A nostalgic anecdote and look back at 80s tabletop RPG, Star Frontiers, what fun it was while it lasted, and comparisons to other RPGS of the time.
Recently, while cleaning out the garage I ran into something I’d completely forgotten about.
Finding this book touched off a wave of bittersweet nostalgia for me.
80s tabletop RPGs were unquestionably the best of all time.
We dreamed of computer graphics filling in for our own imaginations and honestly, we were fools for that. It was the Golden Age and we didn’t realize it.
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was still owned by an independent TSR that was controlled by the god of gaming, Gary Gygax. Dragon Lance was taking it mainstream-ish. The fairly awful Dungeons and Dragons Saturday morning cartoon had led in its timeslot for two years.
FASA had a Star Trek universe that was deeper and richer than what would exist in the 1990s. The Klingons were an actual alien warrior civilization that was believable instead of the retarded space-going Mongol hoard that Roddenberry would turn them into in the 1990s. FASA had a much better explanation for the difference in the Klingons’ appearance between the first series and the first movie.* I’ll get to the amazing Trader Captains and Merchant Princes some other time.
TSR noticed that FASA was nipping at their bottom line and decided to respond.
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My college gaming night group switched off of Dungeons and Dragons for a while because there was a guy that four of us were trying to ditch and one of us kept bringing to Game Night. Despite the fact that the rest of us kept telling him not to. He was That Guy.
When it was my turn to DM, I switched to a new module from TSR called Star Frontiers because I knew there was no way in hell that That Guy was going to show up unless he could play his Dark Elf-Paladin-Monk-Cleric-Mage-Assassin Zex-Xor. He was really That Guy.
However, it turned out that we liked the game. A lot. And for a year we played Star Frontiers exclusively.
The problems begin with Zebulon’s Guide. It was to be the first part of three modules that were going to revise and expand the game’s rules. But then all of a sudden Star Frontiers was canceled out of the blue and replaced with an extremely crappy Buck Rogers series. I thumbed through it at Nerd Dungeon, then washed my hands feeling dirty for having even touched it. The module was awful. I wondered why TSR had broken our hearts and then I completely forgot about the game for thirty years.
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But after I found the guide I decided to do a little internet research on the subject. Here’s what I found:
“Why did TSR kill Star Frontiers after 3 years? Surely, it must have been poor sales, right? Possibly, but more likely it was killed to make way for a Buck Rogers RPG game that is now completely forgotten.
Why would a company kill off a popular product to make a new game based on a license that the target audience probably didn’t give a rat’s ass about?
In 1928, a guy named John Dille syndicated a new comic strip named Buck Rogers, eventually gaining complete ownership of said character. Guess whose granddaughter was the president of TSR during the 1980s? You guessed it. No, it wasn’t Kathleen Kennedy. It was actually Lorraine Williams, President of TSR and member of the Dille Family Trust. I’m probably being silly, nobody in real life uses a position of power to make business decisions that benefit themselves over the company. That only happens in the movies, right? Regardless, that Buck Rogers game tanked harder than Battlefield Earth starring Mr. Barry Pepper. It also caused poor Twiki to blow a gasket.“
Lorraine Williams did more to trainwreck TSR than Wizards of the Coast. I’ll have more on the One Woman Disaster Area of RPGs another time. But, at least Star Frontiers was killed out of honest corruption and greed. Today it would have been canceled to make way for a new RPG called, Gender Frontiers.
Don’t tell Wizards of the Coast.
I don’t want them getting ideas.
Do you have any interest in this game or any nostalgia for other games? What’s your favorite RPG? Can we come to your place for gaming night? Let us know in the comments!
NEXT: #DungeonDrama: How The Woke Has Dragged The TTRPG Industry Into Hell
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There were two TSR Buck Rogers RPGs. One based off the original novellas and the other based on Stars reimagining of the IP.
Stars = TSR