Game of Thrones crossed with Star Wars?
Sounds pretty good, right? Well, over at the Swords & Stitchery blog, a post has been made suggesting that we could combine Dark Albion with Stars Without Number.
Now, mechanically there would be no more problem doing this than with any other OSR game, but the question is how to incorporate the setting? The blog entry above takes inspiration from some weird Russian Sci-Fi and suggests that the PCs could be characters from some galactic empire who are forced to land on an primitive world (Albion's earth) and have only limited access to technology or permission to interfere.
But why not take it all the way?
Imagine if, like how Star Trek is basically a space-western, and Star Wars at least started out as a space-samurai-story, you were to combine Dark Albion and SWN to have a campaign that was the War of the Roses in space? Have the two great families struggling for the throne of a galactic kingdom, in a setting with a medieval aesthetic in the Fading Suns sense, maybe in a galaxy that was once far more advanced and now interstellar civilization is just barely holding on.
Magisters could be keepers of now only half-understood ultra-tech (nanites? quantum sorcery?) or psionics. The Clerics may be Jedi-like servants of some kind of super-advanced cosmic entity they only partially understand. The forces of chaos (frogmen, goblins, Elves, etc.) are hostile alien races in a galaxy where mankind has never found any friends.
Doesn't sound too bad, does it?
You wouldn't have to use SWN of course. You could use White Star, given how much James Spahn likes Albion; or pretty much any other sci-fi game (though a sci-fi OSR game would be best). Which system you use might alter slightly what you'd be blending into the setting, mind you, so it's still a consideration.
But yeah, stuff like this is to me part of the genius of 3rd Wave OSR thinking.
RPGPundit
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Thanks for the mention and there's nothing stopping you from going that route at all. Kinda awesome but I had a request not to use the main stay of Dark Albion's central setting namely the War of the Roses events and the focus of them. Instead, I focused on the Dark European vibe of Dark Albion & combined it with Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's 'Hard To Be A God'. The grim details of the book's settings combined with SWN & Dark Albion brought it close to the historical detail that you put into Dark Albion. Everything fit like a jig saw puzzle. The nice part of the Dark Albion setting/resource book is that its not simply a one trick pony. It can do both of these and types of campaigns including White Star and more.
ReplyDeleteGood stuff, and thanks for your original post!
DeleteThere is a sci-fi miniature wargame (with a complete miniature line) set in a similar universe (or a similarly-feeling universe):
ReplyDeletehttp://theionage.com/
cool, though I don't know if they look medieval-ish enough. They look more like a warhammer-clone to me.
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