Starport Scum - mini-review

Starport Scum  is a skirmish wargame err, solo, coop, it's an RPG... I swear. Okay, so maybe labels aren't so important.

A quick rundown:

• It's a "tabletop game of fierce space adventure, space pirates and salvage crews looking for the next big break."
• It's a narrative RPG, that uses tags to define abilities (it is classless).
• It also happens to be a miniatures wargame (it's one or the other, and both at the same time).
• It's very lightweight rules-wise, and is easy to run.
• It is designed with Coop/Solo play in mind, and can be played without a GM (however, having a GM definitely enhances play).
• It has rules for playing without miniatures (or you could use printed paper standees, tokens, or whatever you have, if full-blown minis aren't your thing).
• It has many supplements with optional rules (like adding Fate points, social interaction as combat, more gear, vehicle rules, and Faction turns), and is very DIY friendly.
• There is progression, and gear, and is designed around investing in your characters over extended campaigns.
• There is also rules for "goons", which are expendable nobodies that the players can control, and can level up and get better gear (if they survive).
• It can be played with an "X-Com" feel to it, with a stable of characters that you level and gear up, that can be rotated out to let them recover from injuries.
• It has lots and lots of random tables to roll on, either as inspiration, or as a sort of GM replacement.

It's an interesting sort of game. It has the fast wargamey feel of Savage Worlds, the freeform narrative tags of something like Lady Blackbird or Fate, and has a simple DIY feel of OSR. It does all this without feeling like they simply copy pasted from these different games, and actually feels like it's own thing.

The author is very active and helpful on social media, and is constantly creating new material (sadly, not as much for Starport Scum anymore, though he's mentioned doing more in the future).

There is also a fantasy version of it called Dungeon Scum. It's the same core system, designed for fantasy, with a very interesting system for magic. It's fully compatible with Starport Scum. I used this and a hack of "How to Host a Dungeon" to run a tribes of monsters fighting over dungeon territory campaign.