White Star and What's To Come

Breaking The Silence on My Most Popular Game

White Star: White Box Science Fiction Roleplaying is the single most popular product ever published by Barrel Rider Games. Next year will mark the 10th anniversary since it was first published and even after all that time, it still remains the most consistent seller I’ve ever published. I’m very proud of White Star and love how the community at large embraced the game and made it their own.

But over and over again, especially in the past few years I keep hearing variations on the same question: “What’s the future of White Star?” I’ve deftly dodged the question for a long, long time. My focus was on other projects, whether they be Barrel Rider Games products or freelance opportunities or obligations totally unrelated to my career as a game designer.

In short: A new edition of White Star is in development.

When it will be released and other details will be released as they become available. In short, it’ll be ready when it’s ready. I’m about three-quarters of the way through drafting the game. Then it’ll go through play testing, editing, art, and layout. In short, it’ll be ready when it’s ready. The tentative title is White Star: Destiny - but even that could change as development continues. But before I start talking about the new edition of White Star and what it is going to be, I wanted to talk about the origins of the original White Star: White Box Science Fiction Roleplaying and how that game evolved.

White Star began life as a 28-page mini supplement for Swords and Wizardry White Box. I had originally written it with the intent of it adding sci-fi flourishes to S&W WB that would allow Referees and Players to add elements akin to campaign settings I loved to their White Box games. Settings like Spelljammer and Dragon Star. But as the writing continued, the product grew and eventually, I realized White Star was better served as a stand alone game. Also, I’d be remiss if part of the reason I began writing White Star is that ever since becoming a professional roleplaying game author and designer I dreamed of contributing to an official Star Wars roleplaying game product and at the time it seemed like that path was closed to me. So, White Star became my love letter to all the things I loved about Star Wars. It wasn’t a Star Wars game specifically, but I included the things I loved about a galaxy far, far away in its DNA. I didn’t want it to be Star Wars, but I wanted it to make me feel the way I felt when I was five years old watching Star Wars on Beta Max on my living room floor.

Did I succeed? Well, in all honesty, I don’t think I did.

You see, one of my key design principles when I was writing White Star back in 2015 was that I make it 100% seamlessly compatible with White Box. That meant compromising narrative flavor for mechanical verisimilitude. I assumed the vast majority of my audience kind enough to purchase White Star would be mashing it up with their vintage fantasy games and I wanted to make that as easy as possible.

Within a year of its release, I realized that’s not what people were doing. They were taking White Star on its own and going on off in fantastic new directions with it. Third party products like Star Sailors, Graveyard at Lus, Between Star & Void, and Five Year Mission were build on the foundation of White Star and (at least implicitly) excluded integration with White Box.

I was blown away by all of it. White Star’s success, the way it was embraced by the community, the sheer unbridled creativity that came out of third party publishers. In response, I returned to the rules set and began to revise it. Instead of looking solely to that beloved film that kept a sickly child dreaming in the early 1980s, I embraced the myriad of sci-fi that I’d grown to love over the decade and what came from that was White Star: Galaxy Edition.

In hindsight, I think Galaxy Edition goes too far. It’s almost 400 pages long and includes everything from every sub-genre of sci-fi that I love. Computer hacking inspired by the works of William Gibson, Mecha rules inspired by the likes of Macross Plus and Transformers, and more options than you could possibly use in a single campaign. With Galaxy Edition, it became less a game serving as a love letter and more a list of things I love. It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one I think.

The lessons I learned from White Star and from Galaxy Edition very much inform White Star: Destiny. You see, I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I wrote the original White Star: White Box Science Fiction Roleplaying in less than six weeks - from blank page to completed draft. All while raising a special needs toddler and working a full time day job. I wrote it at my kitchen table and the entire time I was writing it I had a framed print of Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art hanging above my laptop. His concept art and my childhood love are the foundation of White Star. Its creation was the kind of obsession only found in young love and unbridled romanticism. And I’m still very, very much in love with White Star.

White Star: Destiny will not cling dogmatically to the limits of White Box. Instead, it will use them as a chassis to build a game that emulates heroic space opera roleplaying that I love so much. It will include many foundational elements found in vintage fantasy and anyone who’s played the classic fantasy roleplaying games of the 1970s and 80s will feel right at home. But this time, you’ll have the opportunity to play a real hero. Someone who won’t just be dispatched by a bad roll or two on an unlucky night. This time around, you’ll have the opportunity to embrace your destiny.

Still very much inspired by the Star Wars I fell in love with as a child, I went back to those McQuarrie paintings. But I also went back to the classic tie-in Marvel Comics of the 1970s and 1980s. I went back to the stories by Archie Goodwin. I went back to the NRP Radio Dramas featuring the voices of Perry King and Brock Peters. I went back to a time when that universe dared us to ask what lay just beyond the jump to hyperspace. When we didn’t know all the things we know now. When words like “canon” didn’t mean so much, and the galaxy was still light, and free, and fun. God, I love those days.

The thing is, when you make a roleplaying game, you implicitly ask those questions. What’s next? Where do we go from here? You constantly look to the horizon and the only real answer, the only canon, is the one happening at your table, with your friends. That’s the same sense of wonder I had as a kid. I just kept asking myself what the next adventure would be. And that’s what a good roleplaying game asks after you’ve packed up your dice and walked away from the table. What’s your next adventure?