Adventure Beyond D&D: Five Cool Sci-Fi RPGs
Want to step outside of the typical fantasy realms of swords, sorcery, elves, and dwarves? These five sci-fi RPGs are a great place to start.
When it comes to RPGs there are exactly two genres. Fantasy and everything else. And of everything else, it’s mostly Sci-Fi and Horror with a little light dusting of other things sprinkled throughout. Especially depending on where you drop superhero stories on the spectrum.
Within those broad spectra of RPG genres (and again, that’s just a loose array) there are so many different interpretations and angles it can seem impossible to step outside of familiar fantasy grounds. What is an RPG if you can’t even play an elf? Well, today we’re looking at five great sci-fi RPGs that are great jumping-in points for your next campaign.
Beam Saber
Beam Saber s a fantastic game of mecha combat in the middle of a great galactic war that looms over everything. It’s not a game about seeing the war through to the bitter end (unless you decide you want it to be) but it forms a fantastic backdrop for all sorts of mech combat distilled down to going on missions.
It’s fast and easy to pick up and play. You can find a sample of the rules in the free Quick Start Guide which should give you enough of a taste of the rules to know if it’s for you or not.
The system is built on the Forge in the Dark toolset and comes with some marvelous vehicle rules that let you build your own custom mech from the ground up. If you want a game that gives strong 08th MS team vibes, this is it.
You can hear Beam Saber played on many podcasts. We recommend Friends at the Table’s Partizan arc. It’s Beam Saber at its best.
Tales from the Loop
Tales from the Loop is sci-fi at its finest: you play a group of kids in a dilapidated, gorgeous 80s that never was. You live near The Loop, a massive supercollider project that has resulted in some stranger things than normal happening lately.
Whether it’s dealing with rogue machines. Or strange creatures that emerge from other realities, there’s a lot of weirdness that happens from The Loop. And it can be hard to deal with all that when you’re just a kid.
This is why Tales from the Loop gets trotted out so often because they actually do care about you being just a kid. The framework of the mechanics encourages you to get out there solving sci-fi mysteries in your retro-sci-fi 80s world, but it also wants you to be a kid with all its highs and lows. The two tracks play extremely well together.
Stars Without Number
If you are looking for a game that builds a universe and then gives you the tools to play in it, Stars Without Number aims to do exactly that. It is a hefty game, though. Make no mistake. This is as much of a sandbox as a D&D-type game wants to be. This means that both players and GMs have their work cut out for them.
But the designers have elegant tools to make that work fun tucked away within the pages of this behemoth tome. You’ll find rules for mechs. For flying a starship. For dealing with factions at war, peace, or otherwise in a big universe. It’s got a very old-school RPG vibe to it, but with thoroughly modern (and big) dreams.
Mothership
Mothership blends the only other two genres, sci-fi, and horror, together to make an award-winning RPG. In it, you play a crew on a starship just trying to survive in space. But it gets worse, because not only is it the worst place to be: outer space. It’s also full of unknown worlds, and alien creatures straight out of a xenomorph’s nightmare, but as a sci-fi/horror blend it understands that humanity is the real monster all along too.
There’s a lot of fun to be had in playing this. But it’s definitely a much different vibe from any of the other games on this list. You’re just trying not to die in space. You likely will not succeed. But you will have fun the whole time.
Ironsworn: Starforged
Finally Ironsworn: Starforged. A game of space exploration and perilous quests. This is the game of your story-driven sci-fi dreams. If you want to play a game that gets you behind the console of a starship and out into the galaxy right away Starforged is a great launching point.
Built off of Ironsworn, the game is a narrative-driven one of personal vows, epic quests, and exploring strange new worlds in space. It has some of the best tools for procedurally generating whole new undiscovered worlds. And it even comes with a ruleset perfect for solo play, so you can start figuring out what the game is like by yourself.
But it really sings when you can get a crew together to play it. You can play it with or without a GM, so you can all just play and tell sci-fi stories that take you to unexpected places together.
