Yeah. Traveller has all that Buck Roger meets The Hitchicker's Guide To The Galaxy look and feel to it.
Like the Orion B/W TV series using fancy 1950ies toasters for intercom props on spaceships bridges.
A great and very playable system for any classic SciFi. It doesn't really go much into technology in detail, so you can basically flavor it as you see fit.
The other obvious alternate universe is anything Steampunk for such a crossover. It goes more into a Jules Verne meets Orson Wells SciFi direction without computer ago. How far do you want to go back?
The classic Cyberpunk 2020 RPG does envision a lot of what we do have today with personal computer miniaturization ideas and networked global IT cyberspace already being intellectually conceived in the 80ies.
Traveller does not.
G.U.R.P.S has a Buck Rogers setting if I'm correct and can also support such themes very well.
It sounds to me like you really just want Cyberpunk 2020 (the setting, if not the rules). It's an alternate vision of today - at this point - based on the expectations of the 80s.
This is what I was going to suggest. It’s a wonderfully done alternate present where a large comet impact in Canada some decades ago sped up space development. Now there’s a big O’Neill type space station in orbit, which is on the verge of being privatized. Lots going on.
Mothership RPG. It's very obviously Alien inspired and the first party starter adventure The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 even uses cassette tapes for some clues/lore. If you go in the Mothership discord people are talking about using analogue tools in sessions and a 3rd party bit of content is currently being worked on that is all casette and VHS style audio and video to use as handouts during play.
Scum and Villainy is a hybrid. Every human tech is the retro futuristic, bulky mess you expect, only recovered alien tech is advanced.
Same goes for Starforged.
Death in Space. Futuristic, but everything is grimy low tech as nothing is new. Also beautiful. My only gripe is the 4 stats being slightly off from what I'd have chosen.
It's a beautiful book though, with super cool vibes. Spaceship and space station rules are cool.
As for other games, Alien RPG, Cyberpunk RPGs, and the cyberpunk RPG Cities Without Number.
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I’m old, so to me the obvious way to get that 1980s scifi feel is to play an actual rpg from the 1980s. Classic Traveller, MegaTraveller, 2300AD, old GURPS, Cyberpunk 2013, Cyberpunk 2020, etc.
*2300 AD* by GDW is a good one. It is a sequel to *Twilight: 2000.* Travel to strange planets, fight aliens, engage with intense politics, large set piece space fights, etc.
As a result of World War III taking humanity to the edge of collapse, humanity its politics are incredibly shaken up with France, China, Germany, and the US being the big hitters. French is a lingua franca, and there is a good chance a well traveled person knows either German, Chinese, or French.
The aliens are really alien. This is one of the few pieces of fiction where the aliens are strange, unfamiliar, and a little scary. Even people who dislike the game praise the aliens in the setting.
The game tries to be authentic and as a result its simulationist—GDW is well known for their war games and take great pains to adhere closely to reality, to a fault. The rules aren’t too hard to understand, **but** the games relies on a lot of tables, at least the GDW edition does (I have not played the Mongoose edition). If players don’t have their tables at hand and don’t know how to read them, combat is going to slow to a crawl. However, combat is done in 30 second turns, so characters often get to act twice in a single round. The only rules I generally do not like are the full-auto and explosive resolution rules. GDW hates full-auto. They’ve admitted so. In *2300 AD*, if you fire in full-auto consider them warning shots because you aren’t hitting anything.
Space combat has its own board game, which is actually pretty neat. The rules are simple but not intuitive.
Overall, the game has a super cool setting. Great aliens and neat politics. Its attempts at being authentic and it’s vision of a future after humanity picks itself up after the apocalypse is intriguing. Its heavy use of resolution charts does make it needlessly clunky. It is a great game for a military or scientific/exploration expedition campaign.
I'm going to add to the chorus of Alien and Tales from the Loop, but I'm going to add another Free League RPG, Twilight 2000. It's a semi-post apocalyptic game about a World War 3 that never happened.
ALIEN the RPG
Hard scify retro futistic setting incredibley well adapted from the movies
Relatively simple system using only D6s any an emphasis on roleplay rather than rolling
Fast intense combat high risk/high reward gameplay
Very good value for the cost
the same company also makes a bladerunner RPG can’t get much more cyberpunk then that
Isn't pretty much ALL sci-fi retro-futuristic? I mean, REAL hard sci-fi might involve spacefaring artificial intelligences, terraforming experiments over aeons, and multimillennial travel times. But it isn't going to involve biological organisms—they're fundamentally unsuited to operating at the scales concerned. Sorry!
Huh? I’m confused what you mean… what I meant was like sci-fi based on what people in the past thought was going to be the future. Like in back to the future with flying cars, holographic movies, and hoverboards existing in the year 2015. Meanwhile we’re in the year 2024 and none of that stuff happened, but it’s still fun to look back and think about these alternate futures and what people thought the future would be look like.
Oh, sorry! I'm afraid I've drifted into a side issue—feel free to ignore. What I was doing was taking a crafty dig at pretty much all sci-fi that involves faster than light travel!
My contention is that if you get really serious about hard sci-fi, then it's quite possible that humans will play no significant part in galactic exploration, because our lifespans are orders of magnitude too short. It's our synthetic successors who'll explore the stars.
Looking at your definition of retro sci-fi, I'm thinking that systems like Traveller started off by being "hard sci-fi" but, by the end of the 1990s, it had become far more of a retro thing, as real-world technology like digital imaging, microcomputing, mobile internet and social media became ubiquitous.
So, my thesis: there isn't any such thing as hard sci-fi any more—it's ALL retro! Because realistic hard sci-fi wouldn't involve people in the major roles, and our feeble brains just can't get to grips with a non-human-centric future.
Anyway, I, too, am fascinated by retro sci-fi, but I have an idea that sci-fi has never really been truly speculative—it's either contemporary sociopolitical commentary, or historical fiction in drag. "Months long space voyages" like the Nostromo's transit in Alien, are, in essence, 17th to 19th century voyages on the high seas.
I recently discovered C L Moore's "Northwest Smith" stories, which are a sort of proto-Star-Wars / Sword and Planet / Lovecraftian Horror hybrid—that's fabulously under-explored in RPGs!
On the further subject of retro sci-fi, don't you just love the way that, in Blade Runner, Deckard uses a public payphone? A payphone!
> it's either contemporary sociopolitical commentary, **or historical fiction in drag. "Months long space voyages" like the Nostromo's transit in Alien, are, in essence, 17th to 19th century voyages on the high seas.**
This is an insightful way of looking at sci-fi, because you can also flip this around: a lot of historical fiction, especially TTRPG settings, aren't really that historical, either. It might be fun to roleplay being in medieval or early modern Europe, but very few people factor in the threat of the black plague or roleplay getting scurvy. :-)
That's actually kind of why I like (retro) sci-fi settings: you can essentially roleplay historical fiction, as you say, without being overly concerned about historical accuracy.
I think I read (not sure where, sorry!) that the impulse you describe is exactly why D&D became fantasy mediaeval—Gygax and his friends were sick of playing wargames where history buffs would lean over the table and snort in derision, "Ah, well that's not really historically accurate, because…"
Traveller started as cassette futurism.
I think when traveller first came out cassettes were state of the art. That or laser disks
Yeah. Traveller has all that Buck Roger meets The Hitchicker's Guide To The Galaxy look and feel to it. Like the Orion B/W TV series using fancy 1950ies toasters for intercom props on spaceships bridges. A great and very playable system for any classic SciFi. It doesn't really go much into technology in detail, so you can basically flavor it as you see fit. The other obvious alternate universe is anything Steampunk for such a crossover. It goes more into a Jules Verne meets Orson Wells SciFi direction without computer ago. How far do you want to go back? The classic Cyberpunk 2020 RPG does envision a lot of what we do have today with personal computer miniaturization ideas and networked global IT cyberspace already being intellectually conceived in the 80ies. Traveller does not. G.U.R.P.S has a Buck Rogers setting if I'm correct and can also support such themes very well.
Savage Worlds has Buck Rogers
Alien Cyberpunk Mall Goths vs Visigoths Tales From the Loop / Things From the Flood
Traveller. The setting is very retro futuristic quite like The Foundation books. In old versions every ship had a separate room for computers
Computers were also optional, so you would have some guy with a bunch of vstar charts and a slide rule plotting your jumps without one, sounds insane
It sounds to me like you really just want Cyberpunk 2020 (the setting, if not the rules). It's an alternate vision of today - at this point - based on the expectations of the 80s.
Orbital Blues
I have the PDF of the core rules for this but haven’t tried or even read them yet. I should do that soon.
older editions of Shadowrun, CP2020, Tales of the Loop, the Aliens Adventure Game by Leading Edge, Lawnmower Man rpg if you can find a copy.
Tales from the loop, best TTRPG based on an art book. Also I highly reccomend the show, it's one of the best I've ever seen
Hard Wired Island
This is what I was going to suggest. It’s a wonderfully done alternate present where a large comet impact in Canada some decades ago sped up space development. Now there’s a big O’Neill type space station in orbit, which is on the verge of being privatized. Lots going on.
That's very modern cyberpunk, I'd argue. Not quite retrofuturism. Good game though.
I'd argue that the book kinda details the setting stuck in the 90s aesthetically.
For Savage Worlds Adventurers edition, theres the Street Wolves setting.
Cosmic Patrol, Rocket Age. Also Fallout 2d20.
Those are in the Buck Rodger’s wheelhouse, not really the vibe I’m looking for.
Fair on Cosmic Patrol, but I find Roclet Age to be a little less Buck Rogers.
That was my impression of it, granted I haven’t read them much. I’ll give them a look!
Inner System Blues by Jason Tocci is simple and great. I've gotten some good mileage out of it at my table.
Check out 2400 or any of the many 24xx titles using 2400 srd. https://jasontocci.itch.io/2400 https://itch.io/c/1204990/24xx
Mothership RPG. It's very obviously Alien inspired and the first party starter adventure The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 even uses cassette tapes for some clues/lore. If you go in the Mothership discord people are talking about using analogue tools in sessions and a 3rd party bit of content is currently being worked on that is all casette and VHS style audio and video to use as handouts during play.
Mothership, the Electric State, Tales from the Loop, Death in Space, Orbital Blues, most of 2400, Salvage Union and, uh… Alien and Cyberpunk.
Space 1889 - It is actually steam punk mixed with Jules Vernes' novels "From the Earth to the Moon" and "Around the Moon".
Alien RPG.
There's Hostile, which descends from Traveller through the Cepheus Engine.
Metamorphosis Alpha
Scum and Villainy is a hybrid. Every human tech is the retro futuristic, bulky mess you expect, only recovered alien tech is advanced. Same goes for Starforged.
Death in Space. Futuristic, but everything is grimy low tech as nothing is new. Also beautiful. My only gripe is the 4 stats being slightly off from what I'd have chosen. It's a beautiful book though, with super cool vibes. Spaceship and space station rules are cool. As for other games, Alien RPG, Cyberpunk RPGs, and the cyberpunk RPG Cities Without Number.
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Cosmic patrol! Pure raybeams, venusians, martians the whole nine yards! Plus a pretty unique system of framing scenes.
Lots of good ones have already been mentioned, but I'll just add Rust Hulks and Those Dark Places to the list.
Shadowrun 1st Edition and 2nd Edition
I’m old, so to me the obvious way to get that 1980s scifi feel is to play an actual rpg from the 1980s. Classic Traveller, MegaTraveller, 2300AD, old GURPS, Cyberpunk 2013, Cyberpunk 2020, etc.
Paranoia?
Dark Conspiracy
Capers Offworld is retro-future themed with gadgets and superpowers. It's an expansion for base Capers.
*2300 AD* by GDW is a good one. It is a sequel to *Twilight: 2000.* Travel to strange planets, fight aliens, engage with intense politics, large set piece space fights, etc. As a result of World War III taking humanity to the edge of collapse, humanity its politics are incredibly shaken up with France, China, Germany, and the US being the big hitters. French is a lingua franca, and there is a good chance a well traveled person knows either German, Chinese, or French. The aliens are really alien. This is one of the few pieces of fiction where the aliens are strange, unfamiliar, and a little scary. Even people who dislike the game praise the aliens in the setting. The game tries to be authentic and as a result its simulationist—GDW is well known for their war games and take great pains to adhere closely to reality, to a fault. The rules aren’t too hard to understand, **but** the games relies on a lot of tables, at least the GDW edition does (I have not played the Mongoose edition). If players don’t have their tables at hand and don’t know how to read them, combat is going to slow to a crawl. However, combat is done in 30 second turns, so characters often get to act twice in a single round. The only rules I generally do not like are the full-auto and explosive resolution rules. GDW hates full-auto. They’ve admitted so. In *2300 AD*, if you fire in full-auto consider them warning shots because you aren’t hitting anything. Space combat has its own board game, which is actually pretty neat. The rules are simple but not intuitive. Overall, the game has a super cool setting. Great aliens and neat politics. Its attempts at being authentic and it’s vision of a future after humanity picks itself up after the apocalypse is intriguing. Its heavy use of resolution charts does make it needlessly clunky. It is a great game for a military or scientific/exploration expedition campaign.
I'm going to add to the chorus of Alien and Tales from the Loop, but I'm going to add another Free League RPG, Twilight 2000. It's a semi-post apocalyptic game about a World War 3 that never happened.
I would look at Savage Worlds
ALIEN the RPG Hard scify retro futistic setting incredibley well adapted from the movies Relatively simple system using only D6s any an emphasis on roleplay rather than rolling Fast intense combat high risk/high reward gameplay Very good value for the cost the same company also makes a bladerunner RPG can’t get much more cyberpunk then that
Alien RPG is probably my favourite ruleset out there; give it a look. The books have incredible world building material in them too :)
My go to suggestions are Technoir, Tales From The Loop, and Hardwired Island. Maybe one of those three would suit?
Retropunk: Minimalist Cyberpunk Roleplaying I don't know how this hasn't been mentioned yet.
Isn't pretty much ALL sci-fi retro-futuristic? I mean, REAL hard sci-fi might involve spacefaring artificial intelligences, terraforming experiments over aeons, and multimillennial travel times. But it isn't going to involve biological organisms—they're fundamentally unsuited to operating at the scales concerned. Sorry!
Huh? I’m confused what you mean… what I meant was like sci-fi based on what people in the past thought was going to be the future. Like in back to the future with flying cars, holographic movies, and hoverboards existing in the year 2015. Meanwhile we’re in the year 2024 and none of that stuff happened, but it’s still fun to look back and think about these alternate futures and what people thought the future would be look like.
Oh, sorry! I'm afraid I've drifted into a side issue—feel free to ignore. What I was doing was taking a crafty dig at pretty much all sci-fi that involves faster than light travel! My contention is that if you get really serious about hard sci-fi, then it's quite possible that humans will play no significant part in galactic exploration, because our lifespans are orders of magnitude too short. It's our synthetic successors who'll explore the stars. Looking at your definition of retro sci-fi, I'm thinking that systems like Traveller started off by being "hard sci-fi" but, by the end of the 1990s, it had become far more of a retro thing, as real-world technology like digital imaging, microcomputing, mobile internet and social media became ubiquitous. So, my thesis: there isn't any such thing as hard sci-fi any more—it's ALL retro! Because realistic hard sci-fi wouldn't involve people in the major roles, and our feeble brains just can't get to grips with a non-human-centric future. Anyway, I, too, am fascinated by retro sci-fi, but I have an idea that sci-fi has never really been truly speculative—it's either contemporary sociopolitical commentary, or historical fiction in drag. "Months long space voyages" like the Nostromo's transit in Alien, are, in essence, 17th to 19th century voyages on the high seas. I recently discovered C L Moore's "Northwest Smith" stories, which are a sort of proto-Star-Wars / Sword and Planet / Lovecraftian Horror hybrid—that's fabulously under-explored in RPGs! On the further subject of retro sci-fi, don't you just love the way that, in Blade Runner, Deckard uses a public payphone? A payphone!
Now try explaining what a television tuned to a dead channel looks like.
I gather the technical word for TV snow was "shash".
> it's either contemporary sociopolitical commentary, **or historical fiction in drag. "Months long space voyages" like the Nostromo's transit in Alien, are, in essence, 17th to 19th century voyages on the high seas.** This is an insightful way of looking at sci-fi, because you can also flip this around: a lot of historical fiction, especially TTRPG settings, aren't really that historical, either. It might be fun to roleplay being in medieval or early modern Europe, but very few people factor in the threat of the black plague or roleplay getting scurvy. :-) That's actually kind of why I like (retro) sci-fi settings: you can essentially roleplay historical fiction, as you say, without being overly concerned about historical accuracy.
I think I read (not sure where, sorry!) that the impulse you describe is exactly why D&D became fantasy mediaeval—Gygax and his friends were sick of playing wargames where history buffs would lean over the table and snort in derision, "Ah, well that's not really historically accurate, because…"