Space Jim rediscovers his first time with a percentile: it's Star Frontiers!
This is the TEETH news letter by veteran game critic and designer Jim Rossignol, and former Mojang alumni and famed illustrator, Marsh Davies! Why not come and join us over on the TEETH Discord, where most of us have Teeth or one kind or another.
And oh, if you can wish to support us you can buy our RPGs! (Please, because there’s so many of your reading this now that it actually costs serious money.)
Hello, you.
Links!
STAR FRONTIERS, I found it in a box in the garage.
Hello, you.
Another newsletter? So soon? That is what you might be thinking if you noticed that there was another newsletter last week. If you didn’t notice then you might be thinking “oh hey, a newsletter!” Or you might have already zoned out of this introductory paragraph and be thinking about those snacks you have waiting in the kitchen cupboard. Sweet, sweet snacks. Or savory. I don’t know.
But I digress: I (Jim) wanted to do another newsletter immediately because a) it will be a while before the next one because I have so much to do in the next three weeks, and b) there was a sort of frenzied urgency to share with you my rediscovering my first RPG, TSR’s STAR FRONTIERS. I don’t know why there should be any urgency to this, but there is.
And no, there’s no real TEETH or GOLD TEETH news this time, except to say that we are making real and delightful progress with GOLD TEETH, and that oh boy, this is a significantly bigger and more complicated book than the last. It’s also even more eccentric, if such thing a thing were possible, and that feels like a good omen.
Anyway, links, and then: STAR FRONTIERS.
-Marsh & Jim
LINKS!
THING OF THE WEEK: Jesse Heinig’s 300-page Dark Sun campaign, The Sand Marches, is an incredible labour of love. Heinig says it’s an attempt to bring the West Marches style of gameplay to Dark Sun (West Marches being a exploration-focused sandboxy approach to a long campaign, look it up!) and what results is a formidable PDF, absolutely heaving with detail. It’s been almost as long since I played Dark Sun as it is since I (Jim) played Star Frontiers, and it was one of the box sets I lost in the terrible events of Going To University In The Late 1990s. So this brought a tear to my eye.
How to run Mythic Bastionland one-shots by the man himself.
How do you construct a credible modern religion for your players without first devising several thousand years of history underpinning it? Mindstorm have this brilliant primer, "an entire framework to create something that feels modern, but isn’t just one of the major religions with the VIN number scratched off." It does this by breaking down the components of real-world religions into broad tenets which shape their practice, and inviting you to recombine them in different proportions. Is your religion focused on the renunciation of material living, or on performing an ecstatic connection to the divine? Is it about strict adherence to a canon which purports to wield some higher truth, or does it reject doctrinal hierarchy in favour of a spirituality that suffuses every living thing? It is, fittingly, an enlightening read—and handy too!
Pat Eyler of Foot of the Mountain Adventures has published a sampler for the Spring 2025 edition of their solo game / creative challenge / GMing skills course. It has the excellent title of It's Worse Than That. It takes a mechanism, in this case the Devil's Bargain, deftly pulls apart how it works and what a good execution of it achieves, illustrates this with examples, and then sets out a bunch of scenarios for you—the would-be GM—to work through, flexing the creative muscles until it hopefully becomes instinctual. For example:
Lo Yaal (a spell caster) attempts to create a cloud of smoke to cover their retreat. He’d like a Devil’s Bargain. What do you offer?
How would it be different if he were using a device that created the smoke?
What if they were modern spies instead of fantasy characters?
Brother Mudge would like a Devil’s Bargain to help him fight off the wasps with his quarterstaff. What do you offer?
What if he were using a missile weapon instead?
How many offers can you create for different kinds of complications?
This is such a good idea! I (Marsh) find the Devil's Bargain particularly tricky to improvise: players bargain for an extra dice on a roll in exchange for some other bad outcome which occurs regardless of the roll's success or failure. This means you need to come up with some horrible event that is external to the task at hand—it can't simply be some gradation of failure, as that's already accounted for in the roll itself—yet it needs to be contingent upon it in some way to make sense AND it also needs to be seductive enough that players will go for it. The intersecting point of this Venn diagram of GM mischief is a small target to hit—but practice makes perfect.
Formatting broken down a bit there. Sorry.
MY FIRST RPG: STAR FRONTIERS: ALPHA DAWN
So here’s a thing: if you are on Bluesky and reading the TTRPG chatter you will have seen recent “the cover art that got you started” threads, but I said LAST WEEK that I was going to talk about my first RPG, so when I talk covers here, I have to insist that I was alread ahead of the memetic zeitgeist and not simply falling in lockstep with social virality. That is true! Check the last newsletter!
ANYWAY. The first RPG I owned (I had played D&D by this point, but owned nothing and knew not of any other) was STAR FRONTIERS, the Alpha Dawn box set. This purple box-zine of the 1980s recently fell out of a stack of old magazines that I was going through while looking for something else entirely. Thrilled, because I’d actually been looking for it months earlier, I set about struggling to recollect its origin, thinking it must have a long-ago Christmas present or something. It turns out (via careful corss examination of now-ancient witnesses) that its origin was in fact nine year old Jim Rossignol being taken to the shops to look for Dungeons & Dragons, and only finding its sci-fi cousin. I have no idea if it was those all-important words on the cover which had me part with the Earth bucks that poor old grandad Rossignol gave me, but it was just as likely to be the cover. A kid raised by Buck Rogers and Star Wars could hardly resist this enticement. Look at it!
So that’s the cover that started it all.
But then look at the cover of the second book. It’s the same picture by a different artist?! I mean, sort of, anyway. Did the commissioning editor sent out the same brief to both artists and then do an “ah well, it’ll do” when it came to the cover design and both paintings were the same? It’s possible that we will never know, but for the sake of this article we can assume that’s what happened. If I had been running TSR in the early 1980s I would have henceforth made all Star Frontiers books have a man, a woman, and a monkey guy fighting their way out of a crashed spaceship, with any other cover art being out of bounds. But I wasn’t so some of the expansions had pictures of shiny worms and things.
As I was saying, leafing through this, and the packaged adventure, Crash On Volturnus, brought back a Proustian rush of recollection from the formative days of the Rossignol mind. The funny little amoeba aliens who in my thinking were filling the slot of a sort of dwarf/hobbit character, despite being utterly unlike either, and were the insectile Vrusks elves? Are elves like bugs? What’s happening in my nostalgia? Why were you trying to draw these desperate equivalences, nine year old Jim Rossignol?
The truth is that my little brain wasn’t ready. This was because having played D&D with older cousin Steve, the tropes I had downloaded from his GMing were everything. I wanted this to be D&D. And it wasn’t.
I was equally stunned to discover that my first two polyhedral dice were d10s. Why? Where were the promised fistfuls of colourful platonic forms? Well, it turned out that despite Star Frontiers being all FROM THE PRODUCERS OF DUNGEONS & DRAGONS etc, it was a d100 game. To my kid brain this was because percentages are more science fiction than d20 based systems with additional dice in the wings for damage. Is that true? I… actually don’t know. Maybe? The evidence of more recent times seems to support young Rossignol’s vibes-based assessment of percentile systems. Mothership uses percentages! Is that because d100 is the language of the androids? It could be. It could be.
Anyway, looking at the game now it certainly feels like it’s nearly forty-five years old and not from the future at all. Everything from the page design, through the kinds of situations you find in the adventure, to the design of the grid maps themselves (so beautiful, I wiped away a tear when I saw them again) are distinctly beamed to us from another (older) time.
Most incredibly, the structure of the first book, the sixteen-page BASIC RULES, really does take its time to explain what the hell is going on. After the initial “what is Star Frontiers” which fails to explain that it is an RPG, or what an RPG actually is, it’s not until page nine, AFTER the rules for using the monorail or paying for a rental hover car (?!) that it mentions that one person will need to be the GM. Star Frontiers doesn’t call this person that, however, they call them The Reader, because they are the one reading aloud the passages that set up the adventure.
It then briskly moves on to providing one alien monster, and then telling you to make up your own. Go on, lazy! Get on with it! But I can tell you not to fret, because there are ten more monsters in the next book.
Yes, the sixty-page ADVANCED RULES are much more like it. They remember to immediately mention who the Referee is (not Reader, now), and even explain how you can use your imagination to ELIMINATE the need for a grid map to play on. Radical. Seems risky to me.
There are pages which detail the different races you can play, and then, without obvious distinction, one you aren’t allowed to play, the Sathar, the mysterious worm-like aliens who are making shit go down in the Star Frontiers universe.
And there are rules for how your skills can be used on robots, and even some rules for how robots work in the game, with their levels (1-6) deciding what sort of robot that they are, and what they’re capable of. You can’t BE a robot, though, which seems like a bit of a shame when everyone born after 1975 secretly harbours that R2-D2 fantasy deep down.
And there are TABLES! From “wages for NPCs” for some reason, to the uh “acceleration and deceleration rates” of different vehicles. A generic “typical creatures” table, presumably space cow, space tiger, and space… bear? What’s a good omnivore? That’s all I can think of. And of course sci-fi weapons, where you get to find out how much damage a Sonic Devastator does. Yeah! (It’s ranged based, because sounds are more dangerous close up, and this means damage is starting at Lynch’s Dunian 20d10 and decreasing by 5d10 per range increment.)
Yes, there’s combat, of course. Ranged combat includes an astonishing twelve steps. Only eight of which (base chance, plus skill modifier, range modifier, movement modifier, aiming modifier, burst modifier, cover modifier, size-of-target modifier) are mandatory, you will be delighted to learn. You can do all eight steps and still miss.
All this absorbed into my amoeba-like corpus, I feel like I already understood, way back at the dawn of my consciousness in the Eighties, that all these half-arsed aliens and laser rifles are some cliche shit. And that’s okay! I want to be relishing the iconic nonsense of it. A game like this is like a bath filled with lukewarm tropes. With this in mind, however, I feel like need to draw attention to this incredible (in the sense that it causes one to be incredulous) paragraph from the Star Frontiers Wikipedia page:
In Issue 30 of the French games magazine Casus Belli, Jean Bolczesak liked the game but found its science fiction content a bit simplistic, commenting, "Star Frontiers is playable, interesting and ESPECIALLY entertaining. But Star Frontiers is a game that presents a rather caricatured vision of science fiction. Since Dick and Herbert, SF is no longer necessarily a literary genre reserved for the simple-minded and the mentally ill. You can be passionate about space opera without being completely stupid."*
Wow. I hope you read that in an outrageous French accent. If not, please go back and do so now.
And jeez, Bolczesak, I’m just a nine year old kid who wants to see a spaceship crewed by an unlikely gang of misfits get into all sorts of thrilling space-capades as they play their way across the frontier of the galaxy! What are you saying? Why the belligerence? To be fair to our Francophone friend, however, the quoted passage does go on to note that the review raises a good point beyond the unprovoked vitriol: there are no rules for spaceships? Of any kind? They’re hardly even mentioned? In a game about spaceships?! If I am to inflict this on some friends in a craven act of meaningless nostalgia, I at least need to be able to say that it’s basically a bit like Traveller, with floorplans of spaceships a minimum, and rules for space combat being pretty much mandatory. Perhaps THAT is the reason why the cover art and packaged adventure is all “fighting our way out of a crashed spaceship”, because this is a game of fighting your way out of a crashed spaceship, and nothing else.
The truth is, of course, that there were spaceship rules, arriving a little after this. Which reminds me of other space games we’ve played in recent years. Are spaceship rules always an afterthought? It hardly matters. Nine year old Jim Rossignol had already consigned this to a pile of childhood discards as Actual D&D arrived (that’s a good name for the next edition) and so no matter how hard I shake this pile of old magazines, the peculiarly-named space combat KNIGHT HAWKS box set is never going to fall out of it. And so to Ebay! But at this four decade distance, it’s going to be a longshot. (And that’s -40% to hit.)
More soon! x
*Now I keep thinking “what if frontier was pronounced like metier in French.” Eh? What then?