 January 28, 2025 - 12:26pm | Where to begin...? Like I said on the front page for this project, I pretty much went into this blind to any larger lore or SF community that exists/existed... I played in high school and only ever had the Alpha Dawn, Knight Hawks, and Zeb's Guide books (plus the Bugs in the System module), so any 'world' info to be gleaned from other modules never made it me. I'm kind of glad of that now, because although (so far at least) no one else in the whole universe is aware of what I came up with, *I* at least really like what I came up with, and it's weird and different from what I've since found has been out there for a long time. It's definitely its own thing, separate from the established stuff, not for everyone—I'm good with that. I'm a DIY'er and like putting my own spin on stuff (and it turns out a few of the ideas I planned to incorporate had already been done once I found Star Frontiersman issues out there—we'll get to that). :) So! I started with just the AD & KH books (I mostly disregarded the ZG stuff—sorry fans, I never really glommed onto that book—but I did reference it for more data about sytems/planets as well as better info about stars). I was kinda surprised at how little world-building was built-in, but I guess I'm now used to decades' worth of deep lore with Trek/Wars/etc..., so it seemed...skimpy. Not really a complaint though, as it was also a wide-open field full of flammable material for my arsonist imagination to go wild in, with enough seeds to get me thinking about things but not so many walls to box me in. One thing I tried to do from the outset was make the aliens just a little MORE alien, so I tinkered with the descriptions/depictions...My Yazirians have four fingers, not five for example... They were just too much like humans so I looked for little things to make them more distinct. Another kind of minor (at least at the start) goal was to utilize some resources I had laying around for a LONG time...really good illustrations of the Eagle transporter from Space: 1999 (as well as plans for Moonbase Alpha) made me want to use Eagles in some way ('Frontiersman beat me to THAT! 'Great minds' and all that, I guess!), and use the layout of Alpha as a place my players would visit on some adventure (not as MBA, but some spaceport). I had planned to use the old-school TOS Star Trek hand phasers as examples of what a particular model of electrostunner looks like. This ended up snowballing into a desire to start mixing in ALL the sci-fi I love wherever it would fit (this might end up being a whole other topic—man, I had PLANS!). X-Wings? IN (drastically underpowered from what you would see in the SW universe mind you, they'd be pretty Knight Hawksy). Pulse rifles from Aliens? AGAIN, Star Frontiersman got there first, but my implementation was going to be pretty different. I really loved the hard sci-fi underpinnings that the game has, but I was absolutely going to splash a coat of my favorite space opera/action-adventure sci-fi over the top of it. More on all of that later I guess! My theme kind of ended up being 'The 80s in Space' which I guess is just a reflection of when I grew up and the stuff that I love. I used a lot of color and there are just a metric shit ton of referenced (stolen!) material from the era baked in to the whole thing. With each species I really wanted to home in on sensory differences but didnt QUITE get all the way there... Another big difference between the 'Beta Dusk' (that's total Dralasite humor, by the way...wasn't quite Alpha Dawn so what would come after...? A goofy joke) setting and 'standard' SF is that my timeline is WAY condensed... The ZG timeline has things happening over HUNDREDS of years and for me that felt way to long...technology advances too quickly. So in my setting, the Great Meeting happened maybe 120-150 years earlier, the Sathar invasion started around 45 earlier, lasted around 10 HARD years, and then there was a 5 year period of desolation followed by explosive regrowth, leading to a present time about as far removed from the war as the mid 80s were from Vietnam. My frontierfolk just build FAST I guess. :) My original plan for the document was to do mostly original art, but that blew up pretty quickly. I put it together in about a month...there just wasn't time. So I scanned from the books and colored/modified in Photoshop, i used a ton of stock art that I chopped & screwed however I felt like, and I stole whatever I wanted from Google image searches... There is a bunch of original stuff in there, but none of it is identified or credited. As this wasn't ever really intended for any level of public dissemination, I didn't feel bad at all at the time of making. Now it's a bit weird, I guess. I'm happy to report that from the get-go I DID (in a weird way) credit the original artist(s) of the David Bowie image I used (THAT's also another story I guess LOL). |
January 30, 2025 - 4:56pm | I guess a breakdown of the doc might be in order... TOC is self-explanatory (I would hope!). Art on the left is pulled from an old USS Enterprise Officer's Manual (top) and Moonbase Alpha technical notebook (bottom). Art on the right is made from these fantastic 2009 International Year of Astronomy posters that I turned into travel posters for different systems on the map... 'History' is pulled pretty much straight from Alpha Dawn (with some minor edits). The header art contains an image from the Arecibo message, which I felt tied in nicely to the whole Great Meeting theme. 'Species' covers the four AD player races + Sathar. I wanted the title page to have that lineup image to give a better sense of scale between species than I feel like you ever really get in the book art (they always make Vrusk seem HUGE, but going by the listed size, what you see in the lineup is what you get—they seem kinda small, actually!). The header image was meant to imply various alien equivalents to our DNA. And my 'not all Jawas are scavengers' note was meant to indicate that the stuff I was presenting for each species isn't meant to be the be-all-end-all for each, that just like HERE, there would be HUGE cultural variety among each species—these were just slices of a much larger pie. It was also supposed to let the player know that I'm presenting some ideas that I've come up with, but that those aren't the extent of what's possible—if they had a concept in mind for a character background related to a species different from what I had developed, theirs would just be an example of one of those other cultures. Info pulled from AD, straight-from in some areas, heavily edited in others. I REALLY wanted to get the players focused in on the differences in perception between species and leaned in hard on visual (I guess since I'm a visual person), but I wanted to go back and do a full profile on each that REALLY REALLY fleshed out those ideas more and across the other senses as well. Art pulled from AD and colorized/modified (except humans because what I found worked better, I felt) with additional art to provide atmosphere or imply additional information. I was going for a Hitchhiker's Guide vibe, that if you were looking at the 'real' version, this info/imagery would be animated/scrolling/clickable... For the Sathar profile I wanted the players to feel like they were getting a glimpse at classified info and DIDN'T want them aware of the special abilities, so I redacted most of the info to give it that FBI file feel. :) 'The Frontier (the place)' is just a companion to the Sector map with (mostly) the AD map plus some ZG details. Header image depicting a map grid. 'The Frontier (the people)' was kind of a catch-all page to address a bunch of stuff... Why no homeworld info? Because the homeworlds are all old news, man! The Frontier is where everything is happening! And hey, most people are pretty cool...but a lot of people aren't. When the original book talked about the 'nicknames' for the species they're ALL from a human perspective which I thought was pretty thin. So I figured if we're going to have to deal with racists in the game, let's spread the wealth and come up with what the OTHER species' racist nicknames might be (but Dralasites aren't racist! BUT I used Dralasites specifically in my example of potential racist encounter! Just trying to show it's wide, crazy galaxy). I hadn't developed much on the actual UPF govt OR Star Law, so left them both vague, then found a trove of info online and found that the creators had pretty much gone the same route I had planned (that the govt pretty much exists to keep up the military and that local systems pretty much control themselves—felt RIGHT LOL). Also provided a lot better variety for adventure ideas as I could do whatever I wanted on whatever planet to keep things interesting! Header image showing generic icons for the four species to imply a vast populace. 'Military' got three pages, but not a terrible amount of development actually (at least that made it to the page—got a ton of material in my head. I wasn't sure if the players would want to go a military-style campaign route, so I didn't want to go too far in that direction. The header image is the generic emblem for the UPF Military services, which was itself an outgrowth of the UPF shield seen in the background on the History page. It's meant to be a nod to the UFP flag from Trek and shows the settled systems of the Frontier sector with Prenglar at the center. ;) The Marines got the most internal development (and yes, that's the Trans Am firebird, and there's absolutely a reason I went that way—partly it's that '80s in Space' theme but there's more to it than that. There's a whole backstory with characters and an explanation for why their logo is, let's say an 'homage' rather than 'ripoff' of the USMC emblem... ;) I was really looking forward to designing the uniforms (especially dress uniforms—they were going to be crazy). 'Spaceflight' was meant to explain space travel in SF to people used to Star Trek. I absolutely LOVE SF's system, despite its inconsistencies... I love that they don't have artificial gravity (except accel/spin) and that it takes days to get anywhere. The low-techiness of it all is beautiful. Header image with a retro-style rocket. 'Technology' is just a basic overview of the stuff that's in the book. Again, going for that HHGTTG feel, everything throughout the doc in purple text is meant to look like a clickable link that would take you to more detailed info on whatever subject. Header image showing gears and drafting lines to imply ingenuity and engineering. 'PanGal' was my excuse to come up with text that I could use in images that LOOKS weird/sci-fi/alien but is actually somewhat easy to pick up... It's the written version of the Pan-Galactic language from the book (I shortened it, as I gather a bunch of others do as well—it seems reasonable that that's what people would call it). The faux Coke logo is another nod to that '80s in Space' feel as well as a demo of the alien-but-familiar I was going for. The header image goes from hieroglyphs to Greek letters, to our alphabet, evoking the Rosetta stone. 'Visual Communication' serves a two? three-fold? purpose: First it's a nod to Ron Cobb's Semiotic Standard designs from ALIEN. Second I wanted to get back to that perceptual difference idea and hit the players with it AGAIN. Red is OUR emergency color, but when a quarter of your population can't see red, that doesn't work, so that's going to change how EVERYTHING looks...signs, lighting on ships, advertising... So Blue/Yellow became my setting's emergency colors. That concept led me directly into the third purpose... Skull & Crossbones is a great danger symbol for humans, but Dralasites don't have skulls... So symbology would need to be standardized to be cross-species friendly. Header image showing signage icons. 'Help Wanted' was meant a suggestion for 'here are some of the kinds of things your characters might get into, in case you haven't already got something in mind.' The header image depicts my setting's symbol for the Credit. 'Frontier Trivia' was all atmosphere/humor. Header image looks like on ON/OFF button, but was intended to be an 'i' inside a circle, for 'info' :) The writeup on Admiral Morgaine is a bit of history and a bit of my weird sense of humor again (any Flight of the Conchords fans out there? Bowie's in Space!). SLR Dramune is more of that '80s in Space' flavor [ship art is some AI dreck stolen from Google search, background is a heavily modified stock image, characters are (Yaz F) scanned from the AD book and (Dral) from a SF wiki page. A note about Dralasite art: I tend to really dislike most of it, even from the books, because it fails at capturing what Dralasites ARE. They're always drawn WAY too humanoid—even when they've got the extra arms/legs. This one worked for me because I could easily see some holovid producer telling the Dralasite actor to 'go more Humanoid' to appeal to a broader audience :)] The Transmat 'urban rumor' was a two-fold bit: one to explain to Trek people why there aren't transporters, and two to publicly air my long-held view that every time you see someone beam anywhere on ST, you see an original die and clone/copy walk off the transporter pad. :) Back cover is a mishmash of what I imagine an astrogator's HUD to look like right before hitting the Void and some cool SW iconography for atmosphere + a little nod to Cowboy Bebop, which has a lot of the right feel for SF to me in a lot of ways. Just a way of suggesting to the players that I was going to be mixing in some disparate elements to see what I could come up with. |
