Recycled In Space / Tabletop Games

• The Agents of PSI setting for d20 Modern is James Bond With Psychic Powers!
• CAMELOT Trigger, from FATE Worlds 2, is King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table IN SPACE! PILOTING MECHA!
• BattleTech: At first glance most of the Successor States and other factions are expys of medieval or 16th-18th century nations, though they are written well enough to be unique states in their own right.
  • House Davion (Federated Suns): England / France IN SPACE
  • House Steiner (Lyran Commonwealth): (West) Germany, with Scottish & Irish elements IN SPACE
  • House Marik (Free Worlds League): Yugoslavia / Austro-Hungarian Empire IN SPACE
  • House Kurita (Draconis Combine): Shogunate Japan IN SPACE
  • House Liao (Capellan Confederation): Imperial/Communist China and Soviet Union IN SPACE
    • St. Ives Compact: Taiwan IN SPACE
  • Comstar: the Medieval Church IN SPACE
  • Free Rasalhague Republic: Scandinavia IN SPACE
  • Magistracy of Canopus: Las Vegas IN SPACE
  • Outworlds Alliance: Amish / Mennonites IN SPACE
  • Marian Hegemony: Republican / Imperial Rome IN SPACE (by deliberate design of its founder)
  • Tortuga Dominions: Pirates of the Caribbean IN SPACE
  • Nueva Castile: Reconquista Spain IN SPACE (until Clan Goliath Scorpion takes over)
  • Hanseatic League: Exactly What It Says on the Tin IN SPACE
  • Mostly averted with the Clans, which were deliberately designed as a new society (both in-universe and in real life), but they do use Mongol terminology and initially burst upon the Inner Sphere much as the Mongol horde did to medieval Europe.
  • The original version of the game, BattleDroids was a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max setting IN SPACE with Humongous Mecha.
• CthulhuTech is Call of Cthulhu IN THE FUTURE! Although not IN SPACE! as the Migou tend to blow up anything the NEG tries to keep up.
  • Steve Jackson Games has already done GURPS: Cthulhupunk, a sourcebook that puts Cthulhu IN CYBERPUNK!
  • And for the BRP system, there's licensed Chaosium product Cthulhu Rising - the original Call of Cthulhu IN THE FUTURE! AND IN SPACE! BATTLING DEEP ONES ON EUROPA! RUNNING FROM DIMENSIONAL SHAMBLERS ON GANYMEDE!
• The board game Clank! (a dungeon crawling deck builder) was released as a rethemed version Clank! In! Space!
• Dungeon World is Dungeons & Dragons Powered by the Apocalypse!
• d20 Future is d20 Modern (which is Dungeons & Dragons IN THE MODERN WORLD!) IN THE FUTURE!... oh, all right: IN SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!
• d20 Past and d20 Apocalypse are Dungeons & Dragons IN THE LATE 1800s and After the End respectively. Both also have Urban Arcana style settings.
• The Eberron campaign setting is Dungeons & Dragons FEATURING MAGITEK!
• Eclipse Phase is Delta Green IN SPACE.
• Gamma World was already D&D After the End!
• Parodied with Greg Stolze's free rpg In Spaaaaaaace!, which is billed as a generic space opera...IN SPAAAAAACE! Yes, generic space operas are already in spaaaaaaace. That is, of course, the joke.
• Metamorphosis Alpha: Is pretty literally D&D ON A SPACESHIP!
• Monopoly. Dear LORD, Monopoly. There's Monopoly WITH SPONGEBOB! Monopoly WITH DISNEY!! Monopoly WITH LORD OF THE RINGS!! Just check Google Images. Or any store that sells classic games.
  • And, of course, IN SPAAAAAACE! as well. In multiple flavors, at that.
  • Also Pokemonopoly, although for whatever reason they didn't portmanteau it and marketed it as Pokemon Monopoly.
• Star Munchkin: "Kill the monsters. Grab the treasure. Stab your buddy IN SPACE!" [1]◊
  • It should go without saying that the other Munchkins are merely Munchkin WITH PIRATES, WITH KUNG FU, IN THE WORLD OF DARKNESS, WITH ZOMBIES, WITH CTHULHU and so forth.
• Renegade Legion pits The Roman Empire IN SPACE against the United Kingdom IN SPACE.
• Spacemaster is Rolemaster... In space!
• Spelljammer is literally Dungeons & Dragons IN SPACE! It was largely unpopular, but it has a significant cult following.
• Space 1889: despite the name, this game, as a whole, averts the trope, being one of the earliest examples of steampunk. Making a role-playing game based on late 19th century science fiction and historical late 19th century was a new idea, not an existing idea put in space. However the adventure "Twenty Thousand Leagues Through Martian Skies" in Challenge #74 is Jules Verne's ''20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" recycled in the Martian atmosphere.
• Star Realms is Dominion meets Magic: The Gathering IN SPACE!
• Starfinder is, of course, Pathfinder...IN SPAAAAACE!
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: A Klingon Challenge has much the same gameplay mechanics and presentation as Atmosfear, the first VCR board game to be a real hit. That said, A Klingon Challenge actually includes several gameplay mechanics that would later find their way into the first major Atmosfear overhaul, The Harbingers.
• Stars Without Number is so much Dungeons & Dragons IN SPAAAAACE, the rules are explicitly intended to be compatible with reskinned D&D second edition modules.
• Traveller Interstellar Wars is the Greco-Persian wars in space, all the way from Marathon through Alexander's conquest.
• Warhammer 40,000 began as Warhammer IN SPACE! but is now pretty much its own entity; it still, however, has goblins in space, orcs in space, elves in space, ogres in space, the Church Militant in space, vikings in space, communists in space and Chaos Gods in space. The earliest versions also had dwarfs in space until c. 1993, reintroducing them in 2022.
  • Many armies invoke a flavor of actual historical armies, albeit in space. Catachan regiments are the Vietnam-era US Army, the Armageddon Steel Legion is WWII Germany, the Death Korps of Krieg is the entire Western front of WWI but made much more grim, Space Wolves are Space Vikings, Dark Angels are Arthurian Knights, Black Templars are Teutonic Knights, and so on.
  • And even individual characters can often be spaced-up versions of historical figures. Lord Solar Macharius is Alexander the Great IN SPACE. Creed is Winston Churchill IN SPACE. The Emperor himself is variously portrayed as either Jesus or God the Father or even Hitler IN SPACE, with his Primarchs ranging from Space Octavian (Roboute Guilliman), King Arthur (Lion El'Jonson), Batman (Konrad Curze), and Thor (Leman Russ) to Space Genghis Khan (Jaghatai Khan) and Spartacus (Alpharius Omegon and Angron).
  • The backstory for the Imperium, the, Horus Heresy, is Paradise Lost IN SPACE
  • Ironically, many fans consider Fantasy Battle's successor, Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, to be Warhammer 40000...IN FANTASY, complete with multiple worlds, a God-Emp... err sorry, God-King of Mankind and an order of holy warriors engineered by this God-King to be humanity's leading army.
• White Wolf has a bizarre relationship with this trope, Retcon, and Spiritual Successor.
  • Mage: The Ascension was originally conceived as the medieval RPG, Ars Magica, IN THE MODERN DAY! — but then begat not only Mage: The Sorcerers' Crusade (MtA IN THE RENAISSANCE!), but, once White Wolf sold the rights to Ars Magica itself, Dark Ages: Mage.
  • Exalted, in turn, was supposed to be the original Old World of Darkness IN PREHISTORY! — but then came Scion, self-described as Exalted: IN THE MODERN WORLD WITH ANCIENT MYTHS ON TOP! (Though Scion doesn't necessarily match that description.)
    • With Shards of the Exalted Dream, Exalted has two different variants of Exalted IN SPAAAAAAAAAAACE! No, seriously. The cover even has the Scarlet Empress doing her best impression of a certain Spectre, plus another version who's a space barbarian queen with autoklaves behind her throne. The two variants are Heaven's Reach, which plays space for grandeur and size, and Gunstar Autochthonia, which is a lot more claustrophobic. Shards also includes The Modern Age, Exalted in a modern setting, and Burn Legend, which is basically Exalted as a video fighting game.
    • Scion itself has a couple of alternate settings: the campaign in Scion: Ragnarok takes place in a setting where only Norse Mythology is true, as opposed to the basic Scion setting where All Myths Are True, and Scion Companion offers a historical setting in World War II.
  • Less problematic are the other historical games set in the Old World of Darkness: Vampire: THE DARK AGES!, Werewolf: THE WILD WEST!, et al.
  • There are also the settings in different cultures. Best known is the Year of the Lotus event which gave Asian treatments of every gameline, the flagship title being Kindred of the East.
  • The New World of Darkness has two types of alternate setting: one, nicknamed "Shards", translates the NWOD into alternate genre-settings, such as Bleeding Edge, which is NWOD cyberpunk, and Infinite Macabre, which is the NWOD IN SPACE! The other is historical settings for the various gamelines, such as Requiem for Rome, which is Vampire: The Requiem in the dying days of the Roman Empire, and Victorian Lost, which is Changeling: The Lost in Victorian Britain. Mage Noir manages to pull off a two-for-one, being Mage: The Awakening in the noir genre, set in post-World War II America.

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