Star Ace Classic

I've been trying to think how to describe Star Ace. It's high space opera - in some ways resembling Star Wars, Traveller, Firefly and with even a lot of B-movie influence.

There's an evil Empire (mediaeval-culture humans, racist reptoids, Crassites who are, well, crass) a benevolent but hard-pressed Star Alliance (humans, clone-people and cat-people) and the Star Teams, who are sort of freebooter starfighter pilots who got officially disowned by the Alliance after an inconclusive battle and uneasy ceasefire. There are psionic polar bears as well, whose planet is occupied by the Empire.

Star Ace Classic was originally a Pacesetter game and uses the same system as Time Master (also mentions the Time Master bad guys, the Demoreans, and the events of Terrible Swift Ford ). It's available in PDF from Ronin Arts:

Star Ace Classic Boxed Set (scanned)
Star Ace Classic: Aliens
Ronin Arts: Star Ace

As well as adventures to steal, there are several things interesting about the game.

Some of the species could be worth converting for flavour - I'll post some conversions in a separate page.

The concept of Orders is very close to Alternity professions, being mostly a grouping of skills - Spades to Combat Specs, Hearts to Tech Ops, Clubs to Mindwalkers, Diamonds to Free Agents, though there's no specific equivalent of the Diplomat.

From Deuces Wild and referring back to Wilderness Briefing Manual , there are some interesting implications of the Imperial forces that the heroes will encounter.

So-called mercenaries are the personal troops of feudal rulers. Baron Rissil, Overlord of the planet Sepa Green, has infantry, armed to the same standard as Imperial soldiers, starfighters (again, standard Imperial models) and capital ships up to cruiser class in his mercenary forces.
The majority of mercenaries are Gorlons due to the sheer numbers available for military service in their society. Count Sillith, the Grand High Vizier who resides on the Gorlon homeworld, controls much of this supply and doles them out to lesser nobles in return for favours. There are also Human mercenaries (some noted as Elite) and Crassite mercenaries.

The Imperial army and navy have a unified command structure under Grand Duke Otto. Though their primary focus is to fight the Xenophobes on the far side of Imperial space, they also appear in strength on occupied worlds - apparently their main mission there is to secure spaceports and other strategic facilities. On Sepa Green, Imperial infantry are not involved in actions to suppress rebellion but they may provide the heavy armour support that ICE troops lack. Things are different on occupied worlds without resident nobles, such as Shamba, where the Army deals with internal security directly. The majority of the Imperial army are Gorlons.

Imperial Command Enforcement (ICE) is a division of the Imperial Bureaucracy that seems to combine the traits of the KGB and SS, with plainclothes secret police ("undercover" is probably too generous a word for their tactics), uniformed police agents, paramilitaries known as stormtroopers and warships up to "ICE frigate" class (a hull decked out with weapon-towers to more than destroyer firepower, reinforced to rival a cruiser's toughness and carrying several starfighters of higher than normal specs). The agent types are mostly Crassites with a Gorlon seen also. Stormtroopers are Gorlons (in the largest numbers) and Humans, with laser rifles and tactical heavy weapons but, as mentioned, apparently no armoured vehicles.

In summary, there seem to be two separate centralised structures of Imperial power in addition to a feudal hierarchy. This might seem just confused, but I think it's actually a strength - a political structure that spans multiple star systems needs to be more sophisticated than feudalism alone.