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I’ve been messing around with running a Star Frontiers game again soon, and part of that has been considering alternate player-facing materials to the game. While digging through a lot of Star Frontiers goodies from all over, I’ve noted that one thing it seems a lot of people miss about the baseline design of Star Frontiers is how the various species are built. While each non-human PC species has a special ability, they are generally tied to the species’ worst stat.
Yazirians are berzerkers and warriors. They have the lowest Strength & Stamina.
The amorphous Dralasites can extrude a number of limb-like pseudopods based on their Dexterity. And they have the lowest Dexterity score of the core races. They can detect lies, but are no more social or intuitive than any other race.
Vrusk are natural businessmen with the ability to understand any trade or communications around them even if they don’t know the language. But they are less logical AND intuitive than the berzerker Yazirians.
(Although it should be noted that the Vrusk also have ambidexterity and the highest Dexterity).
When looking at third party materials, you often run into races that break from these concepts. Big races that are natural brutes (honestly, if we add a larger-than-human race to the setting, their natural position would be to give them a very social concept), Intelligent races with great tech abilities, and so on.
The real magic, for me, is that the core races end up in a great balance where humans, despite their lack of special abilities, are still a great choice for a PC.
I’m going to take a poke at designing a few “equal footing” species (that should be roughly as good of a choice as the core species) as well as polishing up my “A Xenomorph May Be Involved” tables for generating random “minor races”.
Dyson's Dodecahedron 
Looking forward to this. I picked up SF on POD a while back with the desire to run it. Now it sits on my shelf.
I used to love Star Frontiers = but noticed the same pattern as you did.
But the “A Xenomorph May Be Involved” tables might make it interesting.
I also noticed (with pleasure!) how hard it might be to get some of the stranger aliens from ‘Star Trek’ out of this chart! 🙂
The development of the playable species in Alien Worlds (the working title for Star Frontiers) is kind of interesting as they were originally thought up in pairs. The basic idea for the Yazirians was that of “emotionally high-strung teenagers”, with the Dralasites being intellectuals with an abstruse sense of humor (not just bad puns, but also ubiquitous shapes). Basically, Yazirians were jock-like in nature, while Dralasites were nerds. Before they became the brainwashing bad guys, the Sathar (called “S’sessu” in a Dragon magazine article) were made to be foils for the Vrusk. While the Vrusk are a group oriented species comfortable being mere cogs in a social system, the Sathar/S’sessu were going to be radically individualistic in a “Randian” sense. Where Vrusk Comprehension in about assessing groups, Sathar/S’sessu Ability Insight is about assessing individuals. Also, the Sathar/S’sessu have good intuition and logic, but suffer in social ability due to their innate lack of empathy — something critical when dealing with individuals.
I love this dichotomy they tried to do, before the higher-up demanded the game to be dumb-down and to have some “Space Orks” for the game so they could market the game to kids. It also makes for a good starting-off point for creating new alien species.
In some cases it makes sense, in that the relevant generic abilities are simply not exercised much when they are overshadowed by special powers.
This can make perfect sense. While many large animals are not as sluggish as they look, they tend to save energy by not moving around as fast or as much as small ones do.