 August 20, 2012 - 7:00pm | StarFrontiersman #18 is up and we would like your feedback. New stuff awaits your viewing. http://starfrontiersman.com/downloads/starfrontiersman |
 August 22, 2012 - 4:29pm | The Santa Maria ship image/stats seem disconnected from anything else. Maybe a headline ('Ship Spotlight'?) with the image and a short description of what it's doing there?
Good point FC. I was trying to eat up some white-space. If only Shadow got me those KH stats, I could have dedicated more layout time. Alas, that 'ole yazirian was probably curled up high in a tree with a bottle of ponjo.  |
 August 22, 2012 - 8:27pm | The interview with Zeb so great and I didn't notice the rest of the magazine; I'll have to get back to you on the new format. Much thanks to whomever scored the interview, it is much appreciated. There being no plans for the home worlds did not surprise me; the whole frontier seems like it was staged to specifically avoid dealing with homeworlds. I agree with Zeb's decision on that. What totally shocked me was the Sathar as a playable race. It does make sense once you know the frontier was just a sample universe. Something I'm curious about, was Mr. Cook unable or unwilling to tell us more about the development of Star Frontiers, or did the interviewer change the subjects in order to get all his topics in? |
 August 22, 2012 - 10:02pm | Thanks for the compliments on the interview. I had 3 goals because I wanted to avoid coming off like one interviewer i read while doing research for this. That interviewer basically said something I interpreted with a surfer dude voice in my head as "So you worked at TSR, how cool was that man?" i really wanted to avoid that so I did a lot of research on him by internet and thought through my quesitons and out line. I was also aware that he had been unceremoniously pulled from development on SF and that it was given to another team with no further imput from him so I suspected there was some hard feeling lingering there and figured I should tread lightly. So I wrote out everything and out lined it and figured I'd hit the biggest points i could that get debated and see what he'd say, if he'd shed any light. but I also figured that since his impact on role playing games is so much bigger than just Star Frontiers I should pick his brains on that and since Larry and I were in fairly continuous conversation about game development and module development at that time. I figured it would be good in general to try to get him to talk about those things so even if someone reads the Sfman for ideas but doesn't really play the game they would get value from that and it would enhance the SFman's value to the wider readership that dont really participate in these forums. Then there had been a few recent deaths among the founding fathers of the RPG industry prior to me making contact with Mr Cook such that I figured that I might only get one shot at him so I best get a story about Gygax out of him if I could and while I didn't get a funny story what he said about Gary running games and that fun was the most important thing really resonated for me. One question left out of the printed interview that I did ask was, "Would you consider writing something for the game for the SFman?" and his answer was we'll see. i think in light of his other answers the real answer was no but he was being polite and I didn't think I should print that last question and answer. Personally i think that he shed as much light on the game as he could and the revelation about the sathar being intended as a PC race was actually made 10 years ago in an interview that one of the organizers of a SFcon got from the guy that worked with Zeb on the initial development of SF. So when I read it I was so excited that I had a major scoop as it were but truth be told it was revealed at a con about 10 years ago. Except now its in print so in a way I did get the scoop. The method of the interview was by email. I wrote it and sent it to him and he wrote his answers and mailed it back. After reviewing his answers I emailed him one further question to which he responded and that was incorporated into the printed interview. I happened to have seen an interview of that old chick on The View who has done all those interviews of famous people (just cant remember her name) and since I had been a year book editor i paid attention to what she said about doing interviews and still had that random trivia floating in my head when it came time to write this one. it was my first interview and it would have sucked eggs if i hadn't seen the interview of what ever her name was. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
August 24, 2012 - 5:56pm | @ Shadow, To answer about the amount of content. I have enough to make several more issues. Just have to juggle things to keep the page count around 86. Things have to be edited and always like to put art into things. I have a couple of your ships going into 19. Sometimes things get bumped so that there is a variety of articles too. If you want to see something let me know and we can work something out? That goes for everyone who has submitted something too. Anyone have questions, just email me @ wdouglass1970@gmail.com and I will be happy to discuss things with you. |
 August 24, 2012 - 6:20pm | Okay I was just curious, as some issues have more pages than others...I was just wondering if each issue was based on the submissions received --- meaning if you receive X submissions you have X2 pages or Y submissions you have Y2 pages. |
August 24, 2012 - 7:10pm | Imagine Karxan as a dralasite sitting on a stool. No legs, grows multiple arms to juggle articles.  |
 August 24, 2012 - 7:51pm | Printed and played Salvage Ops with the kids. They then took it to the basement to play another round. I call that a success.  One of my 12 year old twins was winning, 85 points, and had left the ship on the last round. The rest of us were still trying to gather points to try to catch him and there were two techs still in the mix. Then we pulled a second cybodragon which killed everyone but me. And of course I was the guy with only 22 total points to try to catch him. I found the two techs and enough of the salvage points to be at a total of 78. And then we drew a second Autoturrets and I died.  Bill sent me some images he did for the backs that there wasn't room to fit into the magazine. I built them into pages and printed onto the back of my cards so they were double on the salvage points and had a non-blank face on the back for the others. I'll zip them up and put them in the Star Frontiersman download section and provide a link. They're on a different computer that I'll need to grab them off of. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
August 25, 2012 - 8:28am | @jedion Your reasoning seems sound to me. The interview was as professional as any. Before reading this I was not aware of the circumstances surrounding the release of SF; I knew there had been a rewrite, but I thought it had been handled by the same team. What I consider to be Mr. Cook's greatest game achievement is Moldvay-Cook aka B/X D&D. The similarities between that game and SF are so striking that I thought Zeb had a larger role in SF. I consider Zeb to be one of the all time great game designers, so it was a real treat to read this interview. |
 August 25, 2012 - 9:35am | Glad to hear you and your kids enjoyed it! I played with my brother-in-law (Jim) and my wife (Stephanie) again last night and continue to enjoy it. We had a situation where there were 2 artifacts on the table and one was Jim's color and the other Stephanie's color. All of us wanted those artifacts - either Steph or Jim would have nabbed 30 points if they left the ship alone. But that was the rub - they both wanted it badly. They talked back and forth forever trying to figure out if the other person was going to return to their ship. In the end, both returned to ship and left the artifacts there. I was all alone and SHOULD have left the ship and grabbed the easy 20 salvage points but I was too greedy and stayed for one more and was killed by autoturrets. GRR! 3. We wear sungoggles during the day. Not because the sun affects our
vision, but when you're cool like us the sun shines all the time. |
August 28, 2012 - 7:55am | Jedion, dittos on the interview. It was golden. Thanks for your hard work and professionalism on it. And Sathar as a PC race? Can you say “Ferengi meets Klingon in worms clothing”?  |
