Space: 1889

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RYoung

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As I was browsing through KS looking for new projects I came across Space 1889:

I remember it being on the shelf of my LFG, but never played it. It looked cool but was always focused on other game systems at the time. Can anyone who played previous versions give a thumbs up or down on the setting?

Being a fan of Spell Jammer I was disappointed there was no ship to ship combat in the latest version. SOG claims they fixed this in their 5e Space 1889.

 
As I was browsing through KS looking for new projects I came across Space 1889:

I remember it being on the shelf of my LFG, but never played it. It looked cool but was always focused on other game systems at the time. Can anyone who played previous versions give a thumbs up or down on the setting?

Being a fan of Spell Jammer I was disappointed there was no ship to ship combat in the latest version. SOG claims they fixed this in their 5e Space 1889.


Oh go back a few editions and you don't just have ship to ship combat. You have a full on miniatures combat game!
 
I played it a bit when it first came out. The rules system was too feeble for my group's taste, and after a while we converted to our general-purpose RPG of choice. As for the setting, I thought it suffered a bit from relying too much on a close analogy of Mars and Venus to European colonies in Asia and Africa, with not enough thought given to how space travel would make things different — for example, exploration on the ground would be transformed by the possibility of pointing a telescope out the window of a space-ship. I also got cognitive dissonance because I know how to sail, and had to keep ignoring my understanding that sailing airships, lacking keels, centre-boards, and any other contact with a second medium, would be unable to manoeuvre — they would just drift with the wind. One of the other players in the group I played complained that not enough thought was given to the things that Victorian engineering could do with lift-wood. He designed a perpetual-motion machine.

I'd rate it as "okay if you switch your brain off".

But the idea is wonderful.
 
Oh go back a few editions and you don't just have ship to ship combat. You have a full on miniatures combat game!
For skyships, not for spaceships. Of course, given the lack of any sort of firecontrol computer, the relatively poor optics, and the relative speeds of ships in anything but near identical orbits (let alone when they're using their ether propellers to make interplanetary transits) spaceship to spaceship combat doesn't really fit the setting. Etherships are for going from A to B. Skyships are for fighting (sometimes).
 
One of the other players in the group I played complained that not enough thought was given to the things that Victorian engineering could do with lift-wood. He designed a perpetual-motion machine.
I'm pretty sure medieval engineering could build a basic perpetual motion machine from it - a simple water-wheel with blades of liftwood should suffice. Late-Victorian engineering would be able to do much better, with 'paddles' that remained level on the lifting side and then flipped to vertical for the return part of the cycle - they had paddle steamers with paddlewheels that had similar automatic angle adjusting machinery.
 
I bought and read it back when it first came out, way back when. I liked it, but was never able to convince anyone to let me run them through a game of it. It was an entertaining read, though.
 
I'm pretty sure medieval engineering could build a basic perpetual motion machine from it - a simple water-wheel with blades of liftwood should suffice. Late-Victorian engineering would be able to do much better, with 'paddles' that remained level on the lifting side and then flipped to vertical for the return part of the cycle - they had paddle steamers with paddlewheels that had similar automatic angle adjusting machinery.
The GDW adventure Canal Priests of Mars by Marcus L. Rowland featured a liftwood perpetual motion machine.
 
For my tastes, Space:1889 has one of the best settings ever produced for an rpg and should’ve been a massive hit with novels and comics and movies. Alas, as someone from GDW (don’t remember if it was Frank Chadwick or Dave Nielsen) said to me one year at GenCon “we’ve learned that Space:1889 fans are born, not made.” Meaning that either you’re instantly hooked by the premise, or you have zero interest and nothing will ever change that. I was in category one, but everybody else on my gaming group was in category two and I could never convince them to play it. Presumably online play makes that easier - you can draw from the entire pool of fans worldwide rather than having to find a critical mass of interest among your friends.
 
For my tastes, Space:1889 has one of the best settings ever produced for an rpg and should’ve been a massive hit with novels and comics and movies. Alas, as someone from GDW (don’t remember if it was Frank Chadwick or Dave Nielsen) said to me one year at GenCon “we’ve learned that Space:1889 fans are born, not made.” Meaning that either you’re instantly hooked by the premise, or you have zero interest and nothing will ever change that. I was in category one, but everybody else on my gaming group was in category two and I could never convince them to play it. Presumably online play makes that easier - you can draw from the entire pool of fans worldwide rather than having to find a critical mass of interest among your friends.
Heh, I can relate to all of that.

I think it tended to hit better for a certain subset of historical minis gamer that was already into the real-world period but wanted to dip their toe into a type of fantasy that they could better relate to than the D&D type. At least that was always the case with the people I encountered. They also tended to be slightly older than me, probably already being in their teens when D&D first broke out in the late 70s as a fad hit.
 
I looked at the Kickstarter a while back. Afterwards, I found myself wondering who the Kickstarter was aimed at.

It's pitch seemed to be, "we're actually giving you a reason to have an adventuring group now!" O...K...

I'm going to also admit that I don't like projects that try to sell themselves like the video for this one did. It's trying to be "cute" but it just made my eyes roll so hard that they fell out of my head and I'm still chasing them down the street.

I'm in a strange position with Space 1889. I've liked the concept for a long time but never played. I have the original GDW rulebook from 1990 as well as a Savage Worlds remake (Red Sands), but I've never played. So I'm definitely not an old hand with the game despite a lot of familiarity, and I'm not a newbie either. Still, I can't see why old hands or newbies would be terribly interested in this pitch. I know I look at it and WANT to be interested, but there's simply not much there for me to cling to.

I have to say that the Kickstarter doesn't seem to be that good of a deal either. The tier with both versions of the book ($130) effectively charges full MSRP for the physical + $10. Ironically, a book purchased as an Add On is at a discount ($45 for the book, presumably without the PDF). So the tiers with physical rewards double dip charging for the content twice ($45 physical + $25 PDF). That's kind of shitty, especially not knowing how big the book will be.

The Kickstarter sort of implies there won't be a retail release, but then states the book will have a $59.99 retail version. Probably better for me to wait the probable 18+ months (because Kickstarters are always late) and just see if I want to pick up the book at that point.
 
The original is my favourite rpg. The lack of space combat is because the relative velocities are too great, the ships cannot see each other when at interplanetary speeds. All combat occurs when the ships are in atmosphere because of this.
 
I love the original setting, but I'd wait for a review of this 5e version to see what was altered before I'd buy it.
 
Loved the game instantly when I discovered it in the 90s., not too fond of the original rules. Some parts were great, others were just weird: totally different mechanics for melee combat and ranged combat? WTF? This meant that it didn't get run as much as it deserved, but it is a game I always come back to when I think about starting new campaigns.

Not sure what to think about the reboot. Anything that brings Space 1889 back is good, but I really don't like what I read about the changes in the setting. Ogres and clockwork-men? Really? For me the draw of Space 1889 always was the releative sober treatment of the genre. Sure it had etherflyers, martian super technology, insect men on the moon, but it delivered them with a pretty straight face. There was no magic, no psionics, no super powers, no clockwork-men (Castle Falkenstein scratch all those itches for me anyway), it was a pretty straight colonial game with space ships in the victorian age. At times brutally straight. I do not need my Space 1889 setting spiced up with steampunk nonsense.

I might support the kickstarter, but mainly out of nostalgia. For my own gaming needs I have a Barbarians of Lemuria conversion for Space 1889 on a slow burn, and one of these days I'll get to run that Cloud Captain campaign I've always dreamt of.
 
I own a bunch of stuff for the Ubiquity version from backing the Kickstarter for the English translation of the German version.

So, what exactly is this? Some kind of reboot using the 5E rules? It almost sounds like it's only Space: 1889 in name.
 
It is a bit confusing if you just read the kickstarter page, but there are a handfull of short youtube videos that explains that it will be published two versions. One with a custom d6 dicepool system and one with D&D 5th ed. rules
 
I don’t know anything about the Kickstarter, but I see that you can get the original (either the GDW version or later reprint from Heliograph) for under $50 at Noble Knight Games (so presumably you can also get it for less than that on eBay if you’re willing to put in some effort) which is totally worth it IMO. Why risk a new version that might turn out to be trash when the version you know is definitely good is still easily available?
 
It is a bit confusing if you just read the kickstarter page, but there are a handfull of short youtube videos that explains that it will be published two versions. One with a custom d6 dicepool system and one with D&D 5th ed. rules
I wonder what advantage(s) their custom dice pool system bring to the party that made it a better choice than the Ubiquity system used in the Clockwork Publishing edition?
 
I wonder what advantage(s) their custom dice pool system bring to the party that made it a better choice than the Ubiquity system used in the Clockwork Publishing edition?

Somehow I came away with the impression that it was an update and revision of the original system from the GDW/Heliograph version, but skimming over the Kickstarter description, I'm not sure how I got that idea.

It uses d6s and a single d20 (the danger die) and some cards (to determine initiative and defenses). That's all the campaign text seems to say about it.
 
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