Space: 1889

We've had a quiet few weeks lately, taking care of mom-in-law during her illness. Everything wargame-related will resume sometime later this month. In the meantime, my wife has expressed an interest in the Space: 1889 rpg...

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Created by Frank Chadwick and published by GDW in 1988, it's enjoyed something of a revival lately, perhaps due to the upsurge of interest in Steampunk. The game was revived in the last decade through the good offices of Heliograph, and a number of novels set in the 1889 universe have been released recently. One of the authors is Andy Frankham-Allen, who has set up a site devoted to Space: 1889. Useful materials can be found on their site and Frank's blog. 

My old role-playing group toyed with the game for a little while back in the '90's, but never really took to it, being more enamored of AD&D and Shadowrun. Regretfully, I had to let it drop at the time. 

I've not played it myself, but the game mechanisms seem good, and I've heard praise for the mass combat and Sky Galleons rules. At the moment I've only ever rolled a number of experimental characters, and read through a few scenarios, some of which appeared in Challenge magazine back in the day. 

One thing the old published scenarios became notorious for - they relied upon the player characters being captured by various enemies. Everything that happened after that depended upon their efforts to escape. Tiresome and rather off-putting in a campaign context, to say the least! I aim to do better in creating scenarios.

Some months ago I did raise the prospect of beginning a new blog devoted to role-playing Traveller. Since that's unlikely to fly, I might begin a general RPG blog instead.