How I integrated the Star Frontiers setting into Star Drive

I could have simply just added new races and a couple of new worlds and been fine with it, but I wasn’t satisfied with that. I went a little deeper and decided to take a few elements and characteristics of the Frontier and used them to create a story arch and potential sub-campaign.

There were three major sources I used to draw from. (1) Core Star Frontiers rules books, (2) Dragon Magazine’s conversion of Star Frontiers races to Alternity, and (3) d20 Future.

• The Vrusks are the elder race. There is a lot of mystery behind the Vrusk, the formation of their stellar nation and seemingly generous upbringing of the Yazirians and Dralasites.
• One of the biggest characteristics about Star Frontiers is that none of the alien races have homeworlds. The Dragon Magazine article and d20 Future conversions both assigned homeworlds to all the alien races. I decided to play on that. I redesigned the Frontier, renamed it the Zebulon’s Expanse, and gave the Vrusks, Yazierian and Dralasites a homeworld (as well as the silly races from Zebulon’s Guide). In most cases, I gave them the homeworld the Dragon Magazine article gave them. However I went a step further and planted humans through out the region, with no apparent homeworld. In the new timeline, I had the Expanse humans, for a time, treated as second rate citizens because htey had no homeworld. There was an uprising and now the humans seem to have equal standing. But there are still tensions between the other races and the humans.
• Sathars waged three wars with the UPF and were defeated each time. In the last one, they took major losses and their homeworld was reduced to nuclear slag, although few now remember where the homeworld is. After signing a peace accord, a cold war between the two major powers has been in place. Much intrigue revolves around this cold war. It’s been 200 years since any overt Sathar activity and some believe that they are slowly dying out.
• The technology is very mixed. Ship tech does not have artificial gravity (still borderline tech level 5) but they have personal shields (tech level 8 and 9). Although this is a convenient interpretation of the True20/Modern Tech levels, I am using that to add a little more mystery to the region. The source of some of this knowledge can be traced to Vrusk mega-corporations.
• I am developing a re-invention of the Mechanons that I think is really cool. But I can’t say much as it is tied to the current campaign.