Welcome to this week’s episode of the Space Game Junkie Podcast. In this episode, Jim and I sit down with Stephen A. Rogers, who has created pen-and-paper role playing games based on both Starflight and Wing Commander (both of which you can buy or download at Lulu). These books are fantastic reference materials in their own right, but they’re also great RPG systems in here as well, so we discuss with Stephen the mechanics of the games, how the source material was made into a pen-and-paper RPG and much more.
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As always, you can leave questions or comments below in the comments section, or if you have ideas or critiques of the show you’d like to share just with us, hit us up at hail@spacegamejunkie.com. Thanks for listening everyone, and enjoy!
I really wanted to be there for this one, but the weather intervened.
What happened? Everything okay?
They had some pretty nasty stuff up in northern Nebraska/Iowa/south Minnesota while we were recording the podcast; most of the state of New York also got slammed.
Didn’t come up in the conversation but that’s what originally led me to Norman; my Bachelor’s is in meteorology.
Daaaaaaaayum man, it gets scaaary out there. Why aren’tcha a weatherman? ;)
I always wanted to be a weatherman. I mean, if you’re wrong most of the time, hey it’s the weather. You can be a shitty weatherman and still retire in the job.
Not everybody has to be Dick Goddard.
To actually work as a meteorologist, you pretty much have to go for your Masters in it; I didn’t do that (and I really wish I had). You can intern or volunteer with a Bachelors if they have spots open for them, but in Norman, OK (pretty much the weather Mecca of the world), they have an overabundance of student slave labor. So that’s that.
I did try the on-camera scene out; turns out I’m introverted.That’s bad if you want to be a well-liked weatherman, good if you want to write role-playing games…
Lots of wind, a little lightning, lots of rain. Which would have been fine, but after several half-second power outages, I gave up on electronics for the evening. I need to get a UPS.
Very interesting podcast Brian. I had never heard of Lulu before this, but after listening to the podcast I figured I would pickup a copy of both the Starflight and WingCommander RPG hardcovers. Never been into tabletop RPGs, but I am a sucker for hard copy manuals and novellas that used to come with the old games, so the fact that someone went to all the trouble to gather the back story for these two games is awesome! Thanks for the recommend.
Welcome to the comments Malichite, and I’m glad you enjoyed the podcast. Even if you never use these books to run an actual game, the amount of information for their universes is staggering and amazing to read all on its own. :)
One thing I neglected to mention in the podcast – there is actually a second name on the cover of SFRPG, Chris DeAdder. All the people listed in the credits of both games contributed and helped with their development in various ways. Chris’s had two big contributions to the SFRPG project – the first is that about half of the species listed in Chapter Two were directly written by him (which got his name on the cover – he’s the only person beside myself who contributed text directly to the game). His second big contribution had to do with the other half of the races listed there: I composed those, and I originally wasn’t planning to go into the same level of detail. You can kind of tell that with the first few species; if you look at the Human profile, it’s kind of meager compared to every other race that made it into the game. Chris inspired me to step up my game where those guys were concerned and I think it made that whole chapter a lot more fun to read. That influence carried over into WCRPG, where I strove for the same level of quality there it when it came time to write race profiles. So he had a big influence on the way both games turned out.
I seem to have put that last post in the wrong spot…
Lulu was actually recommended to me by an old room-mate of mine, who had done some work for the Oklahoma Bureau of Tourism and wound up using them to do some print-on-demand stuff for them. I chose to use a print-on-demand model myself because, as I mention in the podcast, I already knew that trying to make a profit was out and it seemed better to go that route (rather than shell out hundreds of dollars for hardcopies that folks may or may not have been interested in). Their products are very high quality and I’d definitely recommend them for anybody interested in self-publishing anything. I should mention that their business model is such that you ~could~ make money (in which case they’d take a cut, of course).
While its awesome this is available in PDF for free it is a shame that all this effort was done pro bono (e.g. missed the no profit comment during my first listen and I had assumed he at least got a small cut of the hardcover sales).
Just curious Brian or Stephen, is there another host site or a way to donate a few bucks to the “tip jar” for Stephen and all of his efforts thus far?
Well, the main point of keeping it pro bono was that I didn’t want to risk a run-in with EA’s legal department. They’re generally okay with fan projects as long as nobody besides them makes money.
That said, I ~have~ given your suggestion some thought. I don’t have anything set up for any folks who may want to “donate to the development of future work” (or whatever), but that may change after I do some homework…