An Ode to Obscure Games: Star Mogul

 Hi!

As my Leviathan plans have hit a bit of a snag with the expense of fixing my car and while I'm waiting for some sculpting supplies arriving I thought I'd spend a bit of time looking at some obscure games, either from my own collection or some of the little niche games that appear from time to time. Some stick around and I fully intend to pick up a copy someday while others vanish into obscurity (and I still plan on picking them up someday!)

One such game is Star Mogul.

Released in the States back in 2006, Star Mogul was very much ahead of its time as it involves rival salvage teams exploring abandoned settlements for loot while trying to stop their opponents from doing the same.

Sound familiar? The Osprey game Stargrave is much the same idea but with more powerful characters. Star Mogul is a decidedly blue collar affair with small forces, averaging about a dozen figures a side and the odd small vehicle or stompy robot to aid them looting out on the frontier in the years following an alien plague that decimated the outer worlds. 

Coupled with a somewhat ineffectual central Earth government these small companies operate beyond the law and fights regularly break out between rival teams.

What made the game so great was you had basic stats for your team but depending on how you used your experience points, resulted in a vast variety of options for how you formed your crew. They could be small in number but well equipped, larger numbers but poorly trained, add robots, quirky crew chief options and different skills and you could really play about with bringing pretty much anything to play.

As for the game, it was rather fun and leaned heavily into an ongoing campaign where your salvage crew would fight to grub whatever loot they could, and that was part of the fun; you didn't have to aim to wipe out your foes as you just needed to recover scrap whilst holding them off!

Coupled with some really interesting fog of war effects and the ability to really develop your characters, the game was a minor success and by 2007 there were two supplements.

Distant Worlds which brought in the Hydrissians, a reptile like race of aliens who had all sorts of interesting tech and the Asteroid Miners, heavily cyborgised humans who had an absolutely brilliant little line of figures.

The second supplement, Alien Evolution saw the arrival of the X-12 Android Cult, rebel robots who sought freedom from the slavery of the humans and the Mephalians, a barbarous degenerate race which has the remains of a long dead species tech and a crude knowledge of how to work it.

Sadly after the release of the Alien Evolution rules, Alpha Forge was sold to someone else who promptly did nothing with it and the game, support and miniatures were eventually sold on to Mega Minis who in turn broke up the range and sold them off piecemeal. 

Now I believe Armorcast has the rights to the rules and some of the figures but the rest have vanished back into obscurity but I highly recommend folks download the rules and have a bash. They are on SCRIBD as are the supplements and with the plethora of sci-fi figures out there these days, its pretty easy to put together a Salvage Team. 

I'd absolutely love to see this game being revamped with new miniatures, artwork and rules as it is a really great wee game with some properly characterful figures but with the status of the figure line, I doubt this will happen. 

The Desert Rose Salvage Crew painted by Supervike

Star Mogul was ahead of its time as it came out when the obsession with massive scale 28mm wargames like 40k were still strong and the niche skirmish market hadn't really developed into what we see today but if you're looking for a small skirmish game that feels a bit Necromunda meets Outland, you can't go wrong.

Looking back at it, I wish I'd picked up more of the range when they were available as I had several teams including the Asteroid Miners but they all went in the big clearout of 2008 when I went off to uni so maybe at some point I'll expend some more time on putting together two salvage crews and playing through the scenarios in the core book.

A Demo-Bot trundles through an abandoned settlement somewhere on the border 

I used to own all the books in physical format but now only have the PDF's so do plan on getting them printed out at some point and will get them bound so I can relive the pleasure of reading them.

A Salvage crew captain with trusty robot minion

Looking through my blog, I can see that I've posted about the game before and even played a game using 15mm figures which can be found HERE and HERE. I'm fairly sure I got some of the rules wrong but it gives a bit of an idea of the game.

I look forward to posting more gubbins over the coming week while I await sculpting supplies to get on with my Leviathan project but in the meantime, thanks for getting this far and All the best!

Richard