mithriltabby | Mindjammer: Starblazer Adventures in the Second Age of Space ★★★★½ (Reply)

Mindjammer is the first published setting for Starblazer Adventures. The setting is a mature transhuman civilization more reminiscent of Greg Bear’s Eon than the darker, more Ken MacLeodish world of Eclipse Phase. With a coherent setting to wrap the book around and more editorial restraint with the art from the comics, this book is much tighter than the Starblazer Adventures tome.

This setting does a good job of fleshing out the fairly abbreviated system in SA for detailing planets, and introduces a system for representing entire cultures and their conflicts, all in keeping with the “Fate Fractal”. With the provided twenty-odd planets for examples, a gamemaster needing to flesh out a cluster of star systems could easily hit the Planet Index on the Mass Effect wiki and keep players occupied for many adventures before having to resort to a planet generator like StarGen. (The sample planets are detailed using Campaign Cartographer and Bill Roach’s Terraformer accessory package for Fractal Terrains Pro; those look like lovely tools for anyone needing detailed maps.)