#starfighters

So I discovered I can draw spaceships, guys.

THEME: Starship Combat

Hello there! Thank you for your patience! I think I might have a few games worth checking out; some are very tactical, while others are complex in ways you might not expect!

After\Burner, by The Cargo Bay.

After\Burner is a tabletop roleplaying game focused on fast and positional starfighter combat and military sci-fi drama.

This game is Illuminated by LUMEN: expect rules-lite, power-fantasy stories about larger-than-life, heroic starfighter pilots with Success/Mixed/Failure outcomes. After\Burner takes the system in the direction of the combat flight game - with some sprinkling of the more sober and serious space flight sim for flavor.

Your hero pilots crack wise and yammer over comms about their feelings. They fall in love/lust with their superior officers and enemies. They get into fist fights with the XO and weasel out of a court-martial. They soar at breakneck speed through trenches and superstructures with no regard to the “flight deck.” They live high-octane lives of danger and melodrama and they have absolutely no chill.

Inspired by media such as Ace Combat, Love Death & Robots, Alphabet Squadron, Battlestar Galactica and more, After\Burner mixes the messy lives of pilots with the high-speed danger of space combat. The game doesn't have much a pre-defined setting; it's more focused on how you navigate combat and the special ways your characters can fight. You pick character archetypes such as Commander, Wingmate or Rookie, which give you experience based on actions you take that will likely put you in direct danger. Your character motivations help flavor the talents you can take, giving you a fighting style that makes you unique.

As for the starship combat, After\Burner builds on the LUMEN system, which gives you three basic attributes for your pilot: Trigger, Gauge, and Burn. You choose the attribute you want to roll based on how you want to solve a problem. On top of this, you also select a starfighter before you hop into battle; it seems as though you can change which starfighter you pilot in each sortie, depending on the kind of fight you're expecting. Your starfighter has a separate health track called Stability, as well as a complement of shields and weapons and special abilities determined by the kind of ship it is.

When you fight, things like range, positioning, and damage matter, so the combat phase institutes a turn order, and a limit on how many actions or maneuvers you can take. LUMEN games are modular, meaning that the choices you make about how your ship is built and how your pilot grows will add new abilities or special rules to follow, reflective of your fighting style. This means that you'll likely develop mastery over the game as its complexity deepens. There's also specific move options that make sense in starfighter fiction, like diverting power from one system to another, improving damage or defense at the cost of something else. If you want a video-game-like tactical experience, you might like After\Burner. If you really like the idea of this game, you might also be interested in the introductory adventure, Operation Snowblind.

Flying Circus, by Erika Chappell.

Flying Circus is an in-depth, highly detailed Powered by the Apocalypse-derived roleplaying game of aviation fantasy, set in a world of machines and magic inspired by the works of Hayao Miyazaki.

In the aftermath of a massive industrial war, the world is slowly pulling itself back together, but danger still lurks in the skies of Himmilgard. The only thing standing between the world and chaos are the brave pilots of the Flying Circuses, indepedent mercenary companies known for the bright and unique liveries of their salvaged aircraft. No mission is too bold, no monster too big, no foe too dangerous… if you can afford it.

Flying Circus uses a unique system for air combat, eschewing top-down maps and treating Altitude and Air Speed as currency to be spent in daring and realistic dogfights. Climb to gain the advantage, dive to regain speed, pull your plane into dizzying turns to get on their tail. But you also face realistic limitations, as your engine burns out, your wings crack and break, and you lose consciousness in a high-G turn.

This might sound a little bit crazy when it comes to recommendations, because Flying Circus is Powered-by-the-Apocalypse, and has a big focus on your characters and their relationships with each-other. The game has two halves to it; a relational, dramatic downtime phase, and a structured combat and flight phase. When you are flying your plane, you're not just rolling using a staggered success rubric; you're tracking speed and how much of it you lose when you turn, how much fuel and bombs you have, and whether or not you're higher than your opponents (and what advantage that gives you). The sheet for your plane looks like a set of flight instruments, making you feel like you're sitting in the cockpit.

As for the setting, Flying Circus takes place in a fantastical historical period, in a country rebuilding after a post-industrialist war. That being said, there are playbooks that nod towards typical science-fantasy archetypes, and even movies like Star Wars took a lot of inspiration from the World Wars, so I wonder if perhaps there's bones here that might be worth building on in a starship game.

Black Hole Era, by Sol's Roles.

One by one the last stars are winking out and the true Black Hole Era approaches. A period of nearly endless stability around which your ancient civilization will quietly await the inevitable decay of protons, and the final oncoming darkness after quintillions of years. This almost eternal period of stability is interrupted by the formation of Star Scars, an unknown phenomena that rips apart some of the few remaining degenerate stellar remnants. From these scars pours forth an alien form of life determined to reignite the black holes, causing the death of untold digital beings, and the collapse of a civilization trillions of years of age.

In this game you will portray one of the mighty vessels called into being to defend your home. Sentient and self aware, you are equipped with space bending engines, exotic energy weapons, and nanoscale fabricators for self repair. However, resources are scarce and must be scavenged from your foes or rationed carefully from the home world vaults. You will have to weigh the benefits of bringing home materials or using them in the field.

A LUMEN game, Black Hole Era assumes that the conflicts you play through are small, concentrated shatter-points in a broader, much more expansive war. As per LUMEN, you're still relying on just three attributes to determine what you're rolling for any given thing, but the cool stuff you do is all hidden in the arrays and bays you choose for your ship. Arrays are are equipment that draws resources to improve speed, reduce detection, improve defense, or give yourself an extra attack. Bays hold your weapons, and can vary in attack style, harm dealt, or range.

Another unique piece of Black Hole Era is Scrap. When you lose a fight, your pilot can typically eject to safety, and your ship is reduced to scrap. This scrap can be used to build upon your next ship, improving your next vessel in some way, shape or form. It feels like a form of experience, but for your ship, rather than for you.

Red Air, by The Cargo Bay.

RED AIR is a tactical, sci-fi starfighter pilot tabletop roleplaying game about portraying the villains. The characters are fighter pilots in the dominant galactic navy of an oppressive, totalitarian State. Endless resources and an iron grip on the populations of countless worlds means the most efficient way of wielding aerial power is through swarms of short range, lightly-armored, un-shielded, highly specialized starfighters. Most pilots are barely screened, swiftly trained, and thrown into a cockpit to darken the skies of beleaguered planets.

Villainy affords you power and prestige - at the cost of constant surveillance and your soul. Will you be ground down into another hateful cog in an insidious machine, or will you ignite the spark of rebellion and take your first desperate steps towards making things right?

For fans of TIE fighters, as well as lovers of Forged in the Dark games, Red Air might be the game for you. The game is built on the Charge system, which isn't exactly Forged in the Dark, but carries a lot of the same hallmarks. You choose both a character archetype and a fighter craft - your character archetype determines your stats, but your fighter craft adjusts them. While Forged in the Dark games typically use narrative positioning, Red Air re-contextualizes position and effect onto a positional grid, allowing you to visualize where you are and what kind of advantage you might have.

If you want to delve into a world where your characters are likely under-trained, overwhelmed, under-appreciated workers for a totalitarian regime, you might like Red Air.

HotShots, by Mitchell Daily.

Do you have what it takes to be a hotshot, to feel the g-forces crash against your body without passing out, to keep your cool as bolts of plasma tear through your engines, to face death with every flight and laugh in its face? There's only one way to find out!

Hotshots is a lightweight system for creating pilots in fragile starfighters going on daring space adventures. Be they racers or rebels, stuntmen or soldiers, hotshots live dangerous (and short) lives. They wouldn’t have it any other way.

Hotshots takes inspiration from cinematic dogfights and races in space, simulators that require you to keep an eye on multiple parts of your starfighter, and OSR D20 simplicity and deadliness. You fighter's AI, weapons, armor, engines, and repulsors can all help you past obstacles and out of danger, adding smaller dice to your d20 rolls. They all also have their own health. Losing some systems leaves you vulnerable. Losing others leaves you dead.

This game has room for both fighting and racing, with rules for jockeying for a position on a race track right alongside rules for dogfights. The game pulls from Old-School sensibilities, giving you a few stats to roll with for pretty much everything, and modifiers that come from your equipment, mainly your ship systems. When you do something in your ship, you roll a d20 and add the result of the relevant equipment dice. Ships are differentiated through these modifiers, like a d8 for engines, or a d6 for weapons systems. Each ship also carries an advantage and a liability, which will likely encourage your character to approach space combat in a very specific way.

When it comes to setting, however, there is little to none, so if you pick up a HotShots game you'll likely have to write the lore and the adventure yourself. For GMs with a space setting already in their heads, this might be just what you need!

SUPER BANDIT, by Adam Schwaninger

YOU ARE A STARFIGHTER. You dance through the void, strapped into a fragile hyper-velocity shell capable of glassing moons. Now your colony worlds burn. Your fleets are scattered. The false prophets and traitor kings call you renegade. They hound you through uncharted space while billions of ghosts cry out for vengeance. Let them come. Show them how easily the hunter can become the prey.

This is a played-and-refined hack of 24XX, which is a quick and rather rules-light game that uses various polyhedral dice to represent your character's skills and abilities. These skills and abilities can include piloting, sensors, gunnery, enemy tactics, intimidation, mechanics, and more. Your characters will enter dogfights with just a few moments to plan what happens next: will they charge in, maneuver, or maintain a distance? The players then compare their decision to the game-masters, in a sort of rock-paper-scissors, with what happens next dependent on the combination of choices. You'll also have to choose tactics before making an attack run, determining what kinds of weapons you can wield, and how you might try to seek an advantage over an opponent.

For a little game, SUPER BANDIT sure packs a lot inside!

You can also check out…

Starfighter: Cygnus, by Majcher Arcana.

Incom Corporation T-65C-A2 X-Wing Space Superiority Fighter

...images from the lost continent of cult films, b-movies and celluloid dreamscapes

Starfighters in 70's/80's SF movies

Tally ho! Let's fire up those pulse engines, charge the laz-burners and see if we can bag one of those damn Vyveek bounders! What?

Midjourney 5 likes to throw in some Lego images!