More and more I find myself much more interested in interesting settings than in new rules systems. I'm generally happy with the OSR and related rules systems. They do what I like, in ways I like, but that doesn't stop me from looking at other rules systems to steal ideas from.
I picked up Star Thugs at a used book store for cheap. Cover price is $17.95, and I'm pretty sure I paid $5. The PDF is currently $6.40 It's an interesting game, mechanically, drawing a lot of inspiration from collectable trading card games, with actions tapping your characters when they do their things. Each player runs their own ship, and its entire crew. The captain is the player's main character, but when it comes to actions, having a larger and more diverse crew means you can do more.Plus you can, though various means, have additional ships under your command. Because everyone is running their own ships and crew, this seems like it could get kind of cumbersome to RP everyone. In some ways this feels more like a board game, or a CCG than a traditional RPG.
Resolution mechanics are on the simple side, with a single 1d12 roll rolling equal to or above the target difficulty. If you have a skill in whatever it is you're trying, and you roll equal to or under that skill, you get to roll again and add both together to try to hit the target number.
The setting of Star Thugs is our own galaxy, and set today. There's a solid chunk of the book that describes the local sectors around Earth. Major planets/systems get write-ups of varying length. Like many sci-fi games, planets are generally looked at as homogeneous entities. It's hard to avoid when each one only gets a couple paragraphs. It also feels like a lot of these planets and systems were based on a 14 year old boy's ideas.
This just feels unnecessary.
Overall I enjoyed reading this book, but it does have a couple of flaws that really bugged me the longer it went on. The book is almost entirely written with an in universe narrator. While I enjoy some of that, I much prefer it when those in universe bits are flavoring, rather than the meat of the book. I also kinda hate the layout. The font is a little on the small and cramped side, and the non-spaceship art is all uniformly bad (see above).
Where Star Thugs really shines though is their random tables for character background and random mission generation. These few pages alone might be worth the (highly discounted) cost of entry.
Cripes, I had no idea there was even a vestige of GhazPORK Industrial still in existence. I never bought this thing - the advertising was off-putting, to put it mildly - but dabbled in that Dying Lights card game on DTRPG a little bit. It wasn't great even back in 2004-2005 (which is when I thought they'd vanished for good) but there's never been all that many starship combat-focused card games out there so I tended to try whatever did showed up. Their old site seems to be utterly gone, but I have dim memories of it being as childishly tacky as Planet Pornocon there suggests - which was odd, because Dying Lights didn't have that vibe at all.
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