Designed by Barak Blackburn and illustrated by Brent Sprecher, Retrostar is a story-driven roleplaying game that faithfully and meticulously emulates the science fiction television shows of the 1970s. The game is powered by the Intention System, which places a sizeable portion of the narrative control in the players’ hands, while still maintaining the traditional roleplaying game structure.
Like all of Spectrum’s “genre emulation” games, Retrostar is not simply a universal RPG that just happens to be adorned with genre-appropriate art. Every single design decision was made with the purpose of bringing to life the sci-fi TV shows of yesteryear, right at your gaming table. The rules even take into consideration the fact that these shows were created with very limited budgets at their disposal!
According to Spectrum Games President, Cynthia Celeste Miller: “All of us at Spectrum are fans of shows like the original Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, The Six Million Dollar Man, Blake’s 7 and even the ‘kidvid’ shows like Ark II and Jason of Star Command. So, it was only a matter of time before we brought that specific kind of action to the world of RPGs. Barak truly hit a home run with the game system and having Brent Sprecher’s Easter egg-laden art grace the rulebook really capped off what we all feel is an amazing product.”
The Retrostar PDF can be purchased here.