I’m all out of Aftermath, so let’s take a look at Fantasy Games Unlimited’s Space Opera. This is the 1980 second printing (the first printing, also in 1980, is blue and has completely different cover art). Amusingly, this cover art, by Gene Day, was considered too risque, so the third printing features Robert Charrette’s version of the same painting, in which the woman is more modestly dressed.  

Space Opera is largely the product of Edward Simbalist, creator of Chivalry & Sorcery. Like that game, Space Opera is “realistic” (read: complicated, with tons of interconnecting systems). The idea, somewhat novel for the time, was to make the box set self-contained and complete, requiring no further expansion to play any sort of science fiction game. I can’t really get a grip on its rules, but they do seem extremely thorough, though I suspect they might, in fact, be unplayable (lemme know if you’ve actually played it). And despite that goal of keeping it self-contained (and regardless of whether the game was actually playable), there is a big pile of supplements out there for the system.

Anyway, despite the dense rules, there is a lot to love here. The pastiche of Space Opera draws on pretty much every science fiction property that existed in 1980, often just…using named you’d think would be copyrighted, like United Federation of Planets and The Force. Flash Gordon, Barbarella, Buck Rogers, all represented in some way. You can tell that much from the cover. I love the idea of dumping all this stuff into a soup pot and seeing what comes out (a bit like Tales from the Floating Vagabond, actually) though it puzzles me as to why Simbalist thought to burden such a fun mishmash with such heavy rules. Maybe it was just reflex.

The real star of the show is the art by comic artist Gene Day. His art is the great unifier, really selling the idea that all these different sorts of sci-fi can co-exist in the same game. He even gets a sweet David Bowie reference in there. It is a massive loss that he passed away in 1982.