Never Played Day Five: Other Suns

[james_davis_nicoll]

Day Five of Unplayed RPGs: Niall C. Shapero's SF RPG Other Suns. Game mechanics were a very detailed, math-heavy cousin of BRP. The setting drew on popular SF of the time (More the Mote in God's Eye and Space Viking side), with the twist that when the heavily-armed Terran Empire encountered the vast, alien community that dominated a third of the galaxy, they were promptly and immediately defeated. Twice. Currently, humans have a collective government but functionally, humans fall under the purview of three alien regional governments.

Said aliens for the most part curiously similar to humanoid animals for the most part, which makes this one of the earlier furry RPGs.



The aliens were also available as PCs, so anyone not wanting to play a member of a second tier group notable mainly for being homicidal bastards who almost crashed civilization could select something more palatable. Seriously, why play a naked ape when you could be a telepathic fox person?

A vast variety of weapons was provided, despite which the example of combat provided in the rules ends with the example character (a human) getting arrested for murder. Also provided, planet generation and ship building rules, which I had a lot of fun playing with.

FGU supported the game rather poorly.

Comments

[theresawright]

I've got to say, the microphone set-up in the art looks surprisingly modern. Also that setting sounds more interesting than some better-supported RPGs or published SF.

[estrevan]

It’s an interesting setting in principle, but very badly explained in practice - very sketchy and high-level without the details it needs to come alive. Definitely potential in there, though, if my memory’s accurate.

[ironyoxide]

Interesting that FGU came out with *two* SF games, with different systems and settings.

Well, three, including Aftermath!, the only FGU game I've ever played. But I'm not sure post-apocalypse quite counts as SF in RPGs.

[ross_smith]

Other Suns was originally submitted to Chaosium, and came very close to being published as an official "Runequest in Space" game (this was before BRP was a separate product). But Shapero and Chaosium were unable to agree over the rights to the alien species in OS, and he ended up taking it to FGU instead. The system was revised significantly between the Chaosium and FGU submissions; I don't know anything about the original Chaosium version, but given the two companies' respective reputations for crunchiness or lack thereof, I suspect it was a good deal simpler than the version we ended up seeing.

Shapero claimed in an interview in 2003 that a second edition would be out Real Soon Now, but nothing seems to have ever come of this.

(My sources for all this are a number of rpg.net posts a few years ago from people who knew people directly involved.)

Reasons for pulling OTHER SUNS

[(Anonymous)]

If you contact me at niall_shapero@earthlink.net I can give you my account of my reasons for pulling OTHRR SUNS from Chaosium consideration. Or I can put you in touch with my attorney of that time, and he can give you his.

[roseembolism]

I recall liking the spaceship designs, and thinking the system was very similar to Runequest. But then again, back then the rpg system I was looking at was very similar to Runequest.

[(Anonymous)]

Um, presumably it wasn't obligatory to play naked? Unless our alien conquerors found that funny.

The problem with “hairless ape” is that most of us do have hair, either more of it or less of it than we’d prefer.

Robert Carnegie