You can always dream

Posted on by <span class='p-author h-card'>Paul Beakley</span>

You can always dream

I woke up this morning wishing I had a complete library of Fading Suns sitting on my library shelf. 

I don’t necessarily want to pay for the whole thing but damn I had a lot of fun back in the day with it. Wondering what it would take to hack it into something more modern (Cortex Plus, PbtA, whatever).

Anyone have a library of Fading Suns books taking up space?

Published by Paul Beakley

I founded the Indie Game Reading Club in 2010. I've written and developed RPGs since the mid-90s, now I mostly talk about playing them.

0 thoughts on “You can always dream”

  1. I ran Fading Suns for a while using the Song of Ice and Fire game system. The House Creation rules were perfect for the setting, although we had to “scale out” the domains to a more galactic level.

  2. I think I just have the core book for second edition. This is definitely a setting that needs a nice, modern revisiting.

    Last time I made any use of it, I ran Dogs in the Vineyard, except using the Inquisition from Fading Suns. Turned out pretty good, though, as usual, my crowd terrified me with how zealous they became to their fake, made-up-on-the-fly dogma.

    Every time I run Dogs, I wonder if my friends are waiting to become zealots, or if they just have a really low opinion of people with strong beliefs…

  6. Weirdly, I was not. First thing I stumbled into upon searching was some cool art, and now I discover there’s a whole religion angle, a star map…this thing is relevant to my interests

  7. Dude Fading Suns is sooooo good.

    Really interesting setup, lots of smart narrative choices. Terrible system. Not brokenly terrible, I mean I ran it for like 3 years, but it could stand a freshening-up.

  8. I played one session in an abortive Fading Suns campaign. The concept was a bit like Farscape, I suppose – a ragtag bunch of escapees from a low-tech feudal world, having found a ship in a buried hangar. Unfortunately, the GM wanted us to start playing well before we had found the ship, which we’d done no prep for, so it was a lot of aimless, “I guess I’ll hang around with.. that guy? He looks interesting” type motivations.  Then, it became apparent that the GM and one of the players had some big secret backstory going on for him, which dripped out mostly as knowing glances and half-sentences so they wouldn’t give too much away. Didn’t stick around.

  9. Haha that’s awesome/awful, Michael Prescott! Fading Suns is the last game where I heavily leveraged all the 90s-era immersion tricks: limited information, secret meetings, lying, etc etc.

    We actually had screaming matches.

  10. The thing I would like is some really good “frames” for FS. Like, why are your nobleman, your cyborg ship captain, your poisonous four-armed-wookiee, and your psychic priest hanging out together?

    Or maybe like “for this kind of campaign, try making characters within these proscriptions.”

    I dunno. I was always so overwhelmed by the setting that I found it hard to run.

  11. I do have a large number of the books. I’ve always enjoyed that setting. I dropped by the time the third edition came around, but I think we have all of 1st ed. and most or all of 2nd ed. books.

  13. Oh man I didn’t know there was a third edition.

    Probably doesn’t matter if the setting stuff didn’t change. Wanna clear some shelf space, Sophie Lagace​?

  15. Paul Beakley I have ALL the books. mwahahahaha.

    Well okay not all, but at least up until they started getting all d20 compatible.

    Most of what I find compelling about the game is John Bridges’ artwork.

  26. Fading Suns was so beautiful. Always kinda wanted to do a BE game, but somehow it was a little too close already to make the reskin satisfying.

  28. Okay so here’s the deal: 

    I will do my level best to build a playable modern version of the game if through some combination of effort I can get a goodly chunk of these books. 

    I will pay for shipping! But no way can I afford to buy them. (I said that in the OP, Mark Delsing, yeah I know about FASA’s site.)

  29. I’ve got some, too. We played a one-shot, almost literally a locked-room murder on the Orient Express set in Fading Suns. The world was so compelling, but I barely recall the system. The game could totally use a re-up.

  38. Take a look at the art on the French editions and you will wish it even more so. They are like wow. BTW I think of Fading suns as sort of Space D&D now looking back some how it give me the OSR feel.

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