I’ve been looking around for RPG and wargame options to play in the mass effect universe recently and thought I’d share what I’ve found so far and ask if others have played /tg/ games in this setting before and know anything about especially good options to do so in? Similarly good sources for minis would be appreciated.
I’ve found a pretty big selection of RPG conversions and homebrewed stuff, some suitable wargames and a pretty good selection of stl files for miniatures (tronic3100 in particular) that would be enough for skirmish games at least. I’ve also seen people convert infinity, gates of antares and various mantic minis. With the right heads you could probably get pretty far as long as you're not super concerned about game-accurate weapons and armor
So far I’ve found:
>RPGs (conversions or readily convertible)
Stars without numbers
trinity continuum
esper genesis
redemption: a game of tactics and consequences
5e conversion
genesys conversion
d6 conversion
fate conversion
>wargames (most need some work to make them thematic)
five parsecs from home
mass effect terminus
xenos rampant
probably a lot of the mini-agnostic sci-fi skirmish games as long as they allow for the biotic and tech powers
>5e conversion
pls no, just reflavor Star Wars Saga Edition if you want d20 Mass Effect.
I don't know if this is quite fpbp material, but it was definitely my first thought.
Especially when you remember that Mass Effect was to a great extent "KOTOR: Licensed IP-free Edition".
Luckily enough, someone homebrewed up a rather extensive mod for Saga edition:
https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?282956-SWSE-Mass-Effect-Saga-Edition
There's apparently a board game coming this year, hopefully it comes with minis
I'd go with Traveller or SWN
>5e conversion
Absolutely fricking not
Post retcons. Here's how I would rewrite the story:
Reapers:
>no subtypes, there's only one "race", no dog fight drones, no dog fights
>you can't destroy one 1v1, that includes dreadnoughts too, and if your ship's too small it won't do
>reapers grow with every harvest in addition to "reproducing", the first Reaper is as big as the Citadel or moon-sized and implied to be the first husk
Husks aka reaper'd sentients:
>husk (Humans, pic related, and Batarians, unlike the others they organize)
>Asari banshee (with the right frequency you can shatter metal like glass)
>Turian einherjar aka commando (retains intelligence and can mimic voices like a parrot)
>Quarian fleabag (they release nanites when they die) or cyborg ticks (they attach to machines and can become a living space ship)
>Krogan berserkr (like husk but bigger) or battering rams
>Elcor mobile weapons platform (guns on its back), transports husks, can be used against other husks
>Volus suicide bombers (explode-hu akbar)
>Hanar headcrab (like headcrab but jellyfish)
>Salarian infiltrator (they can pass for regular Salarians)
I like my husk Krogans the best. I call it Hogan.
I'd just not touch reapers at all except as a vague distant threat
Reapers were ME's secret formula to success.
The space ships *are* the aliens. You can't not call that genius.
Dog fights are a meme and drastically reduced their mystery. By making them an uncaring force passing by anything less than a dreadnought, like a blue whale to a one man fishing boat, you can give them the presence to inspire fear.
they're cool as an eldritch horror from deep space with mysterious origins
Yes, but ME2 and ME3 fricked it up by making them afraid. They went from one eldritch unknown giant cosmic horror that took a frick huge amount of firepower from the human navy and even then seriously fricked up the council fleet and the seat of power of the council races into Shepard now somehow being able to kill one on foot, Earth is now somehow the most important planet on earth, and humans are apparently so important that they harvested these primitives to make a reaper version of it because we're the le only the ones who can le kill one.
I kind of thought every species would get harvested and turned into a Reaper.
nah just humans
technically they do harvest everyone but the resulting reaper from the harvest still looks like standard Leviathan-like reaper. The big thing about ME2 was for all intents and purposes this was the first time they "innovated" and funneled a gorillion humans to construct an actual reaper instead of the bog standard husk or footsoldier-type reaper.
One of the bigger issues with ME was that it was fundamentally Bioware "drawing inspiration" from Star Control 2. The Reapers were a budget brand Hollywood-fashioned take on the Ur-Quan with none of the nuance, subtlety, or depth baked in. And humorously, when Bioware ultimately decided to give them depth in the sequels, that depth amounted to being equal to the Sylandro Probe rather than the Ur-Quan.
Idk dude my first instinct with retconning is to just pretend ME2 was never gonna happen even though it was the best entry of the series.
>after Shep saves the Citadel the reapers are still coming
>but they're gonna have to make their way here manually from the edge of the galaxy
>that's a future galaxy problem about a thousand years from now, they'll probably have giga guns by then anyway
and just focus on galactic infighting, cold wars fought by council species, cerberus, krogan mercs, volus israeliteery, general weird space anomalies (basically the companion missions except as a standalone adventure)
>ME2
>best entry of the series
Maybe if you're sub-90 IQ with ADHD
The problem is ME without Reapers just doesn't have any other defining characteristics. Hell, even the Reapers themselves you could shove into another setting, and they'd be 100% more interesting.
What I mean is, ME is like an amalgamation of Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, etc. And yet all those settings on their own individually are much more interesting than Mass Effect itself.
tbh the ME world already has a lot of entry points for grounded stories about space cowboys doing space cowboy things even outside of the looming threat of reapers
>Eezo shenanigans and experimentations like they did with Jack
>fricked up Asari succubi monsters as a result of inbreeding that can create a cult of sex slaves to do their criminal shit
>Cerberus trying all sorts of shit to genocide xenos
>Prothean tech going haywire
>Geth
Though I will not discount that you can include reapers, I'm saying they should be played like in ME1 as these fricked up eldritch horror creatures that only really care about contributing to the purge. I can see some lovecraftian angles with the indoctrination stuff, but I think if you make them be more than just some distant far future threat then everything just has to be about them.
>ME2 best in the series
What an awful take, literally the only thing it does better than one or three is the writing for companion quests.
I think drones for dogfights make sense. The Reapers big problem from day 1 was how to translate the scale of Reapers being the size of Battleships with how you would fight them in a third-person-shooter.
>corrupted Batarians
actually exist in canon
What's so special about the four eyes?
What's their deal?
I'd just set it after ME3 and have the PCs be a bunch of new Spectres trying to maintain order in the galaxy while everybody's trying to rebuild after the Reaper invasion.
Cool character and cool art, anon!
Retcons:
- The Reapers use organics to gather up eezo in a relatively low-energy way and spend all their time in darkspace doing incomprehensible calculations, rather than the stupid shit they do in canon. Maybe they're still turning people into gooslop that gets fed into the Reaper, but it's just destructive reads to grab more data from their brains.
- Change up the ME1/2 plot so that you have a singular Reaper main antagonist shared between them. Maybe Sovereign limps away, drastically injured by still strong enough that the Citadel Fleet is unwilling to pursue in full force after the end of the battle for the Citadel, idk. Geth and Collectors are both weapon he uses.
- This is partly so you don't need a full-on Reaper invasion in ME3. ME1 hypes them up to an insane degree and as a consequence, ME3 needs a stupid MacGuffin that doesn't make any sense. If Sovereign has been trying to rebuild behind the scenes, that gives you more to work with for an ME3 confrontation to wrap up the trilogy.
Canon ME3 definitely benefits from the groundwork laid by ME1/2 in terms of race relations, since much of its plot is resolving things like the genophage, the Quarian exile, etc. You'd want an ME3 that captures that. Either go for a modest "Reaper vanguard," where the main fleet traded reaction mass to send down relatively few ships, and now you NEED pretty much EVERYBODY to fight them or something, OR, Sovereign manages to draw on the subaltern races (Quarians, Krogan, etc) to build up a fighting force and you have to shoot the right people and negotiate with the right other people.
If you go the latter route, I'd suggest adding some new races for the Terminus systems, since canonically it turned out to just be Geth, Vorcha, and then main race warlords/criminals/other losers, which wasn't really the vibe they were given in ME1. You can set up some more conflicts that can then get resolved in ME3, while also giving Sovereign more potential proxies.
B L U E
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The d6 conversion is really solid and would be my hands-down pick. Maybe throw in some modernisations from Mini Six like static defences, etc, because I don't think it has them.
Disregard, it does have static defences. I suck wieners.
Which one anon? AFAIK there are two different ME d6 conversions out there.
I played an SWSE conversion game. It was great. I played a quarian biotic because I love me some special snowflakes.
Fellowship 2e
Isn't that the Lord of the Rings game?
other than the manufacturers mentioned who makes suitable minis for conversion? I'm think there has to be more stl files that can be converted
I'd use a star wars RPG.
Though I probably wouldn't because ME lost me by not having space elves with big fat wieners.
how would you say a leviathan would live?
the one Shepard talk about refered to itself as a progeny so do seem to grow old and die eventually.
Personally the leviathan story arc is better left ignored and you would be better off trying to salvage the dark energy storyline. But if you insist then just make them functionally immortal.
I'd make it less that they "die" as we would know it, more that they go quiescent and then return to a nymph stage. So the animal itself is immortal, but it kind of recombines itself and becomes young again as its past self's "child."
I think tau would make a pretty good antagonist faction in mass effect. Their aesthetic certainly fits the setting
Salarians.
I don't know why this post was deleted. Mass Effect was a spiritual successor to Star Control.
Humans are neither chosen ones nor special, so instead of being the favorite pets of the ancients, they have to work to earn their own place in space. In addition to that there's planetary exploration, an ancient civilization that disappeared, and an outside force threatening to undo everything intelligent organics have created.
ME1 was good thanks to the mystery it lended to the outside force.
I deleted it to go into further depth in a better-written comment.
I've played in a star wars saga oneshot once. It worked, but I don't like d20 systems.
Otherwise I've heard of a fate diaspora and a world of darkness conversion.
what sort of story/mission did you go for then?
Stop bumping this thread. If it's gonna die let it die.
>7 day autosage
man we haven't even talked about most of the RPGs in the OP and basically nothing about wargame potential
>7 day autosage
What?