Desperately Seeking Serenity

I love Firefly.  Nothing surprising there.  A lot of gamers love Firefly, as is obvious from the vast number of Firefly board games out there.  I own Firefly: The Game, and thematically it's one of the best games I own.  I've even gone to the trouble of replacing the cardboard dinosaur that comes in the box with a proper toy dinosaur.

Things aren't quite so rosy in RPG land though.

I own the Serenity RPG.  There's a fair amount to like about it, in particular useful resources like deck plans for Serenity itself, plus a few other spaceships, and information about the setting itself.  It's possible to play as the original characters in the show, but equally possible to create a cast of new and original PCs - and it includes a full crew of pre-gens to either play or to kick start your imagination in that direction.

Try getting anyone to play it though...

It's not that the system's particularly bad.  It's pretty similar to Savage Worlds really.  It's just extremely average, and beyond the setting there's nothing about it that makes me want to play.

Can we do better?

There's a Firefly RPG as well, from the same company, which seems to have improved somewhat on the original game.  Plus, being based on Firefly rather than Serenity it includes a bunch of stuff from the show that for licensing reasons couldn't be in a game based on the movie, which made some pages in the original game faintly ridiculous.

It also comes with a bunch of supplements, which include not only a set of adventures to play in the 'verse, but also a cut down version of the rules, meaning they can be played even if you don't have the core rule book.

All of which is pretty cool, and the kind of thing I'd be interested in picking up if I spot it on a trader's stall.  Because I've never actually seen any of it.  Despite having been out for five years, it's somehow managed to fly under the radar, at least as far as this browncoat is concerned.

What other options are there?

You can run Firefly in Traveller.  The original spacefaring RPG might not have been built with Firefly in mind, but it hits all the right points with technological disparity between planets, lack of FTL, a heavily stratified society and overall human behaviour.

The problem, of course, is that it's Traveller, and while there are plenty of people who love it, I'm not one of them.  It's one of those games that causes a certain type of gamer to start obsessively designing spaceships in a way that turns it into a game of Excel: The Spreadsheets, when what I really want is to be handed a Firefly deck plan and told to go and have an adventure.

(For those who don't know him, my husband is absolutely that kind of gamer.  We joke about his deep and abiding love of spreadsheets.)

At the other end of the scale there's the indie darling, Powered By The Apocalypse.  I first encountered this system last year and was pretty smitten.  So much so that faced with an upcoming Concrete Cow, I hacked together a basic set of playbooks for Firefly and ran an adventure.  It worked pretty well, and I was planning on continuing to work on it (in a serial numbers filed off way, of course).  I did do some more development, but it was about that time I started writing a novel so it stalled for a bit.

And then I got my hands on Scum and Villainy.

Scum and Villainy uses the Forged In The Dark system, the same as the even newer indie darling, Blades In The Dark.  My home group played BITD for a while, and I was even more smitten than I was with PBTA.  The way it throws you into the action with only the basic outline of a plan, depending on flashbacks to insert any necessary advance planning, makes for a game where every session feels like an episode of a TV show.

Which is, of course, perfect for a setting that actually comes from a TV show.

Scum and Villainy, despite some effectively filed off serial numbers, is pretty explicit about the three TV shows it attempts to recreate: Star Wars Rebels, Firefly and Cowboy Bebop.  And while I haven't tried the other two, it runs Firefly pretty much straight out of the box.

The one small tweak I make is that the Mystic playbook (clearly meant for playing Jedi) stays in the box.  For the short campaign I let one player who wanted to play a psychic swap out the initial special ability on his playbook for an appropriate one off the Mystic sheet.  For convention one-shots I don't use it at all.

Scum and Villainy is the system that I will be running Firefly games in for the foreseeable future.

What it lacks, though, is the kind of supplemental material that the licensed games come with.  And to my mind, one of the best add-ons for playing Firefly in Scum and Villainy is Firefly: The Game.

It's a pretty hefty purchase if you aren't already a board gamer, but if you can justify the expense it's a superb resource.  The main game comes with a fold-out map of the core and border planets (the White Sun, Red Sun and Georgia systems) and the expansions add the rim (Blue Sun and Kalidasa).  And it also comes with a giant stack of adventure seeds.  Grab a few cards off the Mission decks and you're sure to find a job for your crew.  A draw from the Misbehave deck should give you some ideas for the kind of challenges they need to overcome.  The planet decks are full of interesting NPCs and useful bits of equipment.

Since I found Scum and Villainy...
You can't take the sky from me.