Player looking for Sandbox Space-explorer game, have a suggestion for a system

Hi, I'm looking for a group and a GM who'd be willing to play a sandbox space-exploration game. I know a system that's perfect for this called 'Stars Without Number'. I only have a free edition PDF file, but I can share anyway. It encourages homebrew material like custom alien (and possibly playable) races, it's a bit lite on the rules but it's also very definite on a couple of points, has 3 classes - explorer being a skill monkey, warrior being what he sounds like, and a psion with many different forms of psychic powers (like biokinesis, teleportation, predistigation and more). Of course all three of the classes are highly customizable, an explorer could either be an infiltrator, a silver-tongue diplomat, a mechanic or something else entirely, the warrior could focus on any styles of combat you can think of, and the psion has really interesting powers to choose from. With this system we'd probably be playing something like FTL but with muuuch deeper mechanics. If anyone is interested, please add me on skype instead of writing here (because I might forget about this thread): g1ebguy

If you're on in the GMT +1 Late evening, send me a PM with that PDF and I mught make something interesting ;) I can play weekends at pretty much any hour, though.

Have you looked at Traveller?

Traveller's got its own baked-in lore. If you're in space, wouldn't half the appeal be making up your own stuff? I know it says it's generic enough to handle that. But everything says that, and it's almost never true.

Some time ago I saw a post comparing the basic Apocalypse World classes to the Firefly/Serenity characters so recently I've been toying with the idea of playing Apocalypse world where the group has a short term goal of getting a ship. As far as mechanics go, I don’t think a complete hack would be necessary, just think of the space ship as driver’s car. Then I’d give one optional ship-related move to each class (driver – piloting, gunner – manning turrets, etc.) similar to the No Shit Driver and that should probably be enough. :) Also I've skimmed over the SWN rules and I don't like them very much, too much random rolls at character creation, other than that they're starting with the system on Rollplay so I'll see if I like it later (I mean, I've been playing Apocalypse World, Dungeon World and Numenera because of Rollplay so it might convince me after all).

Billy Redd said: Traveller's got its own baked-in lore. If you're in space, wouldn't half the appeal be making up your own stuff? I know it says it's generic enough to handle that. But everything says that, and it's almost never true. So far I have never played Traveller with the setting in the game. The rules are not setting specific and nor are the careers. Its a nice and open system that allows you to do anything with it without having to mod or change the system.

Yes, you can do a lot with Traveller. It just takes time to create your own setting.

Well thats not different from any other game that does not provide a setting. One benefit of Traveller is that it got rules for generating planets, so its easy to make a few quick planets if you like and then think a bit more about them.

I've been looking over the old FASA Star Trek, I think that would be fun to run.