Space 1889
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| Designer(s) | Frank Chadwick |
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| Publisher(s) | Game Designers' Workshop, Heliograph, Inc., Untreed Reads Publishing LLC |
| Publication date | 1988, 2011 |
| Genre(s) | Steampunk, Victorian Science Fiction |
| System(s) | Custom |
Space: 1889 is a tabletop role-playing game of Victorian-era space-faring, created by Frank Chadwick and originally published by Game Designers' Workshop from 1988 to 1991 and later reprinted by Heliograph, Inc. in 2000 and 2001. In February 2013 Chronicle City announced that they were working with the German publisher Uhrwerk Verlag/Clockwork Publishing on a new English edition of Space 1889, which is based on the German edition from 2011 which uses the Ubiquity ruleset. In December 2014 Uhrwerk Verlag separated their ties with Chronicle City and continued the translation of the new English version on their own. The PDF of the English Ubiquity core rulebook was released in October 2014 , the print version in November 2015.
The first published description of Space: 1889 was in the "Feedback" column in the TSR/SPI publication Ares Magazine in 1983, as a proposal for a board wargame. The title is both a parody of the television show Space: 1999 and a continuation of the GDW naming convention applied to two of its previous role-playing games, Twilight: 2000 and Traveller: 2300 (the latter of which was later renamed 2300 AD in order to prevent confusion with Traveller), though neither previous game had any connection to the Space: 1889 universe. The name Space: 1889 is a registered trademark belonging to Chadwick.
The game presented an alternate history in which certain discredited Victorian scientific theories were instead found to be true and have led to the existence of new technologies. In the setting, Thomas Edison invented an "ether propeller" which could propel ships through the "luminiferous aether" (the universal medium that permeates space, based on a now outdated scientific theory), and traveled to Mars in 1870 accompanied by Scottish soldier of fortune Jack Armstrong, where they discovered that the planet was inhabited. By the time of the game's setting in 1889, the great powers have used Edison’s invention to extend their colonies and interests to the inner planets of the solar system. Venus and Mars have been colonized by The United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Russia have colonized both Venus and Mars Belgium has only colonized Mars and Italy has only colonized Venus whilst Japan and the United States maintain economic and scientific enclaves on Mars. There are no colonies or bases on the Moon. Only the United Kingdom maintains a (scientific) base on Mercury.
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