The space opera genre may have spaceship and laser rifles, while the fantasy genre might have horses and catapults, but both genres ultimately revolve around the same core story elements of heroic journeys and clashes between good and evil. This holds particularly true for space opera RPGs like Starfinder or Ironsworn: Starforged, which take the gameplay rules of heroic fantasy RPGs like Pathfinder and transplant them effortlessly into a Star Wars-style space opera setting. Players looking for stories with laser swords, space elves, and adventuring parties with their own starship should definitively check these out!
The science fiction and fantasy genres of literature have always been joined at the hip thematically, both being concerned with creation of strange new worlds filled with wonders and perils. Golden Age science fiction authors like Poul Anderson often tried their hand at tales of fantasy like Three Heart and Three Lions, while New Wave fantasy authors like Ursula K. LeGuin, famous for her Wizard Of Earthsea saga, were equally revered for works of science fiction such as The Dispossessed or The Left Hand Of Darkness.
The Star Wars movie franchise, conceived as a love letter to the Golden Age of science fiction stories, is also effectively an homage to fantasy stories of heroes in distant ages (hence the presence of “lightsaber” energy swords, Jedi “Knights,” and the tagline “A Long Time Ago, In A Galaxy Far, Far Away…“). Following in the footsteps of Star Wars, many of the science fiction RPGs listed below, adaptations of fantasy RPG systems, are less concerned with accurately predicting the future and more concerned with the spectacle of classic science fiction sagas: clashing fleets of starships, star ports filled with strange alien travelers, and a galaxy filled with new mysteries to discover and evil to fight.
Sci-Fi RPG – Ironsworn: Starforged
Ironsworn is a heroic fantasy RPG about grim heroes who swear iron vows in a frontier land of mysteries and monsters. Ironsworn: Starforged, recently funded on Kickstarter, transplants this narrative premise of “heroes courting peril to keep their promises” to an interstellar nebula called “The Forge,” a cluster of volatile newborn stars, roving space pirates, and relics left behind by an ancient precursor civilizations.
Like the original Ironsworn RPG, Ironsworn: Starforged is designed to accommodate solo play, group play with GM, or cooperative play without a GM, giving players special rules, “oracle charts,” and storytelling guidelines to design their own starships, shape their own sci-fi settings, and craft challenges for their characters to overcome.
Sci-Fi RPG – Quest: Cosmic Fantasy
Quest: Cosmic Fantasy is an upcoming expansion to Quest, a fantasy RPG designed to be accessible for both newcomers and veterans of tabletop gaming. According to Dicebreaker, the Quest: Cosmic Fantasy expansion will be released in 2022, containing ability cards for new Character Roles, rules for designing custom starships, and item/NPC dossiers players can use to craft their own science fiction universes. The rules for Quest: Cosmic Fantasy will be completely compatible with those for the original Quest, letting a gaming group mix together fantasy and sci-fi tropes in whatever ratio they find most pleasing.
Sci-Fi RPG – Starfinder
Starfinder, a Paizo Publishing science fantasy RPG, takes place in the same universe as their Pathfinder heroic fantasy RPG system, albeit hundreds of years in the future. Instead of the single magical world of Golarion, players of Starfinder instead venture through space between scattered worlds and civilizations build around both advanced technology and magic. Familiar fantasy species such as Elves, Dwarves, and Halflings mingle with Androids, sentient insects, and Reptilian Humanoids, while the Envoy, Operative, and Solarian character classes blend Dungeons & Dragons archetypes like Rogues and Paladins with Star Wars archetypes such as Jedi or Smugglers.
Sources: Kickstarter, Dicebreaker
