If you are looking at an excellent OSR sci-fi game, check out Stars Without Number. But we are playing FrontierSpace slash Star Frontiers! Why bring this up? Well, if you are looking for sci-fi gamemaster tools, this book is a must-have.
There are a few tools worth mentioning. First, they have an excellent adventure-focused "world tag" system on page 132 that divides iconic world types into five categories: enemies, friends, complications, things, and places. Have a world or asteroid base that falls into the "forbidden tech" tag? You could encounter a mad scientist enemy or a friendly cyber merchant. You could have an insane AI creating evil robots. Data on this world recovered may be valuable. There could be a horrific laboratory, facility overrun by robots, or creepy corporate research base here.
If you need ideas for what could be in or happen at various classic sci-fi locations, this is your book. Just the inspiration alone is worth hundreds of adventures. Could I imagine a distress call from a research base in an asteroid field that has been taken over by a mad AI, and inside are dozens of household and science robots converted over to be mad killer robots? Yes! That is fun! If you can't think of an adventure, the tags and tables in this book will instantly give you a fun idea for a sci-fi adventure.
There are hundreds of charts for people, places, problems, conflicts, and even a faction design system. Random names, NPCs, and societies? The book has them. It also has much, much more.
The game itself is excellent and more of an OSR d20-style game, well worth playing and exploring on its own. There is so much here that it is easy to go overboard and include everything this game covers, but I would recommend starting simple and using the idea generation tools here first.
SWN is also a higher-tech universe than FS-SF, so you may want to think twice about including some of the tech and content from this game at first. If you use items in this game as alien artifacts, ensure their secrets can't be discovered and keep them to "one special item in the entire universe only" things. PGC won't be able to replicate a matter transporter and put it on the market, nor do you want this for your game. And if that item or artifact is destroyed, so be it; that was the only one.
But the referee tools in this game are pure joy and a treat to explore, and if you are stuck for ideas, this is the book to grab and open up.
This is another book I wish I had as a kid when running my original Star Frontiers game. Running sci-fi is complicated, but this makes coming up with "what happens next" or "what could be here" so easy and fun.
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