Fading Suns: The Sinful Stars

My best friend Ben bought me a copy of the Fading Suns fiction anthology, the Sinful Stars, and it came in the mail this weekend. It’s game fiction, but I don’t care. It’s Fading Suns and I fucking love Fading Suns.

I’m only two stories in so far, but I’m having a blast with it. Usually I am totally disinterested in published game settings, unless they’re a licensed property or something. Sometimes I sit around wishing I could have pretend Star Trek adventures or pretend Conan adventures, or whatever media I am excited about at the moment, but I basically never sit around wishing I could have pretend adventures in some world invented primarily for a roleplaying game.

That’s not to say I have a hate-on for published settings; I just don’t usually get all that excited about them. Most of the time I am of the opinion that I can come up with something just as good on my own.

But there are some exceptions, and Fading Suns is the big one. I love Fading Suns with a true and perfect love, but I have only been able to run it a bare handful of times, and I have only been able to play it never. I suppose I could push harder for it, but I kind of think I would be diasppointed unless the other players in the group were also at least modestly excited about the setting. Also, despite my rumblings about wanting to convert it to some other system, RedBrick is coming out with a third edition soon that looks good, so I’m honestly just going to wait for that.

In the meantime, I have this here fiction anthology. And you know what? When all you really want is to have imaginary adventures in an imaginary world, it turns out that reading about adventures in an imaginary world is almost as good, or sometimes even better. So for now, this book scratches the itch. Thanks, Ben.