From Introduction:
I started work on PRIME in November 1998. Ever since than I began working on it for about a few hours every few months. I don't know when I will finish this work, most probably never.
PRIME is my futuristic role-playing world. I was inspired by many sci-fi stories and you often can guess which parts are "stolen" from other sources. I do not hide this fact, because nothing in the world is perfectly new and everything is a modification or variation of an older idea, it sometimes just takes longer to identify the origins. Why then did I write a new role-playing background? I do own Battlelords of the 23rd Century, Battletech: Mechwarrior, Mutant Chronicles, Heavy Gear, Shadowrun, Bubblegum Crisis (and others..), I've seen movies like 5th Element, Star Wars, Star Trek and many more, and every world has its ideas, but none was absolutely what I was looking for.
So what am I looking for? In sci-fi I enjoy aliens, a lot of playable alien races, space pirates hiding in asteroid belts, multilateral politics and diplomacy, giant space battles, heroism and adventure. It's LowTech Sci-Fi and Space Opera, not as dark as Fading Suns, not as specialised as Space Gothic. What's LowTech and Space Opera in my eyes: I want a crew right from a curiosity show. I want the ship to be as old as methusalem and as reliable as Winxxxxx5. I want the ship's engineer to take a hammer, slam it against the 'proton-pulse drive', and, whoarr.., it work's. He's the engineer, he knows his job. No tech-talk.
But my main problem was the scale of sci-fi worlds/universes. Did you ever imagine how a space vessel full of pirates should hide in space? By scaling down the gaming world to one star system I feel this problem partly solved. Spaceships do not have to travel light-years to their destiny and by setting several planets into the sun's orbits a ship may as well be intercepted from asteroid fields or nearby planets.
The gaming rules I choose are from the Fuzion system. I did not want to put extra energy in the creation of a new system if there is the perfect one for free. Fuzion is in my opinion the perfect choice for science fiction and action based role playing.
