Welcome back explorers!
It’s the much anticipated (at least by me) Sathar issue. In this issue we take a look at the Sathar, the enemy alien race in the Star Frontiers setting. And while the Sathar come from Star Frontiers, most of the material presented here is game mechanics light and could easily be used to drop the Sathar into any existing sci-fi campaign.
I was looking forward to this issue for a couple of reasons. The first is that the ideas that are presented in the Sathar Military Organization article have been bouncing around in my head since about the time we started the Frontier Explorer and I finally had a chance to get them out on paper.
Along with the details from that article, I’ve had the ideas for the interior deck plans of a Sathar ship rattling around in my brain as well. I generated a complete set of deck plans for a Sathar Destroyer, 25 decks in all. And then when we started to put the issue together I realized that we had way too much material. Since the deck plans were a very large article, between 15 to 20 pages in length, they simply weren’t going to fit and had to be dropped from the issue.
Since the ship didn’t fit in this issue, we will be releasing it as a ‘Frontier Explorer Presents’ special issue. Look for it around Thanksgiving time. In the end I think that format will work better as we won’t be trying to cram the images into as small a space as possible to allow as many other articles to be included. It will be a stand-alone technical manual for the Destroyer.
I’d also like to give a shout out to our new staff member, William Douglass. William is coming onboard primarily as another editor primarily responsible for doing the layout and helping put the issue all together. Those of you who read the Star Frontiersman magazine have seen his work as he has been doing layout and editor of that magazine since issue 18.
You may also have noticed a change in the cover design. We had an excellent review of issue 3 by Paco Garcia Jaen over at the GSM Magazine blog. Paco gave us some great advice in the review. You can find the full review at
http://www.gmsmagazine.com/role_playing_game/rpg-review-frontier-explorer. We’ll be implementing some of his suggestions in upcoming issues, starting with the content titles on the cover of this issue. If you have any suggestions for improvements to the magazine, feel free to drop us a line at editors@frontierexplorer.org and let us know. We’d love to hear from you.
Now it’s time to dive in and start learning about the Sathar. Hopefully it will give you some ideas for your own game.
Have fun and keep exploring!
- Tom Stephens
Senior Editor
