About

The Star Frontiersman is a community supported fan magazine for the Star Frontiers role-playing game. The content is produced by fans in the Star Frontiers community and the magazine is edited by community volunteers. The issues are provided free of charge.

In addition the the magazine issues, the Star Frontiersman also provides a set of "remastered" rule books containing the core Star Frontiers Alpha Dawn and Knight Hawks rules along with the Zebulon's Guide to the Frontier. These rule books also contain other optional rules that can be used with the core rule sets. As part of this "Remastered" project, we also provide reprints of many of the original adventure modules.

History

The Star Frontiersman was started back in 2007 by Bill Logan as a fun way to provide additional Star Frontiers rules and information to his players. Having produced the magazine, he decided to make it available on the web for others to use and enjoy, along with the remastered Alpha Dawn rules. Over the next few months, Bill produced the first six issues of the Star Frontierman.

As the popularity of the magazine grew, Bill converted it from a private project into a community one and recruited Star Frontiers fans to help edit and prepare the magazine. He maintained senior editor status through issue 8. Starting with issue 9, Bill passed the senior editor status on to Greg Rapp. However, Greg was unable to finish the issue and passed it on to Tom Stephens who completed and published issue 9 and went on to produce issues 10 and 11 as well.

Starting with issue 12, Larry Moore wanted to take over as senior editor and so Tom passed the reins to him. Between issues 12 and 13, Bill and Larry formed DwD Studios and the magazine became a product of the new company with Larry at the helm. Larry served as the senior editor of the magazine through issue 19 with a lot of work done by Tom Stephens, William Douglass, and Tom Verreault as assistant editors.

Starting with issue 20, William Douglass took over the reins as senior editor. With Larry busy with other projects and the Toms having started producing the Frontier Explorer magazine, William was basically working alone and produced issues 20 through 24. With the help of Bill, these issues were published at nearly monthly intervals.

After issue 24, Bill started looking at the direction and resources of DwD Studios and decided that it was in the best interest of the company and the Star Frontiersman magazine that DwD Studios not be responsible for running the magazine any longer. And so he contacted Tom Stephens to see if there was interest in the Frontier Explorer taking over management of the Star Frontiersman and keeping it alive. Tom was happy to do so and so the two Star Frontiers fan magazines are now together under one roof.

The Future

So what's next?

At the very least, there will be an issue 25. William had completed that issue at the same time he completed issues 20-24 so it is basically ready to go. We'll be making a few small changes but it should be out in the near future. We hope to do other issues after that but the rate will depend on the number of community submissions and available time to work on the magazine.

We have a bunch of remastered Dragon articles that never made it into any issue. We defintely want to get those out there. So we may do an issue just of old Dragon articles or maybe make a special remastered product out of them.

There was a project to remaster all of the original modules that was never completed. SF6 - Dark Side of the Moon is mostly done and we still need to do the three Beyond the Frontier modules (SFKH2-4). So you can look to see those in the future as well.

Additionally, we're not closing the submission queue. We are still gladly accepting content for publication. The only difference now is that the content is submitted to a joint publication queue that is shared between the Star Frontiersman and the Frontier Explorer. See our Submission Policy page for the complete details. So keep sending submissions and we'll make sure they get published. And it doesn't have to be just Star Frontiers related material. It can apply to any Sci-fi setting or game. We'd love to see some variety.

A final project in the works, probably very long term, is to complete the Star Frontiersman wiki pages on the Star Frontiers Network wiki. Back in 2010, Tom Stephens started working on this project but it kind of fell by the wayside. Issues 1-6 and 14 are online but the others still await completion. This is something we'd like to finish to make the Star Frontiersman articles available on-line in wiki format to allow for easy access.

So that's where we stand. If you're interested in helping out on any of these projects, drop us a line at editors@starfrontiersman.com and we'll gladly put you to work.

  • Frontier Explorer Magazine

Donations

If you enjoy the Star Frontiersman and the Frontier Explorer and would like to help keep them on-line, consider making a donation.