Six-Shooters & Spaceships
The Six-Shooters & Spaceships sourcebook for the Serenity RPG provides plenty of what a body needs to stay alive in Joss Whedon’s space western universe: weapons, equipment and spaceships. The first half of the book, Guns & Gear, covers everything from new firearms to fresh fruit to high-tech cybernetics. The second half – Crew & Spaceships – has statistics and floorplans for the most popular ships in Serenity’s oversized solar system, as well as statblocks and biographies on the crew that keeps them flying.
The sourcebook looks to provide players and game masters with background materials to keep their games flying. It succeeds. While diehards may take issue with the introduction of cybernetics to the Firefly universe, Six-Shooters & Spaceships lives up to its title by providing plenty of solid background material for the Serenity RPG. It’s a solid purchase for anyone running the game but fans of other science fiction RPGs will find it equally useful.
I fall into the latter category. I run the occasional Serenity one-shot at conventions, but my weekly game is Star Wars. When I first flipped through the book, it was the 14-odd floor plans that immediately drew my eye. Wizards of the Coast did a decent job in providing starship floor plans in many of its Star Wars source books, but they tend to follow a similar blockish, single-level layout reminiscent of the Millennium Falcon. Keeping with the spirit of Firefly and Serenity, the ships in Six-Shooters & Spaceships are multi-deck affairs with prominent cargo holds, common areas, and cramped crew quarters.
The deck plans are perfect for anyone looking for a tramp freighter for their science fiction game, and make it worth checking out the book just for those, even if you never use a single Serenity game mechanic. The same goes for the NPC write-ups, which have enough quirks to give Mal Reynolds and the Serenity’s crew a run for their money. Need some space pirates, rival traders or local character for your game? Just flip to chapter two.
While I picked up Six-Shooters & Spaceships fully intending to loot it for my Knights of the Old Republic game, it is first and foremost a Serenity source book. Unlike Big Damn Heroes, which upgrades the Serenity RPG to the current state-of-the-Cortex-art, this book is purely supplemental. As such, it introduces a lot of mundane material not included in the Serenity core rulebook. Some might question the need for forensics kits, game boxes, smart paper and party dresses, but if anything, Firefly was about sweating the small stuff. In a universe where strawberries are a delicacy, write-ups on multi-tools, paint sets and sewing kits make sense.
There’s plenty of gear with crunchy rules as well, such as burn gel (essential when you’re cutting your way into a derelict ship), camouflage paint (perfect for getting the drop on a contact who’s about to betray you) and armored dusters (also useful when you’re about to be betrayed). There are an assortment of hand-to-hand weapons, from broken bottles to stunners to extensible swords, as well as a variety of pistols, rifles and firearm accessories like night vision and thermal scopes.
Perhaps most controversial will be the section on cybernetics, which adds a high tech feel to Firefly’s largely low-tech universe. The new rules allow players to gain a Cyber-Enhancement, which provides a +2 step bump to a single attribute. They can also take it as a major upgrade, which includes a step bump plus two new traits (one a benefit, one a complication). Specific cybernetic implants include chemical regulators (granting the Steady Calm asset), Chronometer (effectively Walking Timepiece asset) and Cybernetic Uplink (equal to the Mechanical Empathy asset).
Functionally, it allows players to acquire new benefits and drawbacks with a cybernetic justification. While I haven’t tried it in game, I expect it will work just fine. The bigger question is: does it fit your campaign? That’s one that every game master is going to have to answer for themselves, but I have to say that as a fan of the long ago Star Frontiers sourcebook Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space I was happy to see the rules in there. The technological contrast between Browncoat fringes and the civilized Alliance core tends toward the extreme; cybernetics could be a good way of reinforcing that.
There are plenty of little knickknacks and specialized tools in this book that could be helpful to have in a regular campaign, especially if you’re trying to recapture everyday life on the fringe and in the black. The real value of the book, both as a system resource and as one you’re stealing content from for other games, are the starships and NPCs.
Like Malcolm Reynold’s Serenity, all of the named ships in this book have personalities of their own, and crews that are every bit as quirky. There’s the Cantankerous, a surplus Alliance tank transport that’s been converted for freight duty by her captain, Ming-Mei Kowalski. She inherited the barely-functional heap from her recently deceased uncle. White Lightning is a freighter that doubles as a traveling salon and sneaks in a little smuggling on the side to help pay the bills. Elsewhere there’s the Rascal Puff, a freelance rescue ship that might save your bacon should your ship become disabled out in the black. And if you just need a place to kick back, relax and place a few bets, the OddEasy is for you – the former space liner was converted into a traveling prize-fight arena by streetfighter-turned-entrepreneur Jamison Merryweather
As a game master, Six-Shooters & Spaceships was well worth picking up. Players will get a little less bang for their buck; the equipment chapter is handy, but unless they’re the kind who loves to pour over floor plans for their future dream ship, this book won’t be as useful.
March 13th, 2010 at 15:03
We ran one short Serenity campaign, but after that we put the system aside. As much as I love Firefly, I just didn’t get into the campaign at all. I’m not sure why – somehow creating stories in that universe just didn’t seem that much fun.
March 14th, 2010 at 19:08
I just loved this system when I first ran it. It was quick to create for, quick to run, and had a refreshing focus on the character of the characters more so than the stats of the characters. While I did have a minor struggle with adapting to a slightly different paradigm of campaign design, I did learn a lot from running it and subsequent campaigns were structured more appropriately and thus ran much better. My players had a blast either way and really enjoyed portraying their own “big damn heroes”. The setting and system really encourages player actions that result in grand acts of heroic daring-do!
March 21st, 2010 at 13:45
I’ve only run Serenity one-shots so far, but I haven’t had any trouble brain storming ideas. From my perspective, there are plenty of stories out there to be told, starting with your standard smuggling/odd jobs/minor crimes and eventually weaving in bigger stories involving crime lords and the Alliance (in short, following a mirror arc to that of the series).
I think there are plenty of other options, drawing inspiration from Mission Impossible, The A-Team, Leverage, Alias, etc. And, of course, there are plenty of westerns out there as well.
While some of these sources of inspiration would take you far afield from the original “smugglers on a starship” premise, one of the things I loved about Serenity was that it wasn’t *just* about the space western; Whedon weaved in other genres as well, and that gives us plenty to work with. I’d love to run a campaign and see how Plot Points effect the evolution of the larger campaign; I can see how a strongly-character driven game could be a challenge to run (but a good challenge).