Stargrave: A New Hope?

Marcus fesses up to his Stargrave woes and how he’s gone about recruiting a new crew.

I’ve had some problems playing Stargrave. It’s not the game. I am sure it isn’t perfect, but we love playing it at the club. It’s not even my club-mates, who keep shooting me. It’s my crew. Well, that’s not fair. I do like my crew. But they look quite…similar. Too similar. And it hasn’t helped that I used the original Stargrave roster from the book, downloading it from the Osprey site. In the middle of a game I would find myself shuffling and flipping over sheets trying to work out which character was being fired at, or acting, and not exactly sure which one I was looking out without checking.

The concept of that crew was something like the Bynars from Star Trek: The Next Generation (the episode 1.15 “11001001”) with an added dose of psionics. The crew comprised some small Copplestone Grey’s, the brains, and the mean looking, vat-grown “Big Greys”, which were from the now defunct Griffin Miniatures. I had never managed to get around to using these before. It took me long enough to get around to painting the mean Greys, although I really like them.

The Old Crew. Left to Right: 101, or is that 110..?

I might use them in Xenos Rampant in the future, although we have been using 15mm figures for that so far. But I digress.

In an effort to solve the problems in my personal organizational abilities I needed two things:
Firstly, a one page roster so that all that stats were right in front of me. I had tried looking at creating roster cards, but they just didn’t seem to work for me. I wanted everything, the whole crew, on one side of A4. Fortunately club members, noticing my travails, kindly offered me a selection.

Stargrave Roster

(Editor’s note: If you print this roster, make sure you open the “More Settings” option in the print preview screen and have “Fit to Printable Area” selected.)

Secondly, I needed to recruit a new crew. A more individual crew of characters.

And it really isn’t that hard to stat a crew up, at least not if you can be decisive about it! In a nutshell, recruit a Captain and First Mate from the various specialities (akin to schools of magic in Frostgrave) available and spend 400 Cr. on recruiting the rest of your eight crew.

The specialities I referred to are “abilities”. The Captain chooses five, with three of four from the characters background e.g. psionics as i referred to for my first crew, or veteran. There is quite a range with new backgrounds being added in the inevitable supplements to the core rules. It makes for an interesting comparison with Five Parsecs from Home, which regular readers of the blog will know I have also been playing solo (I should really complete another episode soon!) However, in Five Parsecs the choice of crew characteristics is all based on random rolls reminiscent of the old school Traveller RPG. It’s much more about the whole crew even if the Captain is the first among equals. In Stargrave it is very much about the Captain and a little about the First Mate. In truth, everyone else is disposable to a greater or lesser extent. The First Mate chooses four abilities, with two or three from their background. Previously I chose two Psionicists, but this time I chose a Cyborg Captain and a Veteran First Mate.

Why did I make this choice? I am not entirely sure. I was looking through the core rules on character creation with the intent of choosing a new crew but the process became influenced by the models I had available or fancied using and the narrative that began to create in my head. I think that is a good thing!

I initially had the idea that I would use figures from a Kick-Starter project that I had received: Star-Schlock. This at least started out rooted in influences of the pulpy Sci-Fi TV of the 80’s. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century crossed with Star Trek and maybe a dose of Star Wars and 80’s Flash Gordon, in particular.

Gillian Grey and Willard White

Some similarity occurred to me between the Star Trek: TNG era and Buck Rogers slightly more campy second season. Something akin to the rescued Borg Seven Of Nine in Star Trek Voyager. I had the idea of using some unused cyborg miniatures which I had from the old Scotia Grendel Urban War range, the VOID Syntha biomechs, making them a kind of Star Trek Borg analogue.

I had already started painting some of these after a long time in the lead pile. I was intending to put them to use in Spy-Fi games as some kind of, well, Fembot for want of a better word. Yeah Baby!

Then I hit a problem.

A diminutive “White Rat” with Willard

It was only when I compared the completed Syntha miniatures to the Star Schlock figures I noticed a considerable size discrepancy! That was pretty much the deal breaker although at this point I realized that I was in some danger of repeating the same folly using some Star Schlock rank and file figures; a lack of clear characterisation.

Repeating the same problem. Do they look a bit similar?

I was now fixed on using the Syntha as Borg analogues but the sizing discrepancy made me think about using at least some more old school miniatures. Hence a look at EM-4’s range of early Grenadier sculpts. It was a chance to pick up some older, characterful miniatures that I had regularly seen pictures of, or seen new versions of older sculpts, but had never quite managed to add to my collection. Since i was basing this crew around the escaped cyborgs I wanted a crew that at least in part were themed around interconnection, robotics and coordinated firepower. At least that was the plan.

The White Rat and the Black Rat – They escaped a lab based programme where they were literally
lab rats, sent out to do some exotic missions at the behest of the ailing Authority, until those orders ceased.

The Black Rat

Also known as Six of Seven, Black Rat is to be my captain. She had somehow managed to escape some Authority “black-ops” experiment as government broke down. She has very little knowledge of her origins, but is on a quest to know more.

I chose to give her:

  • Camouflage (she is wearing a stealth suit)
  • Target lock (allowing her or another member of the crew to automatically hit the target of a grenade/grenade launcher attack, even if not in line of sight.)
  • An energy shield (absorbing some shooting damage)
  • Control robot (interface with a robot and take control)
  • Drone. I am rather partial to using drones, not that they have done me much good so far. (Draw line of sight from the drone)

She also has a carbine (2 spaces), a pistol, light armour, a deck for hacking and a filter mask.

Harriet “Harry” Barber

I originally had a figure in a beret picked out for this role, but Harry has grown on me. I first saw the figure many years ago. It normally has a truncheon and I think is supposed to be a “space police” figure. I removed the truncheon and added a small pouch in its place. In my mind there is a similarity to Glynis Barber in the 80’s series “Dempsey and Makepeace” where her character was called Harriet Makepeace. She is some kind of ex-security figure (the kind of security that doesn’t use a truncheon or wear a uniform) who along the way helped the Black Rat escape from her captors.

  • Fortune. (She is a bit of a Han Solo and you might call her lucky, or perhaps it is her roguish charm?)
  • Armoury (Harry has a way with weapons and can field power armour without the upkeep cost or increase the damage on one standard firearm)
  • Remote Firing (Can select a robot in the crew to make a +3 line of sight shooting attack)
  • Repair Robot (Yes, Harry is good with robots too)

Harry also has a filter mask (always handy), light armour, a carbine taking up two spaces and picks for breaking into physical objects.

Harriet “Harry” Barber

Moving on to the Standard and Specialist figures, these are much easier to select as they are very much modular, “plug in” selections.

The “White Rat” (Three of Seven) – Commando

Naturally, also being a cyborg and a comrade of Six (or part of the same hive mind), the White Rat needed to pack a bit of a punch. They were specialist operatives after all.

Ratchet the Robot

Picked up from some abandoned facility and reprogrammed by Harriet, Ratchet is an armoured trooper. Thanks to Harry’s Armoury skill she can offset the upkeep cost. Originally I costed out Ratchet as a grenadier, making that rather large gun a grenade launcher of some kind. I changed to admittedly costly power armour as a result of choosing the armoury skill for the First Mate.

Ratchet the Robot

Troopers (3)

There have been various iterations of this crew, but they always seemed to revolve around having three troopers. These are Viridian, (with the green skin and yellow jacket), Sal Buco (long green coat and pistol) and Cy An (Blue skinned alien). At the outset they all have a carbine, heavy armour and a knife. Yes, I know Sal appears to have a pistol. Does anyone remember the pistols in the original “Man From Uncle”? Well Sal has picked up something like one of those. He can attach an extended barrel, long magazine and collapsible stock. Hey presto: a carbine. Originally Sal was going to be a simple recruit, but I had another idea…

Sal and Cy

Hacker – Zero One

A nod to my old crew. Zero One now stands out in a crowd. It is my hacker equipped with a pistol, light armour, a deck for hacking (of course) and a knife.

Viridian and Zero

Recruits (2)

Finally, my two recruits. Originally I was going to fit in a guard dog, but the dog cost 10 credits and frankly can do less. I am not a min/maxer, but when you want to fit in certain options the free figures give more flexibility. And a bit of colour. These miniatures came from the Hydra “Retro Ray-Gun” range. It is a nice range although the figures tend to be a little larger overall. But these two are I think teenagers. I painted them up with no clear objective for using them. I watched Firefly again recently and it occurred to me that these two, the “Citrus Kids” could be analogues to Simon and River Tam (except he isn’t a doctor and she isn’t a psychic killing machine). That points to the one thing which might be slightly dissatisfying with the rules. As I pointed out earlier, if you aren’t a Captain or First Mate, there isn’t going to be much progression, beyond adding a better bit of kit. That said, I don’t think that is what this game is for and is why I like a bit of solo Five Parsecs.

Recruits have a pistol, light armour and a knife.

Recruits – The Citrus Kids

So that is the crew of the “Dirty Rat”. I’m looking forward to seeing how they do in an outing at the club mysteriously entitled “Oubliette”, very soon. I am sure there will be a report.

Author: Brigadier Tony

Club Webmaster