4 Sci-fi TTRPGs that warm my space buns

Yes, 4.

I’m glad to be taking part in #Sci-Friday again with this post.

Andrew Smith

has done a great job bribing people into taking part with cute dog photos and it’s become a cool little corner of Substack to be a part of!

TTRPGs are a subject very close to my heart. I met a lot of my best friends through a mutual love of the medium and I’ve had the best time playing these 4 in particular.

Cyberpunk 2020/Cyberpunk RED

I’d played Cyberpunk 2020 a few times before running my own campaign during the pandemic. By that time, Cyberpunk RED had been released, and Cyberpunk 2077 was on the horizon. I used a site called Roll20, a virtual tabletop where players can join a session and interact with battlemaps, tokens, and digital dice rollers. Sometimes not a great substitute for real in-person play, but somehow for Cyberpunk RED it really worked.

Maybe it had something to do with the setting’s own digitality. Its willingness to lean into the ever-narrowing gap between NET space and MEAT space. Characters in the setting spend their entire working lives in a virtual reality that influences and shapes the real world as much as the militaristic megacorps that permeate it.

As a setting, it’s bleak. It’s a warning of what rampant capitalism is capable of becoming and an indictment of the corporate-sponsored exploitation of the world’s resources and its people.

As a game, it’s hella fun. Augment your body with the latest tech and use it to score some extra scratch. Put together a crew and take what you need because the city sure as hell ain’t gonna give it to you, Choomba!

Alien

While some RPGs lend themselves to more saga-style campaigns, and others are more suited to one-off adventures, the Alien RPG does something pretty cool.

You can absolutely play a campaign set in that really well-established and interesting universe—in campaign mode, or you can play a quick adventure filled with suspense, action and inevitable death in Cinematic Mode.

In all fairness, I haven’t played a campaign of this game (yet) but the Cinematic mode I did play was an excellent translation of the best aspects of the Alien franchise into the form of a high-stakes tabletop RPG. It was intense, brutal, creepy, and so enjoyable that I even took some perverse pleasure in my character’s gruesome death. Not because I have a thing for gratuitous violence or anything, but because we all knew going in that our characters were doomed (we’d all seen at least one Alien movie), and there was some catharsis in embracing that fact.

The Expanse

To start off, I personally think that The Expanse series of books is some of the best if not the best modern sci-fi on offer. The TV show was great too. I won’t get too into the why of that here, but suffice it to say I’m a fan.

When I played this RPG, I hadn’t read the books, nor seen the show. I jumped in on a game because the group was down a player and I happened to be at the cafe that day anyway.

The first thing that struck me was the depth of setting. This was clearly a world that had been very well considered without being overwrought. The complexity of the setting’s political and societal status quo was an interesting and engaging backdrop for the adventures of a small crew of (essentially) space pirates.

But none of that is really about the RPG itself.

There were a couple of stand-out mechanisms that took an idea from the source material and transformed it into a mechanical aspect of the game that had a direct impact on the players. Namely, The Churn Tracker.

A spiraling trail of fickle fate that triggers negative events in scaling magnitudes. Taken from Amos Burton’s description of the churn being the next catastrophe that shakes up the order of things, the in-game realisation of this concept was a stroke of genius. It keeps players from getting too comfortable with their abilities while providing a real sense of jeopordy that rings true with the setting’s ever-present dangers of living and working (and surviving) in space.

Starfinder

Originally sold to me as ‘D&D in space’, I played in an over-2-year-long campaign of Starfinder run by my friend, Callum, that was finally killed by the logistical difficulties of the pandemic. This was, without a doubt, the best TTRPG experience I’ve had. Perhaps not the most formative, or the most impactful (traumatising), but the most fun I’ve ever had in an RPG, and the most engaged I’ve ever been in an RPG. Our WhatsApp group, an archive that still exists, was awash with in-character discussions and in-world play. Like, being at the table every Sunday wasn’t enough.

This was mainly due to Callum being an excellent GM, but every other player in the game brought something fun and unique to the table (literally) that made this game a joy to play. We’d look forward to every Sunday.

The setting is bustling with interesting places, races, and mysteries. The Pact Worlds is an organisation of governments within a single solar system (The Golarion System), from planets, moons, colonies, and Absalom Station, a space station that orbits the sun where the planet Golarion was before it mysteriously disappeared.

It’s also a universe in which both advanced technology and magic exist, as well as the cosmic horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos. So, if you ever wanted to play as a weird alien race that can shoot from a mile away with a high-powered personal rail gun while projecting a magical shield around your position and covering your friends while they hack their way into the headquarters of a techno-cult hellbent on awakening some ancient cosmic evil, this might be the TTRPG for you.

If not, well, it’s still a lot of fun.

The system itself is a kind of streamlined version of Pathfinder (a fantasy RPG) and it can get a little mathematical the longer you play. Bonuses to base skills come from a host of racial and class features as you level up, as well as from feats, gear, weapons, and others so it can become a lot of numbers to manage.

Some people really enjoy that aspect of RPGs, the min/max-ing of stats, making sure that whatever they roll on the dice, they have the mathematically best chance of succeeding.

Not me. I’m more likely to choose the upgrade that sounds like the most fun or chaotic, and in some cases, the least likely to actually work. But, when it does? It makes for those moments where everyone at the table roars in surprise and delight. Moments when the purest joy of RPG playing can bloom.

Honourable Mentions

Tales From The Loop

Traveller

Star Trek Adventures

Altered Carbon

Judge Dredd

Scum and Villainy