[ExI] I found the game! : )

[John Grigg]

The game I was hunting for is Star Rovers!  : )  The cover art for the 1981
boxed set rpg was lame, but according to a reviewer I found, Mr. Lizard, it
was still an extremely special game of astounding imagination and fun, that
he played many times while in highschool.

This will show the laughable box artwork...

http://rpggeek.com/rpg/1742/star-rovers


He excitedly discusses the *epicly epic* game setting...

I’ve skipped a few paragraphs here and there, but nothing which would add
more "context" or "meaning" or "definitions" or any other such wuss-like
things. Hurrakku? Dragonspawn? "Starspawned"? Starknights? Rebel Axis? Some
of these words show up again in the text, never explicitly called out or
defined, others are never seen again. But you KNOW what this game is about!
Giant alien…somethings… that chew through
ENTIRE STARCLUSTERS! Biomorphs! Starknights! Ancient artifacts! Galactic
secrets! Holes in TIME AND SPACE! Some sort of outer space dragon men, or
something! Whatever! It’s cool! This game certainly isn’t about whipping
out your HP Scientific Calculator that does RPN and trying to figure out
the fuel requirements for the jump drive and if you’ll show a 15 credit
profit on that load of dried beans you’re hauling from one planet to
another. This game is about things that eat galaxies, man! Whatever they
are! Didn’t you read it, dude? They, like, eat galaxies! Or they’re running
from something that eats galaxies. Or… something. Whatever. Dragonspawn!!!!

>>>
This is what he had to say about the awesomely wonderful timeline that I
remember after all these years....


*THE. FRACKING. TIMELINE. *

I say, without fear of contradiction (mostly because being contradicted
doesn’t scare me, it just pisses me off), that this timeline, a
poster-sized piece of folded paper, is composed of 100% pure compressed *
awesome*. Never before and never again has so much unadulterated
*cool*been shoved into one simple piece of paper. The timeline reaches
from Tech
Level "A", the "Proto Social Age", where Power Source was "Muscle" and
"Communication and Transport" consisted of "Grunts & Growls" and "Walking",
all the way through endless epochs to "V", where the power source was
"Entropy" and "Economic Org. & Occupations" are "Monitors Of The
Starchildren". Along the way from stone knives to "Astral Combat", we learn
that at Tech Level "L", the "Aquarian Age" (the tech level right after "K",
the "Nuclear Age", aka 1981), we will live in "Orbital Ghettoes" and our
religions will include "Scientosophy" and "Grokism". (At tech level "Q",
religions include "Revival Of The Demonic Cults"). By tech level "R",
government will be by "Universal Government Ipsocracies". (Ipsocracies? Is
that a *word?* Yes, it is. It is a word (Ipsocracy) with only *three Google
hits*, all referring to the work of deconstructionist founder Derrida.
Whoa. Dude. Are you getting this? In 1981, the people who worked on this
game — people who deserve far more that the obscurity to which they and
this piece of pure wonder have been cast — tossed onto their Timeline Chart
a term so astoundingly obscure that in the umpty-zillion petabytes of
information indexed by Google, it appears only three times. In context, it
seems the word was used correctly, too. I repeat: Whoa.) Anyway, that’s the
timeline. I promised character creation, and we will be getting to it,
soon.
>>>

His summary that shows his respect for the vast scope,
imagination, and cool craziness of the game...

Well, that took a lot longer than I’d planned… I mean, this whole series,
not just this little coda (though it, too, took longer than expected). What
can I say? "Star Rovers" shares with the original Arduin books an
incredible *density* of ideas, made possible by never actually explaining
much of them in depth. Terms, words, locations, concepts are all flung onto
the page and then never heard from again. You’re left to ponder the
meaning, or make up your own. The rules were a spur to imagination, not a
set of limits upon it. The nadir of roleplaying (in my opinion), the 1990s,
was the age of the Metaplot, of deeply detailed settings that mapped out
every square foot, and that reduced PCs to bit players who walked in the
shadow of "canon" NPCs that got to have world changing adventures (in
novels), while the DM was reduced to being an automaton who read from boxed
text and didn’t dare let his players accomplish anything meaningful since
it might mean the next supplement would be useless.
>>>


http://mrlizard.com/tag/star-rovers/


I will definitely have to find and buy a copy of this game.  I just wish it
had succeeded enough that supplement books had been written for it
(especially the one for starship combat).  But the cover art was horrendous
(ironic because the inside art was excellent), which I'm sure adversely
affected sales.  And yet despite the limited output, the scope of it's
imagination was incredible!  I hope "Mr. Lizard," or another game developer
(with permission), does actually pick up where the original designers left
off, and expand the game universe & update the rule mechanics.  But they
better not suck the life out of it!

This game may not be quite as transhumanist in nature as the much more
recent Eclipse Phase or Transhuman Space, but I think it still does work in
terms of stretching the imagination.  It planted seeds/memes in my mind at
a very young age, as science fiction in various forms did with many of us.


Best wishes,

John  : )
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