The Sci-Fi Kitchen Sink Setting

Don't ask why. Ask why not.

There has never been a successful RPG that has done for science fiction what Dungeons & Dragons has done for fantasy.

Already, I'm sure there are hundreds of hands running to keyboards to tell me I'm wrong. Surely I can't believe that - there are all kinds of successful sci-fi RPGs out there. What about Traveler, which has a history almost as long as D&D's own? What about games like Spelljammer and Starfinder, which build off D&D's rules to facilitate space adventures? Star Frontiers was being published by TSR at the same time they were publishing D&D; surely that counts. There's all manner of RPGs based on existing sci-fi properties, like Star Wars or Warhammer 40,000. And if we step outside the space opera subgenre that's dominated this conversation so far, we'd be remiss to forget Cyberpunk and Shadowrun. Science fiction surely has as much support as fantasy does in the TRPG landscape!

And that statement is absolutely correct! However, that isn't the point I'm making. I don't mean to say that there has never been a successful sci-fi RPG. I'm saying there has never been a successful sci-fi D&D.

All the games I just listed, to some degree or another, have their own defined tone, look, and feel. They all have a setting they're either built around or heavily associated with. They're geared toward playing a specific kind of sci-fi. Most RPGs are like that - D&D, despite being the oldest and most popular of them all, is somewhat of an outlier in that it doesn't try to emulate a specific subgenre of fantasy.

Much has been made about the "kitchen sink" nature of a typical D&D campaign. If you asked what kind of fantasy D&D is, the answer would be "yes." It combines Tolkienian elves, dwarves, halflings, and orcs with the barbarians of the Hyborian Age, monsters from myth and legend, Hammer Horror vampires and werewolves, Lovecraftian elder gods, and even some original creations. That's been tempered somewhat in recent years, as Wizards of the Coast has tried to lock down a canon for the game, and while I understand why that is - they're part of Hasbro now, and a game about an entire multifaceted genre doesn't do well to attract investors or establish a brand identity - I can't help but feel it's lost something. To me, D&D is at its best when it's a game that can cater to and accomodate pretty much everything under the fantasy umbrella, allowing DMs to create their own fantasy worlds with whatever colors of the genre's broad spectrum they choose.

Science fiction has long been viewed as fantasy's sister genre, but it doesn't have anything like that. And I've always found that curious. Really, there's not much of a difference between expecting every high fantasy setting to include elves and expecting every space opera setting to include Wookiees. Both races were created as something specific and idiosyncratic to a seminal work in their respective genre, but one expectation is normalized, and the other sounds completely insane.

Part of it might be because of copyright laws. Tolkien, after all, was building off of a long tradition of mythology and folklore. He might have codified the ways we view elves and dwarves, but no one owns elves and dwarves, as a concept. Meanwhile, most of the classic sci-fi races were created out of whole cloth in living memory, and are protected by large and litigious corporations. Gygax faced legal trouble with hobbits and balrogs, after all. But, on the flip side, he was able to get away with basically using them as-is once he changed their names, and no one stopped him. No one in sci-fi has even tried that.

It could also simply be the fact that D&D was the first of its kind. When it came out there was no real precedent for what a roleplaying game was supposed to be, and TSR was allowed to make their genre as broad and as open-ended as "fantasy," with no further qualifiers, without anyone telling them not to. So too, it was a game made by and for fans of the fantasy genre, not by any large-scale corporation, so it's understandable that the people behind the game would want to make something to capture the magic of their favorite stories instead of trying to stand on its own within its genre as a product that could itself be marketed for its background lore, as later games would do.

I can't help but wonder, if D&D was made today, assuming the TRPG landscape was otherwise identical, would there still be elves, dwarves, and halflings, or would it just be dragonborn, tieflings, and kenku? Many have noted a greater trend toward players wanting to use D&D original races instead of those grounded in Tolkien, but I have to ask if that's truly just a player thing, or if it's what Wizards wants - after all, they can establish dragonborn as their thing. They can't do that for dwarves. And we were getting setting-specific RPGs as early on as Empire of the Petal Throne. Sci-fi RPGs, then, had to enter a world where merely being a sci-fi RPG wouldn't set them apart. They needed to create their universe from the ground up, and be RPGs about playing in that setting, not just in a sci-fi setting.

Now, you'll notice the qualifiers I used. I said that no successful RPG has pulled off a sci-fi kitchen sink setting like this. That was on purpose, because there have been attempts. Grognardia, which has a very good article on this very subject, reviewed 1980's Space Opera, an RPG by Fantasy Games Unlimited that probably came closest out of any published RPG to what I'm positing here. To pull a direct quote, "this is a game where Flash Gordon, Chewbacca, Ming the Merciless, Barbarella, and assorted aliens can meet in a cantina and go adventuring among the stars without the petty concerns of rhyme or reason." Alas, Space Opera was burdened with an incoherent ruleset and the shadow of Traveler, and never caught on.

But I also want to talk about something outside the scope of TRPGs. I want to talk about Star Schlock.

Star Schlock is a skirmish wargame by Wunkay Games that's seen steady releases for the last few years, with both rules and an official miniatures range. It's themed around science fiction cinema and TV from the late 60s to the early 80s. I don't have much interest in the game itself, but as someone who's been steadily getting back into miniatures, and as someone who's always been interested in retrofuturism - and in particular, the cassette futurism movement of that era - it scratches an itch for me, and I've picked up several of the minis for my collection.

But even if I might not ever play the game, I'm fascinated by Star Schlock's setting. The developers have made no attempt to hide its origins. Their ranges all draw heavy inspiration from assorted source material. The two armies included in the starter set are the Explorer Corps, an agency of scientists and explorers charting the final frontier led by "Captain Timothy J. Curt," and the Simian Star Kingdom, a brutal regime of ape despots and their oppressed human slaves led by "Dr. Zayce." Other factions include the Eternal Empire and its faceless, white-armored "Dronetroopers," the zombie plague of the Necronauts, and the Viper Legion, a ruthless terrorist organization led by a megalomaniacal masked commander. There are stat profiles for lawyer-friendly versions of Boba Fett, Buck Rogers, Robbie the Robot, and even Ro-Man from Robot Monster. To my delight, the cuts run so deep that there's an entire faction that seems to be based on the concept art from Alejandro Jodorowsky's aborted Dune adaptation, complete with a miniature of Salvador Dali as the Emperor of the Known Universe.

It's a game that unabashedly started as an exercise to mash up forces from different sci-fi universes and find out who would win. But in order to justify that, the game has spun a setting with surprisingly deep and extensive lore that places these different factions in the same universe - and it works. The starter set includes a "Galaxy Guide" devoted entirely to background information, and the official Schlocklog magazine publishes enough articles on the setting that I've found them an engaging read even when I have no plans to play the actual game.

This, to me, is what a setting that does for science fiction what D&D has done for fantasy would really look like. And I'd argue that it's a setting that would work very well for roleplaying. There's enough background material out there for a prospective DM to get started on a campaign, with a number of distinct factions and power players; there's even been multiple planets that have gotten their own dedicated writeups in the pages of Schlocklog. So too, the mix-and-match nature of the setting makes it easy for newcomers to get in - chances are they'll be familiar with the series these factions were drawn from, and can come to the table with their understanding of what they can expect from them, no expodumps needed. It might have been written for a wargame, but the information would be just as applicable, and just as useful, for a TRPG.

Am I asking for an official Star Schlock RPG some day? Not necessarily - though it would be cool. But I do think what's there could prove just as useful to DMs as it could to wargamers. It would be a good fit for Retrostar, an RPG designed to emulate science fiction film and television of the same era, if one wanted to lean into the genre conventions (the system even puts a limit on how many actions can be made per session to ensure "episodes" fit into a 30-to-60-minute timeslot). But if one didn't want to go such a meta route, I'd argue that you could grab a sci-fi ruleset of your choice, use the Galaxy Guide and Schlocklog as your campaign setting, and be good to go.