Space 1889

[quarkstomper]

One of the suppliments had a martian perpetual motion machine as it's McGuffin; an enormous ferris-wheel-like contraption that utilized liftwood. It was too big to steal, though.

I ran one game using the standard plot of sneaking into High Martian territory to raid a liftwood grove, with the twist that the players were hired to do this by Gilbert & Sullivan, who had brought their operatic company to Mars for an interplanetary tour. The idea was that they would secretly have the costumes devised with liftwood panels in the corsets, so that in the finale of Iolanthe the fairy characters would actually fly over the audience. (Of course, the players would have appreciated this more if I were not the only one in the group into Gilbert & Sullivan)

I also ran a story once using orbital mapping as a plot point. A station orbiting Venus is using experimental thermal photography to map the surface through the planet's eternal cloud cover. The plates for one region keep turning up with a peculiar flaw in them, a temperature anomaly that links into a legend among the Lizard Men and leads to a treasure hunt...

[Apache]

http://ourworlds.topcities.com/space1889/index.html

One of the best fan sites around.

Good fiction, and nice 'explanations' on how liftwood works (as well as ether screws...).

I loved the game, but yes, the game engine was clunky. It DOES have the advantage of being fairly simple, and character generation is pretty fast and easy.

When S:1889 came out, the first thing I thought was 'I gotta use GURPS for the RPG engine'.

[Shrale]

Originally Posted by quarkstomper

One of the suppliments had a martian perpetual motion machine as it's McGuffin; an enormous ferris-wheel-like contraption that utilized liftwood. It was too big to steal, though.

I ran one game using the standard plot of sneaking into High Martian territory to raid a liftwood grove, with the twist that the players were hired to do this by Gilbert & Sullivan, who had brought their operatic company to Mars for an interplanetary tour. The idea was that they would secretly have the costumes devised with liftwood panels in the corsets, so that in the finale of Iolanthe the fairy characters would actually fly over the audience. (Of course, the players would have appreciated this more if I were not the only one in the group into Gilbert & Sullivan)

I also ran a story once using orbital mapping as a plot point. A station orbiting Venus is using experimental thermal photography to map the surface through the planet's eternal cloud cover. The plates for one region keep turning up with a peculiar flaw in them, a temperature anomaly that links into a legend among the Lizard Men and leads to a treasure hunt...

very clever.

your Thermal Photography got me thinking about those Life Spotters (whatever) from Chronicles of Riddick, the guys whose head's in a jar and they can see living creatures. I know it's not the same, but I can see flashes of a Steamer analog to it.

[David Johnston]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

I played it twice using the built-in system (which is lame) and once substituting ForeSight (which worked much better).

The idea of the setting is great. But unfortunately I know too much about sailing to believe for a second that skyships would work.

Sailing? Space 1889 skyships aren't wind propelled. They use steam driven airscrews.

[KevinJ]

I've always loved the setting in Space: 1889, but even with a good GM the system was... unmentionable.

I did invest in some of the tactical things like the Ironclads & Ether Fliers book.