The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Marshal Law has always been one of my favorite comic books, primarily because it either dropped or turned on its head most of the conventions of the superhero genre. Sure, it was hardly the only one - Alan Moore's Watchmen and Miracleman, Rick Veitch's Bratpack, Mark Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme, and so forth. All of them were brilliant (although I haven't read Miracleman or Squadron Supreme) to varying degrees, especially the must-read Watchmen, but they didn't have the flat-out bitterness and sarcasm that Marshal Law had. Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill had a universe where superheroes were essentially phonies, soldiers given superheroic powers and sent to fight in a South American war that was like "Halloween night in Hell," according to the title character. Because of their lack of a normal sensation of pain, superheroes wound up almost always becoming sadists. Most of them form gangs, or work in underground fight rings; some of them, in one of the series' funniest moments, work like prostitutes, allowing normal men to beat them up as a form of stress relief. Marshal Law was a "hero hunter", tasking himself to keep the peace and to bring down the Public Spirit, whose propaganda led thousands to their death. The book is hyperviolent, hypersexual, darkly funny, and constantly sending barbed arrows into the entire idea of superheroism as a concept. But behind it all was the unspoken acknowledgement that Marshal Law was himself a hero, bearing all of the attributes but denying that he was.

So, what in the hell does this have to do with Underground? Underground is essentially the role-playing version of Marshal Law, except lacking in almost everything that made Marshal Law good. Yes, there's unbelievably massive superheroes strutting around with big guns. Yes, the government is corrupt. Yes, it's hyper-violent. Yes, it's consistently critical of superheroes. There's slogans on the walls and there's superheroic gangs, but Underground manages only to ape the surface elements of Marshal Law without really understanding what it's about. The skin is there, but no muscle and no bone.

I think that one of the main failings of the book is that it's soaked through with leftist critiques of the society - the corporations and the government are unbelievably corrupt, to the point where free speech needs a license and certain forms of terrorism are legalized. The superheroes are essentially cast-aside veterans of a number of unjust wars, and the economy is in ruins. Things weren't much different in Marshal Law, but the difference is that Marshal Law had a wicked sense of humor, throwing dark jokes and funny slogans ("Yeah, they amaze me" "Who Barted?" "Fliers Only" "Sewer Sides Up!" and so forth) into almost every panel. It was leftist, but subtly so, and it was less about politics as it was about how hero worship leads to ruin. Underground takes itself much too seriously, suggesting that superheroes are going to be the ones that revamp society. The entire point of Marshal Law was that superheroes were utterly ineffectual in almost every task, doing good only as images, and Underground misses this idea by a good country mile.

But enough about Marshal Law, at least for now. Underground was published by Mayfair Games back in the early 90's, apparently using a variant of the DC Superheroes system. (I wouldn't know.) Set in the around 2020, the world has changed dramatically. Wars are settled by corporate "conflict resolution firms", which employ super-powered soldiers to fight. Civilian and conventional force casualties tend to skyrocket when they fight, of couse, which makes war that much more horrific. Once they muster out, though, super-soldiers are left on their own in a society that doesn't have jobs for them. The net result is that they either tend to become criminals or political activists, in the "Underground" - a terrorist organization out to bring down the corrupt government of the United States. There's a lot of oppurtunities for former superheroes to do some good - or some evil. Meanwhile, corporations produce their own consumers, "pre-frontals", who have become the new blue-collar working class. There's a Tastee-Ghoul restaurant where accident victims tithe their bodies to be eaten. (I don't know why, since there's no mention of food deficiencies, but perhaps it's a gourmet thing.) In short, it's a dystopia. Characters seem to trend towards stereotypes, although I imagine that GMs are meant to flesh them out into real people.

The system uses 2d10 for resolution. Both player and GM roll 2d10, then add the attribute or ability in question; in the event that the task is more difficult, there's a difficulty number that gets tacked on to the GM's side of the roll. Rather than just creating a difficulty number to exceed, the GM - or somebody trustworthy - has to roll for the opposing side of the equation every time. I'm not entirely sure that I disagree with this approach, but I mostly play online; that kind of dice-rolling is going to drive me nuts, and it seems like it would have just been easier to make it a "beat this number to win" system than forcing a dice roll. There's also an addition of a graded scale for results, where the amount of distance between the GM's dice roll and your own shows how well you did, which is one of the game's primary mechanics.

And then there's the unit system. May God help us all in our time of trial, because this is one of the most annoying things about the Underground system. It simulates various weights and measures by assigning them a unit scale - for example, 4 units equals 250 pounds, 30 feet, twelve seconds and 150 cubic feet. You manipulate units in order to find out how they interact with each other. For example, a character with a strength of nine can throw a 5-unit weight four units (9-5=4) - in other words, some thirty feet. It's a useful mechanic, especially for when you want a specific measure, BUT the problem is that it's a fundemental part of the game system. Everything - including time - is measured in units, so one day is measured as 44 units rather than as one day. Regeneration, for example, knocks your rating off of the amount of time that it takes to heal a single wound.

This is a silly idea. The units chart is good for specific measurement, but I'll be damned if I'll look at a chart every time I want to find out when I make a healing challenge, or whenever I want to pick something up, or damned near anything. It's a unique idea, to be sure, but I'm not going to perform the equivalent of learning the metric system every time that I want to figure something out. I don't know; maybe it becomes transparent as you play, but given how complicated character creation is, I'm not feeling particularly optimistic. Personally, I dislike the idea; you may get different mileage.

I didn't realize how complex this game could be until I created a character, following the example of a reviewer in Dragon magazine. You actually allocate some $20,000,000 of the military's money to the creation of your superhuman soldier, in four categories. Genetic surgery and reconditioning both have preset limits on how much you can spend; genetic surgery and recruitment cash do not. Why the preset limits on those two categories? They determine how successful your character's modifications were and how close to going insane he is at the end of his military career; that's something that you won't often see in a role-playing game. Genetic surgery and recruitment cash determine how many points you've got for superpowers, skills and attributes, with each $100,000 giving you a point to spend.

The first problem that I ran into was that I spent too much on attributes and not enough on skills; this is, admittedly, my own fault, but I was intending to get a character whose attributes were close to superhuman. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that you could buy boosted attributes via genetic surgery. D'oh! Winding up with four skills - gun combat, programming, streetwise and detective (specializing in police) wasn't the highlight of the character creation process. Then again, these are soldiers, not jacks-of-all-trades, but it would have been nice to seperate skill points from attributes. The charts aren't bad in this section; there's a little bit of consulting, but it's no worse than, say, GURPS. And if you're running low on points, you can choose to specialize, learning how to do one subcategory of a skill at a high level in exchange for doing other subcategories as if you were unskilled. Not bad.

The genetic surgery part is where the nightmares begin. In order to buy a power, you first have to decide what its rating is going to be - how strong the power in question is, plus a base rating cost. Then you get the potency cost of the power, which affects which column you use in the table. Then you find out how many points it costs, write down, and then decide if you want to take a Limitation or Boost, which lowers the cost according to some arcane formula which I wasn't sure I was using correctly. Then you write the whole thing down, do some division to find out how much stress it costs you to have the power. Then you start all over again for your next superpower. I'm not sure where swallowing the barrel of a .44 Magnum comes into this, but it was a step that I was considering adding to the process.

It's ridiculous, even for a "crunchy" game like this, to have to flip back and forth just to find out how much a power should cost. This is especially annoying when I realized that the little useless diagrams for each superpower - which tell you nothing - could have been used instead to list samples of power costs, or something that would have been even modestly helpful in crunching the amount of numbers involved. Maybe it gets easier once you've done it more than once; I really don't know.

In any case, you also have to roll for reconditioning and genetic surgery, which adds an element of randomness to the whole thing. And it's here where I ran into the bugs. Specifically, this is one of the only games that I've ever seen where your character can "die" - well, go permanently insane - during character creation. Genetic surgery indicates how good your implants were, which can strengthen or weaken your powers. I wound up with a four-armed superhero who had one really strong extra arm (Strength 4) and one really weak extra arm (Strength 1). First off, that's going to look weird, which is something I didn't want; evening them out would have been nice, but no rules were provided. I don't know how it's supposed to work, to be honest, or what role it's supposed to play - maybe it has something to do with game balance, but I couldn't entirely figure it out.

And then there's reconditioning, which affects stress - and, therefore, your chances of going insane. And it's here where your character can "die" before even heading out into the field. Essentially, each superpower that you have has a stress rating, which boots up the possibility of going insane. The more powers you have, the more likely you are to go insane. Reconditioning allows you to roll dice in order to drop that stress level, hopefully reducing the stress to a manageable level. Initially, I thought that the minimum stress level was 1, thanks to a misread; it can go down to 0, which meant that I gained four more Tolerance points. That makes things slightly more tolerable, but still - it seems odd to include random generation in a situation like this. You can roll for your military career, which includes promotions, medals, crippling injuries and so forth - standard stuff.

The combat system is fairly simply, using alterations of the game's central mechanics in order to determine hitting and damage and so forth. Nothing truly stands out - there's modifications for running and cover and so forth, but I didn't notice anything particularly innovative. There's a section involving equipment which has some fascinating items, like a personal radar detector, for detecting radar-guided antipersonnel missiles, but there's not much else along those lines.

What makes Underground truly memorable is the system for campaigns. Rather than aiming at goals decided on by a GM, the players can decide for themselves what they want to do for the city that they live in. The system for this is represented by six different factors - Safety, Take-Home Pay, Education, Government Corruption, and so forth - which are graded on a scale from one to twenty. By spending reward points - basically experience points - characters can alter these parameters to achieve certain goals. Want to stop Government Corruption? Launch a raid on a corrupt governor, expose the lies of the police captain, spend the requisite reward points, and the government in your area gets a lot more honest. But increasing any factor also increases another factor, and decreases a third. You can avoid the changes by spending more reward points, or even make them permanent by expending five times the regular amount. Instead of just a generic stab at how corrupt or unsafe a town is, there's an actual numerical rating that players can affect by doing works. It's a brilliant idea, adaptable to almost any game, and it gives players more control over the setting in which they live. (Imagine playing AD&D and having the Monster rating go up after you slay the local dragon - after all, it was keeping away smaller and more numerous monsters. But the local Wealth has gone way up thanks to the dragon's hoard - except that inflation is getting out of control, and there's thieves wandering the neighborhoods now.)

One thing that I nearly forgot to mention is the art, which is pretty fantastic throughout. Peter Chung, late of Aeon Flux - who I would love to see get some steady work - contributes character artwork, while other artists do full-page splashes that manage to capture the utterly weird feeling of Underground. It looks awfully clean for a dystopia, but there's lots of little details that contribute to the feeling of the game. The cover piece, by Geof Darrow, lives up to his standard hyper-detailed standards, which is to say that he draws in every rivet of every machine pictured. To call it excellent would be an understatement. ("Hard Boiled", written by Frank Miller and drawn by Geof Darrow, is somewhat Underground-ish, by the way.) Other artwork consists of small cartoons (a robot visiting a robot porn parlor, for example), advertisements for products in the Underground universe, and military operations involving boosted soldiers. The problem with some of them, though, is that they skirt the edges of good taste, and occasionally go right over the edge. One pictures a booster soldier staring in the mirror and pointing a gun at his head, with a caption saying that an artifical brain is causing him to "bow out of the rat race"; it's an unsettling image, just because of the rawness. Ditto a picture of a veteran weeping in what appears to be a nervous breakdown, the victim of post-traumatic distress. It seems exploitative, commentary used for shock value. I don't know. The overall style of the book also contributes to the "hollow" feel that the book has - everything is white glossy paper, with gradients in different colors setting apart sections on rules and so forth. There's "hypertext" captions in different colors, which helps, but the information provided is usually pretty self-explanatory. The annotated paragraphs, which sum up the bulk of the paragraph in a single line, are excellent, though - something that could easily be useful in other books. The style just doesn't feel "dirty" enough for the setting that it potrays.

Is it worth buying Underground for? Ennh. I wouldn't say so, no. The system is fairly simple, but I haven't playtested it, so I don't know how it comes out. The Unit system is interesting if you want to find out how much flat space 150 cubic feet of liquid covers, but there's not a whole lot else to recommend it. The background is sketchy. I find myself wondering if I'd complain about a conservative bias in the game, but I probably would - I don't like political dogma on either side in my games. As a game system, it's interesting but ultimately much too complex; as a setting, it's interesting, but it isn't nearly coherent enough to provide a good game session without supplementary materials.

You very well may have different results; I almost feel like I know more about this game and its influences than I properly should. You should look through this product if you can, make your own decision. Me, I can't recommend it - like I said, flashes of brilliance don't redeem what's overall a fairly incoherent product.

-Darren "Nuke Me Slowly" MacLennan

P.S - I picked this up for about $10 from a local comic store. Try to find it in a bargain bin - it's interesting, but not worth the full price.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)

Underground
Author: Ray Winninger Category: game Company/Publisher: Mayfair Games Inc. (MGI) Line: Underground Cost: $25 Page count: 256 ISBN: 0-923763-87-2 Playtest Review by Darren MacLennan on 05/25/99. Genre tags: Science_fiction Espionage Conspiracy Post-apocalypse	Marshal Law has always been one of my favorite comic books, primarily because it either dropped or turned on its head most of the conventions of the superhero genre. Sure, it was hardly the only one - Alan Moore's Watchmen and Miracleman, Rick Veitch's Bratpack, Mark Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme, and so forth. All of them were brilliant (although I haven't read Miracleman or Squadron Supreme) to varying degrees, especially the must-read Watchmen, but they didn't have the flat-out bitterness and sarcasm that Marshal Law had. Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill had a universe where superheroes were essentially phonies, soldiers given superheroic powers and sent to fight in a South American war that was like "Halloween night in Hell," according to the title character. Because of their lack of a normal sensation of pain, superheroes wound up almost always becoming sadists. Most of them form gangs, or work in underground fight rings; some of them, in one of the series' funniest moments, work like prostitutes, allowing normal men to beat them up as a form of stress relief. Marshal Law was a "hero hunter", tasking himself to keep the peace and to bring down the Public Spirit, whose propaganda led thousands to their death. The book is hyperviolent, hypersexual, darkly funny, and constantly sending barbed arrows into the entire idea of superheroism as a concept. But behind it all was the unspoken acknowledgement that Marshal Law was himself a hero, bearing all of the attributes but denying that he was. So, what in the hell does this have to do with Underground? Underground is essentially the role-playing version of Marshal Law, except lacking in almost everything that made Marshal Law good. Yes, there's unbelievably massive superheroes strutting around with big guns. Yes, the government is corrupt. Yes, it's hyper-violent. Yes, it's consistently critical of superheroes. There's slogans on the walls and there's superheroic gangs, but Underground manages only to ape the surface elements of Marshal Law without really understanding what it's about. The skin is there, but no muscle and no bone. I think that one of the main failings of the book is that it's soaked through with leftist critiques of the society - the corporations and the government are unbelievably corrupt, to the point where free speech needs a license and certain forms of terrorism are legalized. The superheroes are essentially cast-aside veterans of a number of unjust wars, and the economy is in ruins. Things weren't much different in Marshal Law, but the difference is that Marshal Law had a wicked sense of humor, throwing dark jokes and funny slogans ("Yeah, they amaze me" "Who Barted?" "Fliers Only" "Sewer Sides Up!" and so forth) into almost every panel. It was leftist, but subtly so, and it was less about politics as it was about how hero worship leads to ruin. Underground takes itself much too seriously, suggesting that superheroes are going to be the ones that revamp society. The entire point of Marshal Law was that superheroes were utterly ineffectual in almost every task, doing good only as images, and Underground misses this idea by a good country mile. But enough about Marshal Law, at least for now. Underground was published by Mayfair Games back in the early 90's, apparently using a variant of the DC Superheroes system. (I wouldn't know.) Set in the around 2020, the world has changed dramatically. Wars are settled by corporate "conflict resolution firms", which employ super-powered soldiers to fight. Civilian and conventional force casualties tend to skyrocket when they fight, of couse, which makes war that much more horrific. Once they muster out, though, super-soldiers are left on their own in a society that doesn't have jobs for them. The net result is that they either tend to become criminals or political activists, in the "Underground" - a terrorist organization out to bring down the corrupt government of the United States. There's a lot of oppurtunities for former superheroes to do some good - or some evil. Meanwhile, corporations produce their own consumers, "pre-frontals", who have become the new blue-collar working class. There's a Tastee-Ghoul restaurant where accident victims tithe their bodies to be eaten. (I don't know why, since there's no mention of food deficiencies, but perhaps it's a gourmet thing.) In short, it's a dystopia. Characters seem to trend towards stereotypes, although I imagine that GMs are meant to flesh them out into real people. The system uses 2d10 for resolution. Both player and GM roll 2d10, then add the attribute or ability in question; in the event that the task is more difficult, there's a difficulty number that gets tacked on to the GM's side of the roll. Rather than just creating a difficulty number to exceed, the GM - or somebody trustworthy - has to roll for the opposing side of the equation every time. I'm not entirely sure that I disagree with this approach, but I mostly play online; that kind of dice-rolling is going to drive me nuts, and it seems like it would have just been easier to make it a "beat this number to win" system than forcing a dice roll. There's also an addition of a graded scale for results, where the amount of distance between the GM's dice roll and your own shows how well you did, which is one of the game's primary mechanics. And then there's the unit system. May God help us all in our time of trial, because this is one of the most annoying things about the Underground system. It simulates various weights and measures by assigning them a unit scale - for example, 4 units equals 250 pounds, 30 feet, twelve seconds and 150 cubic feet. You manipulate units in order to find out how they interact with each other. For example, a character with a strength of nine can throw a 5-unit weight four units (9-5=4) - in other words, some thirty feet. It's a useful mechanic, especially for when you want a specific measure, BUT the problem is that it's a fundemental part of the game system. Everything - including time - is measured in units, so one day is measured as 44 units rather than as one day. Regeneration, for example, knocks your rating off of the amount of time that it takes to heal a single wound. This is a silly idea. The units chart is good for specific measurement, but I'll be damned if I'll look at a chart every time I want to find out when I make a healing challenge, or whenever I want to pick something up, or damned near anything. It's a unique idea, to be sure, but I'm not going to perform the equivalent of learning the metric system every time that I want to figure something out. I don't know; maybe it becomes transparent as you play, but given how complicated character creation is, I'm not feeling particularly optimistic. Personally, I dislike the idea; you may get different mileage. I didn't realize how complex this game could be until I created a character, following the example of a reviewer in Dragon magazine. You actually allocate some $20,000,000 of the military's money to the creation of your superhuman soldier, in four categories. Genetic surgery and reconditioning both have preset limits on how much you can spend; genetic surgery and recruitment cash do not. Why the preset limits on those two categories? They determine how successful your character's modifications were and how close to going insane he is at the end of his military career; that's something that you won't often see in a role-playing game. Genetic surgery and recruitment cash determine how many points you've got for superpowers, skills and attributes, with each $100,000 giving you a point to spend. The first problem that I ran into was that I spent too much on attributes and not enough on skills; this is, admittedly, my own fault, but I was intending to get a character whose attributes were close to superhuman. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that you could buy boosted attributes via genetic surgery. D'oh! Winding up with four skills - gun combat, programming, streetwise and detective (specializing in police) wasn't the highlight of the character creation process. Then again, these are soldiers, not jacks-of-all-trades, but it would have been nice to seperate skill points from attributes. The charts aren't bad in this section; there's a little bit of consulting, but it's no worse than, say, GURPS. And if you're running low on points, you can choose to specialize, learning how to do one subcategory of a skill at a high level in exchange for doing other subcategories as if you were unskilled. Not bad. The genetic surgery part is where the nightmares begin. In order to buy a power, you first have to decide what its rating is going to be - how strong the power in question is, plus a base rating cost. Then you get the potency cost of the power, which affects which column you use in the table. Then you find out how many points it costs, write down, and then decide if you want to take a Limitation or Boost, which lowers the cost according to some arcane formula which I wasn't sure I was using correctly. Then you write the whole thing down, do some division to find out how much stress it costs you to have the power. Then you start all over again for your next superpower. I'm not sure where swallowing the barrel of a .44 Magnum comes into this, but it was a step that I was considering adding to the process. It's ridiculous, even for a "crunchy" game like this, to have to flip back and forth just to find out how much a power should cost. This is especially annoying when I realized that the little useless diagrams for each superpower - which tell you nothing - could have been used instead to list samples of power costs, or something that would have been even modestly helpful in crunching the amount of numbers involved. Maybe it gets easier once you've done it more than once; I really don't know. In any case, you also have to roll for reconditioning and genetic surgery, which adds an element of randomness to the whole thing. And it's here where I ran into the bugs. Specifically, this is one of the only games that I've ever seen where your character can "die" - well, go permanently insane - during character creation. Genetic surgery indicates how good your implants were, which can strengthen or weaken your powers. I wound up with a four-armed superhero who had one really strong extra arm (Strength 4) and one really weak extra arm (Strength 1). First off, that's going to look weird, which is something I didn't want; evening them out would have been nice, but no rules were provided. I don't know how it's supposed to work, to be honest, or what role it's supposed to play - maybe it has something to do with game balance, but I couldn't entirely figure it out. And then there's reconditioning, which affects stress - and, therefore, your chances of going insane. And it's here where your character can "die" before even heading out into the field. Essentially, each superpower that you have has a stress rating, which boots up the possibility of going insane. The more powers you have, the more likely you are to go insane. Reconditioning allows you to roll dice in order to drop that stress level, hopefully reducing the stress to a manageable level. Initially, I thought that the minimum stress level was 1, thanks to a misread; it can go down to 0, which meant that I gained four more Tolerance points. That makes things slightly more tolerable, but still - it seems odd to include random generation in a situation like this. You can roll for your military career, which includes promotions, medals, crippling injuries and so forth - standard stuff. The combat system is fairly simply, using alterations of the game's central mechanics in order to determine hitting and damage and so forth. Nothing truly stands out - there's modifications for running and cover and so forth, but I didn't notice anything particularly innovative. There's a section involving equipment which has some fascinating items, like a personal radar detector, for detecting radar-guided antipersonnel missiles, but there's not much else along those lines. What makes Underground truly memorable is the system for campaigns. Rather than aiming at goals decided on by a GM, the players can decide for themselves what they want to do for the city that they live in. The system for this is represented by six different factors - Safety, Take-Home Pay, Education, Government Corruption, and so forth - which are graded on a scale from one to twenty. By spending reward points - basically experience points - characters can alter these parameters to achieve certain goals. Want to stop Government Corruption? Launch a raid on a corrupt governor, expose the lies of the police captain, spend the requisite reward points, and the government in your area gets a lot more honest. But increasing any factor also increases another factor, and decreases a third. You can avoid the changes by spending more reward points, or even make them permanent by expending five times the regular amount. Instead of just a generic stab at how corrupt or unsafe a town is, there's an actual numerical rating that players can affect by doing works. It's a brilliant idea, adaptable to almost any game, and it gives players more control over the setting in which they live. (Imagine playing AD&D and having the Monster rating go up after you slay the local dragon - after all, it was keeping away smaller and more numerous monsters. But the local Wealth has gone way up thanks to the dragon's hoard - except that inflation is getting out of control, and there's thieves wandering the neighborhoods now.) One thing that I nearly forgot to mention is the art, which is pretty fantastic throughout. Peter Chung, late of Aeon Flux - who I would love to see get some steady work - contributes character artwork, while other artists do full-page splashes that manage to capture the utterly weird feeling of Underground. It looks awfully clean for a dystopia, but there's lots of little details that contribute to the feeling of the game. The cover piece, by Geof Darrow, lives up to his standard hyper-detailed standards, which is to say that he draws in every rivet of every machine pictured. To call it excellent would be an understatement. ("Hard Boiled", written by Frank Miller and drawn by Geof Darrow, is somewhat Underground-ish, by the way.) Other artwork consists of small cartoons (a robot visiting a robot porn parlor, for example), advertisements for products in the Underground universe, and military operations involving boosted soldiers. The problem with some of them, though, is that they skirt the edges of good taste, and occasionally go right over the edge. One pictures a booster soldier staring in the mirror and pointing a gun at his head, with a caption saying that an artifical brain is causing him to "bow out of the rat race"; it's an unsettling image, just because of the rawness. Ditto a picture of a veteran weeping in what appears to be a nervous breakdown, the victim of post-traumatic distress. It seems exploitative, commentary used for shock value. I don't know. The overall style of the book also contributes to the "hollow" feel that the book has - everything is white glossy paper, with gradients in different colors setting apart sections on rules and so forth. There's "hypertext" captions in different colors, which helps, but the information provided is usually pretty self-explanatory. The annotated paragraphs, which sum up the bulk of the paragraph in a single line, are excellent, though - something that could easily be useful in other books. The style just doesn't feel "dirty" enough for the setting that it potrays. Is it worth buying Underground for? Ennh. I wouldn't say so, no. The system is fairly simple, but I haven't playtested it, so I don't know how it comes out. The Unit system is interesting if you want to find out how much flat space 150 cubic feet of liquid covers, but there's not a whole lot else to recommend it. The background is sketchy. I find myself wondering if I'd complain about a conservative bias in the game, but I probably would - I don't like political dogma on either side in my games. As a game system, it's interesting but ultimately much too complex; as a setting, it's interesting, but it isn't nearly coherent enough to provide a good game session without supplementary materials. You very well may have different results; I almost feel like I know more about this game and its influences than I properly should. You should look through this product if you can, make your own decision. Me, I can't recommend it - like I said, flashes of brilliance don't redeem what's overall a fairly incoherent product. -Darren "Nuke Me Slowly" MacLennan P.S - I picked this up for about $10 from a local comic store. Try to find it in a bargain bin - it's interesting, but not worth the full price. Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 2 (Sparse)