Silent Death is a game of starship combat. It was originally published in 1990 by Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE) as Silent Death: Metal Express, the latter moniker to denote its usage of metal spaces ships in an era that predominantly used cardboard markers in games. The game received a rules revamp in 1995 and was rebranded Silent Death: The Next Millennium.
The game was originally a derivative of ICE’s SpaceMaster Star Strike battle system aimed at small fast skirmishes using an innovative Combined Attack Dice mechanism already piloted in ICE’s Blade Storm Fantasy Skirmish game. ICE no longer exists and the rights to Silent Death now belong to silent-death.mx. They hold all legal rights to the source material and run a going concern shop where books and miniatures may be be purchased.
The silent-death.mx site provides a detailed history of the game. Further to this yours truly wrote two articles for Black Gate Magazine to remind people that this awesome game still exists. The articles were inspired by the cover of Megan E. O’Keefe’s book Chaos Vector. The spaceship by the artist Sparth (Nicholas Bouvier) was similar enough to the Silent Death Talon ship that John O’Neal and I were inspired to collaborate on a write up. The articles can be found here and here.
Silent Death Resources on the Net
Back in the day, when the internet had a different look and feel, before the likes of Word Press and when Google was just a small search engine, there was Z Silent Death page. The owner ran a forum and published home grown resources for the game. It was cool to hang out there and participate. Sadly something happened, some sort of falling out based on copying Z’s material – it was a long time ago and that wonderful resource was removed.
Silent Death relater material on the internet is becoming a bit thin, but as I find references in will post the here:
1D6Chan – A wikipedia based site devoted to traditional and tabletop gaming.