. Experience is a tougher judgement call. Under B/X and Rules Cyclopedia, experience is awarded in a 1:1 ratio to gold plus whatever experience a monster would provide. 

In the last session, the characters encountered only traps and treasure, some of it magical. I can easily map out found items to coin value excepting magic items and weapons. They don't have clear price in these rules. It seems the intent was to have the object be the reward. I'm of two minds on that as it makes perfect sense. But there is the kid of the 70's who used to make wish lists from the Brand Names Catalog that wants everything to have a value.  

What I came up with was a value of about 250 experience points divided among four characters. (Two characters are sitting at a base camp.) 

This has happened because I should read the rules of this module strictly for solo play. The party has no thief and even if they did. the traps they encountered are not the sort a thief can disarm. No experience for them.  

If I had a "live" party, I could see many opportunities for the party to gain experience off of the traps. The traps in this section of the module was the very reason I selected the front door as the party's destination. In solo play with a single character, any of these traps could be deadly. The traps the party encountered would be unpassable to a single magic user with max hit points. However, 4 characters can eat up that damage. I did it because I've always wanted to do it in solo play but couldn't with an individual character. 

The traps are a series of obstacles, two magic missile attacks, a molten metal trap, two sets of murder holes and several slamming doors and dropping portcullis's (portculli?) to force the characters forward. 

As described, the magic missile attacks and slamming doors are unavoidable, the molten metal trap plus the dropping portcullis's both requires a save, and the murder hole attack requires judgement. 

Were I DM'ing this with real characters, the potential to judge situations allows for experience awards for these traps. For the doors, murder holes and portcullis traps, the simply decision to act as one and move forward or back allows for roleplay. Tricky PC's could fill sacks with dirt to prop the doors or prevent the portcullis from closing. The magic missile and murder holes are interesting traps for the PC's because there is that small chance of evading them through trickery but then wandering back into them by poor choices. 

Ah, let me tell you about parties and poor choices... 

But all of that implies thinking through an immediate problem and receiving experience for it. 

This Friday, I am looking forward to reading some materials I received plus another session in Lion Castle. 

Star Smuggler... again... and again

Ok, in my last post I created a new ship for Star Smuggler, creatively called "The Antelope II". It's twice as big as the original. 

Crewing the ship will be a problem as will generating weekly funds to pay for it. In order to dance around these issues, I decided to create a new mechanic for Duke Springer. Duke has a statistic no other character has, Cunning. When playing, you roll 1d6 to generate this value. When replaying the game, it is suggest that you reduce this number if the game was too easy and increase it if the game was too hard. 

Since the game already allows a changing value for this Cunning mechanic, I want to use it to rapidly add crewmen. Duke can "purchase" one crewman for a point of Cunning. He cannot spend all of his Cunning on this, he must have at least one Cunning point. 

The available options are all of the retainer types from e062 to e069. The player simply chooses the one(s) he wants, include the Driver who normally won't travel outside of his or her system. In this case, he or she would. Where there is a choice of two, such as gunners or bodyguards, Duke picks the better of them.

Stats are generated just like retainers, but crewmen are different than retainers. Each crewman has a stake in the ship as opposed to drawing a salary. When items more than 100 secs are sold, they take a 1% cut. They keep this money for themselves to buy goods or save, as they see fit. The crewmen can operate independently and can be separated from the ship and/or Duke to perform their jobs. 

Additionally, they purchase their stake in the ship from Duke. When these characters are initially created, they have 1d6+150 secs. which they pay half to Duke for a stake in the ship.

If Duke is killed, one of them takes over his role. 

EDIT 1 - I tried that part and it was too difficult. I have changed it. Each crew generates their starting money and it is pooled. This pool is divided by the following formula: (pool/number of characters+2). Each person has a "stake" in the ship now, but the ship has two stakes. If the characters had 1000 secs. and there were 3 characters, each stake would be the 1000/5=200. Each character has 200 secs. while the ship has 400. The 400 secs. for the ship's stake is what is used to purchase goods for the ship. If a character purchases personal equipment, not for the ship, it comes out of their personal money. 

When items are sold, the funds are also divided up in this fashion, too. The sale of 100 secs. worth of goods would net each player 20 secs. and the ship would take twice that amount, 40 secs. This makes it much harder to generate funds for the weekly payments, but that is the cost of doing business. Save early, save often. 

To pay the 300 secs for the loan, players would have to make at least 1500 secs. a week. If the funds aren't there, all characters will kick in money from their personal savings. It's that or be hunted as a loan jumper. 

If new characters are added, recalculate the cost of each stake by adding the new character to the original formula. This means you need to write the formula down the first time you use it. The new character will then pay that amount to the ship's account to become a crew member. If a crewman dies, nothing much happens. When the sale of good occur, use the new number of crew in the formula. Yes, getting your crew killed will make more money for the survivors. It happens. 

As an added twist, these crewmen also have a Cunning skill. It is 1d6-2, with a minimum of 1. Like Duke, they can use this stat to bring on new crewmen at a later date. This creates the scenario where Duke probably isn't the most cunning person on the ship. As a consequence, if Duke enters a scenario where a cunning roll is needed, the roll is made by the character with highest Cunning present. If Duke desires to do something dangerous, he must accompany that person and pays the price of a failed roll himself.

EDIT 2 - This part didn't make sense. Duke can't decide for another crewman, he can't force them to be savvy. 

Something like Mal and Zoe's relationship where Mal has an idea and Zoe does the tricky work of getting the details right. It also covers a situation like when Simon hired the crew for a heist or when Mal brought Simon (and River) on as crew after they had started their adventures. 

EDIT 3 - The comparison doesn't make much sense now. 

I haven't even begun to categorize the rules and event changes this would require. But it seems rather workable. What do you think? Let me know in the comments. 

Star Smuggler... Again

I unexpectedly have the day off and want to revisit the Star Smuggler Universe. The temptation to reskin the characters as the crew of the Firefly is incredible, but that would take a lot of work. I am stealing some ideas, but not Firefly whole clothe. I have decided to interject some ideas from Traveller into this run through, too.

My understanding of Traveller is super weak, so I am taking some of the larger concepts and ignoring many mechanics. The main idea that I am stealing is weapon mounts are dependent on hull size. I have created a large ship, which I will dub the Antelope II and it's twice as big as a 100 ton ship.

The original Antelope was 100 ton ship with space to carry about 134 CU of goods. Sort of. I seem to get a different number depending on how I count. The Antelope II is 200 ton vessel and has 212 CU of space. That is a multiplier of 1.58 for those keeping score at home. 

Since this is Inktober, I wanted to keep the high contrast drawn vibe from the original game. I used GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) to create a new deckplan, staying as close to the original art as I could. It isn't exactly "ink" but it sort of looks like it. 

As you can see from this schematic, I have stolen a bunch of ideas from Firefly. The ship has space for two hoppers, a medical area and weapons hold. The crew area is much larger than the Antelope, holding 6 rooms or enough room for 32 CU of people. Unlike Firefly and the Antelope I, it has two gun mounts and no secret areas. The 60 CU cargo hold is of center as it was in the original design, but this ship has a second 40-CU hold fore of the main hold and bay. It can hold a second hopper, but that is not a standard option so play begins with just one. 

This ship would require a few of modifications of the rules, which I have not formally written up yet. It looks like I would have to rewrite 3 events and 3 rules: e001, e036, e157.4, r237, r229d and r217. The events cover your first day with the ship, e036 covers buying a new ship and e157.4 references the medical regrowth tank. The rules modified are r217 for starship damage, r229d for search locations and r237 for critical hit locations. In respect to hits and search locations, the only completely new things are the medical space and weapons hold. 

The medical space is simply an area large enough for several characters and the medic could hang out in there. It would count as quarters for searches and would be immune to criticals as it's a vault in the center of the ship. The weapons hold would be searched on cargo hold results and would share the immunity to criticals for the same reason as medical does. The medical space is somewhat like a turret as it has enough room for the 4 CU regrowth tank plus a medic and one patient. The regrowth tank is not a standard option, so the player would have to find one. As far as the extra crew quarters and hold, I would have each of them hit on a 50-50 chance. I think I thought of everything, but I will have to do a play through to be sure. 

Since we are talking about a ship 1.58 times bigger, I figure multiplying everything by that will give me good cost stats. The cost is 190,000 secs with an interest payment of 475 a week. All of these values are simply the original ship's stats multiplied and rounded up. At that price point, the player would get two sets of tech 1 guns and one hopper and 16 hits. 

The overly large size will create crewing problems. I'll look at that in my next post. 

"You're the scum of the Sector!" Star Smuggler Review

Title: Star Smuggler
Credits:
   Designer: Dennis Sustare
   Graphics Design: David Helber
   Map Art: Tom Maxwell
   Cover Painting: Bob Depew
   Edited by Arnold Hendrick
   File prep for online publication: Eric Hanuise
   Digital Character Record Sheets: Ron Shirtz
Rule Set: Unique to set
Year: 1982
Pages: 24 Page Rules Booklet, 20 Page Events Booklet
Number of characters: Solo adventure, many characters.
Rating: ★★★★

This game has a story to start the story. I came by my physical set back in the late 80s and loved it ever since.

But for the publishers, designer and author, the story was a bit more rocky. I don't know all of the details, but the Publishers, Heritage and the imprint Dwarfstar had a run of popular and cool games such as Barbarian Prince, Demonlord, Outpost Gamma, and Star Viking starting in 1981. These were all in house games created by Heritage/Dwarfstar. Two games were designed and created by outside designers, Dragon Rage and Star Smuggler. Hard times hit and the company and their imprint were down but not entirely out.

In 2003, Reaper Miniatures obtained the rights to many of these games allowed them to be reproduced online. (Click the link for all the games) In 2006, Dennis Sustare granted permission for limited online distribution by Dwarfstar.brainiac.com of Star Smuggler.

I snagged a photo of the game for this review. You can check out all of the art and the full game on Dwarfstar's website. I only mention this due to the Distribution Agreement at the end of this post, while the photo is probably fair use, I agree with the agreement below. Although I have a physical copy, I would like to thank Eric Hanuise for all the work in digitizing this game for online distribution.

So how does this game play? Very well for something probably designed, typeset and edited entirely by hand. You are playing "Duke" Springer, a business man turned criminal... maybe. Depends on how you roll, literally sometimes. After a quick read through the rules, you are ready to go. The rules spell out what you can do, but often not what you cannot do. That is to be expected in such a light weight game. Your character has 4 stats, hand to hand, ranged combat rating, endurance and cunning. All characters have the first 3, while only Duke has cunning. Cunning allows Duke to outsmart other characters and enemies.

To play, you write out your character stats, money and inventory on a sheet of paper. Recently, I don't know when, Ron Shirtz published a character record sheet and time tracker to make this task easier. You flip to e001 in the events book and you are off to adventure.

The future of the 80s was pink and green.

In the course of play, you can hire a crew, get in combat, buy and sell or run down many of the special events, some of which are relatively simply side quests. The goal is to pay off your debt on your starship, a total of 120,000 secs. or Sector Exchange Units. Every week you have 300 secs. interest payment and paying on principle doesn't reduce this amount. Back in the 80s, front-ending loans was thing, I guess.

The game has many locations where events occur and these locations are divided up in the System by planet and then planetary regions, like cities, starports, space stations, ruins, etc. It is a rather ingenious system which precludes oddities such a car dealer on a spacestation or military presence in a ruins, except for when those things would make sense in context. Travel from one area or planet to another eats a lot of game time, which is important for making those interest payments. You are totally on the clock, all the time, in this game.

Have you heard the phrase, "You need to spend money to make money"? That is totally true in this game. While it is a solo game, you need to hire a crew to be effective. And the crew gets paid, so you need to be sharp with your money.

How do you win? Pay off the ship. How do you lose? Die or lose the ship. Simple.

However, within the events booklet, there are seemingly dozens of different endings. I've never troubled to count the actual number but there are more than a few. The first time through, these auto-win, auto-lose events add flavor and spice, but on replay, they are an annoyance. Depending on your mood, you probably don't want to win or lose by a single die roll in a game that requires so many die rolls.

One of things that stands out in this game is the ever-changable scenery, the planets, tend to not so much scale as warp so you can have a very different experience on each one with the exact same mechanics. There are very few things in the game that change the mechanics, which is nice. The rules are dense, but once you have them down, they're easy to remember.

Some of the downsides to this game are many, but none of them are a deal breaker. The system has a simple but effective combat system, which is obviously lethal to participants. You can die in a shootout that leaves your crew alive, but purposeless. Game over. There are a number of cheap shot endings, which are annoying if you play frequently enough.

This game is actually complex enough to have a number of things in the middle ground as far as gameplay goes. First and foremost, there are some rather obvious things left out. You can pilot a ship, fight well and use a variety of weapons from ship guns to hand weapons. But you can't drive a skimmer, the 1980s' future version of a car. Skills can't increase, except Cunning. Combat is deadly in a vacuum, but can you depressurize your ship? Not covered, at least not as a purposeful action. Can you have two ships?

One of the stranger bits is the concept of "losing". There are a few events which specifically cause a lose condition, like death or imprisonment, but there are a number of ways to lose everything except your character. Is that a loss? Don't know. Without a ship, you can't do much, but you also have less of a chance of dying. So you can have series of lingering "not winning" scenarios.

There is a difference between the physical books and the digital files. Eric Hanuise remastered many of the confusing typos right out of the books, and incorporated all of the errata into the text. Thank you, Mr. Hanuise. The physical boxed set also had counters printed on the box cover edge. That did nothing for the box, which was sturdy before I cut it. Again, the counters have been reproduced and even improved. The ability to print as many counters as you like is wonderful, but I find myself using random counters.

The main upside of a programmed solo adventure is that it is always there for you. The big downside is, if you are a creature of habit, you can get yourself stuck in the game, repeating the same routes and sequences again and again. This isn't a limitation inherent to only Star Smuggler, it is inherent to all solo adventures.

All and all, I'd give this 4 of 5 stars even though it is one of my most prized games. It has a lot of bugs and flaws, but still worth a play or 100. Download it today.

DISTRIBUTION AGREEMENT -- PLEASE NOTE Dennis Sustare has granted permission for digitized copies of this copyrighted game to be posted for public download. The game and files are NOT released into the public domain. You MAY NOT not sell these files or charge a fee for access to them. You MAY NOT distribute these files except as authorized by Dennis Sustare. PLEASE RESPECT THE TERMS OF THIS DISTRIBUTION AGREEMENT so that these files can remain available for free download. By downloading any files from this page you are certifying that you will abide by the terms of this distribution agreement. All of these conditions must be posted prominently and openly on any page or site providing access to these files.