I've always loved running games, it's great fun being able to tell a story with your pals. For a while though, I've found a lot of systems require a lot of prep work and a lot of book keeping to run properly and smoothly. There's been an itch I've wanted scratching for a while.

Along comes Black Star, which promises a rules light approach to roleplay, emphasising ease-of-use to tell a story, and a player-facing system to ensure they're the ones in the limelight. And on these promises, this game delivers. The 2d6 with bonus/penalty system is wonerfully elegant, and having the same target number to succeed removes a lot of the tedium with difficulty scores and enemy modifiers and such. There are a good number of skills, talents, and equipment listed in the book to choose from to really tailor make your character however you see fit, and creating additional options yourself with homebrew is wonderfully simple due to how straightfoward the system is. While the inspiration for its setting and presentation are obvious, you can just about use these rules for any science-fiction/cyberpunky setting you can think of.

Combat is wonderfully streamlined, making focusing on dramatic action and setpieces all the easier without the need to track things like actions, hit points, initiative, etc. A player has a turn, then an NPC has a turn, and this alternates until the round is complete. Attacking is as simple as making a roll and if you succeed then you shoot a guy. Being attacked is as simple as rolling a defense roll to not take damage. The core of this system also applies to space combat, which in a lot of other science fiction roleplaying games, usually becomes an entirely separate subsystem with its own tedium and several new moving parts to juggle and track.

Overall, Black Star is a great lightweight science-fiction RPG for those who don't like the granular, number-crunchiness of some other combat-focused RPGs, and who prefer a fast moving engine for storytelling and roleplaying. Its relatively small word and page count make it an especially excellent RPG for beginners or for veterans on-the-go looking for something to learn quickly and improvise with.