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Freedom in the Spinward Marches!
Nov. 10th, 2017 01:10 pmBack in the Golden Age of Wargames, one of my true loves was SPI's Freedom in the Galaxy, designed in response to the space-opera film craze set off by Star Wars. The premise was simple. One player was the Evil Empire, seeking to crush all dissent by any means necessary, while the other player was the plucky rebels, fighting against hopeless odds to topple the cruel regime and bring, well, freedom to the galaxy. Like it says on the box.
The board showed several star systems split into five sectors. Each system had a ring-shaped track for each planet showing what environments were on the world, any special notes, and a loyalty track showing how strongly the world was cheering for the Emperor. Actions taken by both players move that marker from utterly loyal to outright rebellion.
What made the gameplay so interesting was that it wasn't just cardboard counters being pushed around the map, each player had control of several characters who could move from place to place and perform missions to gain allies, find equipment, kill the enemy characters, or shift the alliance of a world in their direction.
Which made for some interesting strategic planning, as you had to have the right people in the right place to advance your agenda while foiling the plans of your opponent. Is this the right time to send young Adam Starlight to kill the seductive but deadly Thyssa Kimbo? Or is he needed to accompany Doctor Sontag on a desperate mission to destroy the dread Planetary Stabilizer?
Given the large number of characters, items, and ships available, play changes with every game. Which I like in a wargame. There are only so many ways for the Warsaw Pact to invade western Europe, no matter how many times you play the Third World War series from GDW. Mixing up what was almost role-playing (the group I played with totally acted all the parts) with traditional board gaming was a lot of fun.
In actual gameplay, the key was to focus on one of the four outer sectors and work all the worlds towards rebellion without actually triggering one. You had to make sure that when you did trigger the uprising, the domino effect would spread the call to rise to other worlds without you having to do anything. As the Imperial player, you need to crush these insignificant worms before they can do just that. Harder than it looks.
SPI took this track with another of their great games, Swords and Sorcery. As the name suggests, this game is set in a totally cliched fantasy setting, with even more puns and industry in-jokes. Not quite as fun as Freedom, but still playable.
I'm thinking about this game, and its character cards, because since I've dropped my NaNoWriMo project after what I learned from my psychologist, I've turned back to planning a Traveller game. Yes, again. Trust me.
I want to do my Finders, Inc. game. The players are contractors for a corporation that finds things for a fee. Starships skipping on their bank loans, missing heirs, a rare book last seen in a museum shortly before the Sword Worlds landed troops . . . that kind of thing. It's great for an episodic game, as each mission is self-contained while giving hints of a larger arc.
The setting will be Glisten March and the surrounding areas in the Spinward Marches sector. Yes, I'm not using subsector, it annoys me. Besides, Exarchos sounds so much better than Duke, don't you agree? I'm trying to find a good list of all the Freedom in the Galaxy character cards (or a set of the cards themselves) because they'd make awesome NPCs. Emperor Coreguya becomes Exarchos Coreguya, Kephalē Glisten. I can use the existing character structures in the game to build a nice web of intrigue for the characters to get caught up in. Nothing like palace politics in a backwater province to spice up life!
But yeah, working on my setting and game gives me something to that I can cut into small pieces. Which is good for me right now. I'm going to spend some time really reading the Mongoose Traveller book (which I still call Rikki Tikki Traveller for obscure reasons, ask if you're interested) and begin doing text details of the systems, first in Glisten and then District 268.
Hopefully, I'll have something ready to run by next March. I'm taking this slow and not over-promising. Who knows, maybe the characters really will fight for freedom in the galaxy!
The board showed several star systems split into five sectors. Each system had a ring-shaped track for each planet showing what environments were on the world, any special notes, and a loyalty track showing how strongly the world was cheering for the Emperor. Actions taken by both players move that marker from utterly loyal to outright rebellion.
What made the gameplay so interesting was that it wasn't just cardboard counters being pushed around the map, each player had control of several characters who could move from place to place and perform missions to gain allies, find equipment, kill the enemy characters, or shift the alliance of a world in their direction.
Which made for some interesting strategic planning, as you had to have the right people in the right place to advance your agenda while foiling the plans of your opponent. Is this the right time to send young Adam Starlight to kill the seductive but deadly Thyssa Kimbo? Or is he needed to accompany Doctor Sontag on a desperate mission to destroy the dread Planetary Stabilizer?
Given the large number of characters, items, and ships available, play changes with every game. Which I like in a wargame. There are only so many ways for the Warsaw Pact to invade western Europe, no matter how many times you play the Third World War series from GDW. Mixing up what was almost role-playing (the group I played with totally acted all the parts) with traditional board gaming was a lot of fun.
In actual gameplay, the key was to focus on one of the four outer sectors and work all the worlds towards rebellion without actually triggering one. You had to make sure that when you did trigger the uprising, the domino effect would spread the call to rise to other worlds without you having to do anything. As the Imperial player, you need to crush these insignificant worms before they can do just that. Harder than it looks.
SPI took this track with another of their great games, Swords and Sorcery. As the name suggests, this game is set in a totally cliched fantasy setting, with even more puns and industry in-jokes. Not quite as fun as Freedom, but still playable.
I'm thinking about this game, and its character cards, because since I've dropped my NaNoWriMo project after what I learned from my psychologist, I've turned back to planning a Traveller game. Yes, again. Trust me.
I want to do my Finders, Inc. game. The players are contractors for a corporation that finds things for a fee. Starships skipping on their bank loans, missing heirs, a rare book last seen in a museum shortly before the Sword Worlds landed troops . . . that kind of thing. It's great for an episodic game, as each mission is self-contained while giving hints of a larger arc.
The setting will be Glisten March and the surrounding areas in the Spinward Marches sector. Yes, I'm not using subsector, it annoys me. Besides, Exarchos sounds so much better than Duke, don't you agree? I'm trying to find a good list of all the Freedom in the Galaxy character cards (or a set of the cards themselves) because they'd make awesome NPCs. Emperor Coreguya becomes Exarchos Coreguya, Kephalē Glisten. I can use the existing character structures in the game to build a nice web of intrigue for the characters to get caught up in. Nothing like palace politics in a backwater province to spice up life!
But yeah, working on my setting and game gives me something to that I can cut into small pieces. Which is good for me right now. I'm going to spend some time really reading the Mongoose Traveller book (which I still call Rikki Tikki Traveller for obscure reasons, ask if you're interested) and begin doing text details of the systems, first in Glisten and then District 268.
Hopefully, I'll have something ready to run by next March. I'm taking this slow and not over-promising. Who knows, maybe the characters really will fight for freedom in the galaxy!
