Space Opera by Edward E. Simbalist, A. Mark Ratner & Phil McGregor

[james_davis_nicoll]

Space Opera by Edward E. Simbalist, A. Mark Ratner & Phil McGregor

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

While rare today, saddle stitching has not gone completely extinct; Mongoose still uses it for their shorter texts.

[bolindbergh]

If Wikipedia can be trusted, it would have been the Australian Postal Commission at the time.

[ba_munronoe]

Now I find myself curious about how someone living in Australia and someone in the US ended up collaborating on an RPG that early on.

The lizard in a skullcap on the second cover is admittedly less goofy than the giant bug/cartoon cow with lipstick on the first, but perhaps less interesting.

[james_davis_nicoll]

Enjoy!

[ba_munronoe]

Thanks!

[theresawright]

I remember looking at this a few times and not being impressed. It has too much of a virtual setting built in (Ray guns and starships space opera) to be a flexible SF RPG, but not enough of that virtual setting to be interesting (Kinda like Star Wars and Star Trek, but not really either-or). From your review it sounds like the rules had the same sort of mismatch going on.

[viktor_haag]

I think Ronald ran Space Opera for a time (at least one adventure; perhaps a campaign?) but then again, he also happily ran Aftermath and C&S, and I think belonged to that type of Referee that was both capable of, and happy to, studiously pore over rulebooks to commit has much as possible to his working memory. I'm much happier to run with "the gist" in my working memory, a flexible coherent rules framework (from which I can improvise) and a set of rules that's designed to work as a good reference (while I used to be heavy on the "must have an index" side, I've since come to think that a well structured set of rules is much more important than an index -- partly, I suppose, because even when RPGs have indices they're almost uniformly very poorly made).

[beamjockey]

This Dreamwidth entry is missing the "Tears" tag, though the review site carries it.

[roseembolism]

Aside from strong Star Wars and Trek elements, there was also a lot of Starship Troopers material-the powered armor was practically lifted from the books. Also quite a bit of Laumer (I think that's where the flechette pistols and slug guns were stolen from).

The Traveller group I was part of back in the 80s switched from Traveller to Space Opera, since they liked the more detailed characters and skill rules- plus they wanted "real powered armor", not the anemic great of Traveller. They kept the Third Imperium setting though, in spite of the technology differences.