Against the Starmaster interview: Massimiliano Caracristi on space opera rules, vehicle criticals, and AI disclosures

Open00 space opera roleplaying game Against the Starmaster launched its public playtest on DriveThruRPG ahead of a scheduled November crowdfunding campaign, sparking community scrutiny after the storefront flagged the preview pack for containing machine-generated content. As Geek Native reported last month, the disclosure directly conflicted with publisher Open Ended Games’ emphasis on Tommaso Galmacci’s original art direction and Tazio Bettin’s cover art, raising questions about the role of gen AI assets in the final commercial print run.

Behind the production disclosures sits a substantial mechanical restructuring of the percentile chassis first popularised in Against the Darkmaster. To discover where generative tools touched the playtest, how vehicular combat operates without bloated critical tables, and why the system scrapped its predecessor’s nine-phase tactical structure, Geek Native spoke directly with lead designer Massimiliano Caracristi.

Against the Starmaster Interview

The DriveThruRPG storefront listing for the Against the Starmaster playtest explicitly flags the file as containing AI-generated content, yet official announcements highlight original art direction by Tommaso Galmacci. Where were generative tools used in this playtest pack, and what is your policy regarding machine-generated assets in the final commercial print run?

Every piece of art you see in the playtest pack, from the cover to the pre-generated character portraits, was made by our in-house artist and art director Tommaso. The alternate cover art on our webpage (https://againstthestarmaster.com/) was made by our good friend Tazio Bettin. We flagged the playtest pack on DTRPG because we used AI for assistance with proofreading, copyediting, layout, and with some of the elements in the map for the Burning Nebula scenario. We have no plans of using any kind of machine-generated asset for the final product. In fact, we’re already working with some incredibly talented artists (such as Borja Pindado, who’s working on the Player’s Handbook cover right now) to bring you more amazing handmade art that will bring the Against the Starmaster galaxy to life.

In your designer notes on skill progression, you outlined revisions to how vocations award Development Points across skill categories. How did you overhaul character progression to balance technical skills like piloting, astrogation, and cybernetic operation against raw combat proficiencies without forcing players into narrow specialisation traps?

Great question, and that was actually one of our main concerns when designing the game. Pulp space opera heroes tend to be relatively versatile, and we wanted to keep that. We wanted you to be able to build a starship captain who can hold their ground in combat, but also inspire their companions and pilot their ship. Or a genius mechanic who can fix anything but doesn’t have to automatically run for cover as soon as a firefight breaks out.

This is why we decided to drop the Against the Darkmaster skill development system, in favor of a more flexible structure. Every character gets a flat number of points to spend on skills, and their Vocation determines the cost tier for each skill. This way a character’s Vocation still has a strong identity, since some Skills will always be cheaper and faster to develop than others depending on what you picked, but buying Skills that are unusual for your Vocation feels less punishing than in VsD.

Moreover, we decided to keep skills, and in particular technical skills, as broad as possible, so that characters won’t have to spend all their budget to cover a particular area of expertise. So, for example, Science covers physics, chemistry, biology, and everything related; while Mechanics can be used to repair starships and other vehicles, operate complex machinery, and even fix the cybernetic limb of one of your companions. This way a player who want to build a ship’s engineer doesn’t have to invest in five different skills where one wishing to build a gunslinger needs only one.

Finally, there’s diminishing returns. After a certain point, increasing one skill just isn’t as good as picking up a new one, so the math of the game itself encourages versatility rather than overspecialization.

Adapting Open00 from Against the Darkmaster to space opera means shifting from flesh-and-bone fantasy injuries to high-tech warfare. How did you re-engineer the system’s d100 critical hit tables to handle both biological wounds and vehicular damage like hull breaches or reactor overloads without bloating the charts?

Mostly by keeping them separate. Characters and creatures track Hit Points and suffer Critical Strikes (and you’ll find a few new types of Critical Strike in Against the Starmaster, such as Laser and Bullet, to reflect the effects of high-tech weapons and attacks).

Starships and vehicles don’t have hit points at all. Instead, significant hits cause Malfunctions, rolled on a single Vehicular Malfunctions table, with a modifier based on their severity. Malfunctions can impose penalties on rolls made to operate the vehicle, force it to slow down, or even damage the crew manning it. Malfunction penalties stack, and past a certain threshold the vehicle becomes inoperable. And, of course, a sufficiently powerful attack can also destroy the vehicle with a single, well-placed strike.

This allows us to minimize book-keeping without losing what we feel are some of the core elements of the Open00 system, even when dealing with starships and other vehicles.

Starship combat in percentile systems often isolates non-piloting party members during dogfights. How do the space combat rules in Against the Starmaster give every crew member high-stakes tactical choices each round?

Here we have two different ways of handling it, depending on the scale of the fight.

For regular fights with vehicles in them, the tactical choices are basically the same for every combatant. Vehicle handlers must spend at least one of their actions to keep their vehicle from crashing, but otherwise everyone on board has the same actions as everybody else. This means they can shoot, take cover, attempt to jury rig a malfunction on the fly, assist their allies, or attempt any other action, exactly as if they were on foot.

On the other hand, things like actual dogfights, vehicle on vehicle battles, or fleet assaults are handled as Dramatic Challenges. These are a series of conflicting skill rolls, in which every character contributes through their own skill, even if they’re not personally on the vehicle themselves! So, it’s not just the pilot who rolls, but also their friends giving them attack coordinates through a communicator, or hacking into the enemy’s defense systems, or using their mystical powers to find a weak spot in the enemy’s battle station. Every character gets their turn to participate in the conflict and no one is left to watch the events unfold as a mere spectator while the others play the game.

Against the Starmaster covers a wide genre spread, from gritty blasters to mystical Starblades. How do the rules mathematically balance technologically focused characters alongside mystical energy users so neither style invalidates the other?

Well, there are several factors, but I think the main one is that Against the Starmaster treats all these abilities, including mystical powers, as skills. Simply put, each point spent in a mystical discipline (or in assault weapons), is a point not spent elsewhere. Each character builds their skill bonuses in the same way, and they all share the same math. The differences come from how the players spend their points: you can have an engineer commanding a swarm of drones, a frontline fighter in power armor and heavy blaster, a starblade wielding champion… They all feel very different in play, and offer a wide range of different options and playstyles, but they’re all built in the same way and within the same power curve.

You previously noted that your priority is tailoring mechanics to specific genres rather than building a generic retroclone. Which legacy mechanics from Against the Darkmaster failed when tested against space opera tropes, and what did you replace them with?

Beyond character progression, which we covered earlier, the biggest change was the combat round structure. In Against the Darkmaster, the combat round is organized into 9 phases, and each phase corresponds to a certain type of action. So, for example, readied range attacks happen before melee attacks, and the order in which melee attacks are resolved is determined by the length of the attacker’s weapon. And that works well for fantasy, because it allows a certain degree of tactics while keeping the scale of battle rather personal. Each fight is almost a duel between the hero and their adversaries. But in a space opera setting, battles are much more dynamic. Combatants are moving around more, ranged weapons are basically the norm, and the length of your sword doesn’t matter at all. So we streamlined the round, structuring it around how long it takes to perform an action. This means that quick actions like dashing for cover or a fast shot happen early, while more deliberate ones like a carefully aimed blow happens later, whether you’re wielding a laser gun or a shock pike. We also stopped measuring distances in meters, moving to a more abstract “theater of the mind” system that uses combat areas instead. That makes it much easier to handle all the kinds of weird environments and obstacles one could encounter in a space opera setting, and keeps the combat fast even when everyone is always moving around and shooting.

Travel is another area that changed a lot. In epic fantasy the heroic journey often occupies a large part of the story, but in space opera characters can just jump from one planet to the next one. So we kept a lighter version of the Against the Darkmaster travel rules for situations like exploring an ice-covered moon or crossing an asteroid field, but we shifted the focus on other elements, such as handling star travel and rules for starships and other vehicles. And in many space opera stories the main ship is almost a character unto itself, so we gave the heroes’ home ship its own rules and personality.

Against the Darkmaster leaned into a focused aesthetic inspired by classic high fantasy and heavy metal music. Because Against the Starmaster is setting-agnostic, how do you keep the core mechanics feeling distinctive rather than a generic sci-fi toolkit?

Against the Starmaster is setting-agnostic in the sense that it isn’t tied to a specific setting and lets you create your own galaxy, but that doesn’t mean you can use it to play every kind of science fiction. The rules are geared towards a heroic space opera, so if you’re looking for a “hard sci-fi” type of game, you’re likely going to be disappointed. You have things like the heroes’ home ship being much harder to destroy than any other spaceship. Axes being a viable weapon choice in a galaxy where laser guns exist. Aether drives powered by mystical energies. Heroic deeds fueled by Passions and Drive. The tempting lure of the Dark Path. And, of course, above all is the Starmaster Himself. So yes, you can customize your setting and your villain, but at its core, Against the Starmaster remains a game about a group of heroes rising against a galactic tyrant.

What obscure sci-fi story, comic, or independent tabletop title served as an unexpected influence during design that you would recommend readers check out?

We’ll have a whole section dedicated to our sources of inspiration in the book, but I must say that I’ve enjoyed myself perhaps a little too much revisiting some of the 80s movies that were, let’s say, “inspired” by Star Wars. The Legend of Orin, The Last Starfighter, Masters of the Universe, Battle Beyond the Stars… I loved these kinds of movies as a kid, and they still have a certain charm. And they are definitely Starmaster material!

Thanks, Massimiliano.

You can test the modified Open00 engine firsthand by downloading the free Against the Starmaster Playtest Rules on DriveThruRPG, which includes the complete Burning Nebula scenario and pre-generated characters ahead of Open Ended Games’ Kickstarter launch this November.