The Inside Scoop on Gaming

I admit I didn't have much of an idea of what I was getting into when I asked for a review copy of Raven Star, 2nd edition. What little I heard promised a new multi-genre game set on a frontier planet. Visions of a wild west Shadowrun went through my head.

How wrong I was. The generic title, if nothing else, should have warned me. Raven Star is a dull, cheap rip off of a game that mixes cliches and mechanics from better games and ends up being much less than the sum of its parts. Most offensive, though, is the magic system, which shamelessly plagiarizes GURPS, a fact that single-handedly renders moot what positive points the game has.

Setting: Set sometime in the future (no dates are given), the humans of the Raven Star universe have mastered FTL travel and colonized other worlds. Somewhere along the line, they apparently discovered, or were discovered by, other alien races: dwarves, elves, and two races of cat-men. Details of first contact or how the races interact with each other are pretty much absent, and details of the aliens' societies are limited to a couple of lines (dwarves and elves confirm every stereotype you have, one of the cat-men species likes to fight, the other is just really big). Also, there's magic, but no explanation why, when, or how it was discovered. And it gets worse.

An unspecified time before the unspecified period in which the game is set, one of the worlds on the frontier was colonized. When the main colony city, New Chicago, was being built, some "runes" with unspecified magical properties were discovered (actually, according to the book, they were and still are being "mined"). The runes were translated to read "the coming of Raven Star brings rebirth." The interstellar government -- or maybe just the colonists: I'm really not sure -- decided to attach some significance to this meaningless phrase and call the planet "Raven Star." No significance, though, seems to have been attached to the fact that it seems more than a bit odd that a near-lifeless (and completely birdless) planet far from earth would have ravens. Maybe that's the magic. Or maybe ravens developed interstellar travel. I dunno and there's nothing to suggest the author does, either..

In addition to the runes, New Chicago has lots of crime and megacorporations, and "hard-core and alternative hangouts." And a University of Magical Studies. It probably has other things, too, but the book doesn't mention them. It also doesn't really describe the other things, either, except to say they exist. There's not much in here at all: very few details, no personality or individuality, no local colour, no attitude (claims to the contrary in the book notwithstanding), no gimmicks, no hooks, and no reason for interest on my part.

Artwork: This is probably the best part of the book. Most of the illustrations are done in a comic-book style, with grimacing musclemen and improbably buxom (and gravity-defying) women. Most of it is okay; a couple of pieces are excellent. There's also a series of not-very-good computer-generated colour plates at the end. Several of them feature the exact same female figures, differing only in hair and bodysuit colours. Another has a cityscape which inexplicably features a skyscraper through which the background can clearly be seen. Most curious of all, though, is a picture of "Raven Star" from space -- with Australia clearly visible.

System and Character Creation: To create a character, you roll 10d6(!)x2+40 to determine your attribute points, which you then divide among the standard AD&D attributes (no Wisdom, though, but they thoughtfully give you Will to make up for it). Then you get some bonuses depending on race (quite large bonuses for the cat-men). If your attributes are high or low, you get bonuses and penalties to your hand-to-hand damage, dodging, follower loyalty, etc. -- just like AD&D. We are told that PCs have higher attributes then "average" people, but you'll have to trust them on that, since no comparison scales exist.

You also get to pick spells (see "Magic" below) and cybernetics. The cybernetics list is lifted more-or-less intact from the one in Cyberpunk 2020. Taking cybernetics makes you less "human" and overdoing it will turn you into a "Cyborg" -- a psychotic killer to be hunted by special police/bounty hunter "cybe squads." Just like Cyberpunk 2020. It also hinders magic use. Just like Shadowrun.

Skill levels basically work the same as in GURPS. Each is based on a your attributes. The difficulty level of the skill and the number of points assigned determines the level. There's also a GURPS-like system of defaults. The skill list is fairly lengthy, but also fairly typical.

When rolling against a skill, you take your skill, add any modifiers and then add a d20 roll. A roll of one is a critical failure, and a roll of 20 is a critical success, regardless of skill level or task difficulty. Needless to say, this system is _very_ random, since the spread of a d20 roll is extremely broad compared to the differences likely to occur among skill levels and modifiers. As a consequence, it is a fairly common occurrence for a skilled character with a bad roll to fail where a comparatively unskilled character (who will usually have skills only a few points below a highly skilled character) with a good roll succeeds.

It also means a couple of not-too-unlikely bad rolls in combat can easily -- and arbitrarily -- doom even the most competent character, which seems pretty un-fun in a game centered around heroic action. Think of a first level AD&D mage -- they're not much fun to play, because they tend to live or die mostly by blind luck. Now think of a whole party of them going into combat and you get the idea.

Speaking of combat, Raven Star combat is divided into "turns" which shoot by at 50 to the minute (or 3000 to the hour, we are helpfully informed). I guess a second is just too little time.

The book also comes with character generation software, which is a good idea, but with typically lousy implementation. For starters, the program doesn't print out anything approximating a character sheet to the screen -- you have to look at attributes, skills, equipment, etc. separately, one at a time. When you do finally print out the character sheet, the borders and logo look "smudgy," like they had been printed out and then scanned (badly) onto a computer as a bitmap, at least on my printer. The software also doesn't warn you when you're breaking rules like exceeding racial attribute maximums. It's easier just to use paper, pencil and the book.

Writing and Editing: Raven Star is almost breathtakingly badly edited. Typos appear on almost every page, and I have a hard time believing even basic proofreading was done. Punctuation is often missing or misplaced, line spacing is inconsistent, and both capitalization and subject-verb agreement seem to have been left to chance. At least the book has the merit that the many misspellings are occasionally humourous, due mostly to the fact that a spell checker was obviously trusted to fix most of the errors, and often picked the wrong words. Thus, it is possible to sneak aboard a "costume designed" "Navy Battle Ship," sidle up behind a "grad" and disable him with a "never pinch," thus averting "cretin death."

The errors seem to actually get worse as the book goes on, and by the end you're treated to sentences like "a Merc is shoot [sic] up and suffered [sic] form [sic] a total 24 LMP lost rendering [sic] him at [sic] (2)F-8 wound stage." I couldn't make this stuff up. Of course, I doubt I'd find it as funny if I had been unfortunate enough to have shelled out my own hard-earned cash for the privilege.

Magic: It is in reading the magic section that my already-wavering opinion of Raven Star changed from "amateurish" to "rip off." After some typically vague and meaningless mumbo-jumbo about how magic works ("Some say magic forces are derived from nature."), we are plunged into the system.

Which is a complete rip off of the GURPS magic system.

Anyone who knows GURPS will instantly identify the prerequisite system, spell categories, the effects of high skill levels on casting, and virtually every spell there. Even the GURPS rule of requiring one character point for minimum competency is carried over, despite the fact that it doesn't mean much in the Raven Star system, where one point is the minimum anyway.

There's no excuse for this. None. The gaming industry has always has always bordered on the incestuous in its approach to "borrowing" mechanics and ideas across systems, but this is theft, pure and simple. I was willing to overlook the AD&D-esque attributes and GURPS-inspired skill system -- there's only so many ways to do that kind of thing, I suppose. Even the Cyberpunk 2020 cybernetics list that Raven Star copies -- after all, most of what they had was either common sense or borrowed from novels and movies.

But this -- I mean, it's one thing to use a system you like as the basis of your own homebrew system: lots of people do it, and more power to them. But to take it and actually _sell_ it is plagiarism, and it made me angry. It's a case of the author, A. Siddiqui, taking Steve Jackson's hard work, passing it off as his own, and charging unsuspecting consumers for it.

Conclusion: Any positive qualities the game might possibly have instantly vaporize in the face of the blatant plagiarism. While I suspect it wouldn't be worth it for Steve Jackson Games (or any of the other companies Raven Star steals from) to take legal action, it is the kind of dishonest, unethical, lazy behavior that can ultimately hurt the vast majority of creative, hard-working game designers. For this reason alone I would recommend no one buy this game and on general principle give the author and the company a wide berth.

Even if the mechanics were more original, though, I don't think there would be any way I could recommend the game. The background is nothing more than a few hoary cliches mixed together, with nothing that hasn't been done better a dozen times before. The writing and editing are atrocious -- very little effort was made to make the material presentable, let alone professional. I doubt even the very young and inexperienced gamers Raven Star seems to be targeted at (the disclaimer advises parental discretion for gamers under the age of eight (!)) would get much out of it. In general, this seems much more like a homebrew system and setting combining the author's favorite games than the original product it pretends to be. The idea that gamers are expected to shell out their good money for it is offensive and insulting.

Final Note: After writing the above, I went to Deja News to see if there had been any Usenet discussion of the game. One article in particular caught my interest. It was a list of passages from the first edition of Raven Star and analogous passages in GURPS Space and Cyberpunk 2020. They were identical, or very nearly so -- Mr. Siddiqui had simply copied the SJG and RTG material into his game word for word. Somehow, this did not come as a shock to me.

The passages in question have been changed a bit for the second edition, but they're still on the same numbered pages, which leads me to suspect that those are the only changes between editions. To find the article I read, go to Deja News and search for the keywords 'raven', 'star', and 'copyright'.

Oh, and one of the races of cat-men is apparently supposed to be a race of bear-men.

Style: 2 (Needs Work)
Substance: 1 (I Wasted My Money)

Raven Star 2nd Edition
Author: A. Siddiqui Category: game Company/Publisher: Raven Star Game Designs LLC Page count: 224 Playtest Review by Eric Brochu on 12/13/97. Genre tags: none	I admit I didn't have much of an idea of what I was getting into when I asked for a review copy of Raven Star, 2nd edition. What little I heard promised a new multi-genre game set on a frontier planet. Visions of a wild west Shadowrun went through my head. How wrong I was. The generic title, if nothing else, should have warned me. Raven Star is a dull, cheap rip off of a game that mixes cliches and mechanics from better games and ends up being much less than the sum of its parts. Most offensive, though, is the magic system, which shamelessly plagiarizes GURPS, a fact that single-handedly renders moot what positive points the game has. Setting: Set sometime in the future (no dates are given), the humans of the Raven Star universe have mastered FTL travel and colonized other worlds. Somewhere along the line, they apparently discovered, or were discovered by, other alien races: dwarves, elves, and two races of cat-men. Details of first contact or how the races interact with each other are pretty much absent, and details of the aliens' societies are limited to a couple of lines (dwarves and elves confirm every stereotype you have, one of the cat-men species likes to fight, the other is just really big). Also, there's magic, but no explanation why, when, or how it was discovered. And it gets worse. An unspecified time before the unspecified period in which the game is set, one of the worlds on the frontier was colonized. When the main colony city, New Chicago, was being built, some "runes" with unspecified magical properties were discovered (actually, according to the book, they were and still are being "mined"). The runes were translated to read "the coming of Raven Star brings rebirth." The interstellar government -- or maybe just the colonists: I'm really not sure -- decided to attach some significance to this meaningless phrase and call the planet "Raven Star." No significance, though, seems to have been attached to the fact that it seems more than a bit odd that a near-lifeless (and completely birdless) planet far from earth would have ravens. Maybe that's the magic. Or maybe ravens developed interstellar travel. I dunno and there's nothing to suggest the author does, either.. In addition to the runes, New Chicago has lots of crime and megacorporations, and "hard-core and alternative hangouts." And a University of Magical Studies. It probably has other things, too, but the book doesn't mention them. It also doesn't really describe the other things, either, except to say they exist. There's not much in here at all: very few details, no personality or individuality, no local colour, no attitude (claims to the contrary in the book notwithstanding), no gimmicks, no hooks, and no reason for interest on my part. Artwork: This is probably the best part of the book. Most of the illustrations are done in a comic-book style, with grimacing musclemen and improbably buxom (and gravity-defying) women. Most of it is okay; a couple of pieces are excellent. There's also a series of not-very-good computer-generated colour plates at the end. Several of them feature the exact same female figures, differing only in hair and bodysuit colours. Another has a cityscape which inexplicably features a skyscraper through which the background can clearly be seen. Most curious of all, though, is a picture of "Raven Star" from space -- with Australia clearly visible. System and Character Creation: To create a character, you roll 10d6(!)x2+40 to determine your attribute points, which you then divide among the standard AD&D attributes (no Wisdom, though, but they thoughtfully give you Will to make up for it). Then you get some bonuses depending on race (quite large bonuses for the cat-men). If your attributes are high or low, you get bonuses and penalties to your hand-to-hand damage, dodging, follower loyalty, etc. -- just like AD&D. We are told that PCs have higher attributes then "average" people, but you'll have to trust them on that, since no comparison scales exist. You also get to pick spells (see "Magic" below) and cybernetics. The cybernetics list is lifted more-or-less intact from the one in Cyberpunk 2020. Taking cybernetics makes you less "human" and overdoing it will turn you into a "Cyborg" -- a psychotic killer to be hunted by special police/bounty hunter "cybe squads." Just like Cyberpunk 2020. It also hinders magic use. Just like Shadowrun. Skill levels basically work the same as in GURPS. Each is based on a your attributes. The difficulty level of the skill and the number of points assigned determines the level. There's also a GURPS-like system of defaults. The skill list is fairly lengthy, but also fairly typical. When rolling against a skill, you take your skill, add any modifiers and then add a d20 roll. A roll of one is a critical failure, and a roll of 20 is a critical success, regardless of skill level or task difficulty. Needless to say, this system is _very_ random, since the spread of a d20 roll is extremely broad compared to the differences likely to occur among skill levels and modifiers. As a consequence, it is a fairly common occurrence for a skilled character with a bad roll to fail where a comparatively unskilled character (who will usually have skills only a few points below a highly skilled character) with a good roll succeeds. It also means a couple of not-too-unlikely bad rolls in combat can easily -- and arbitrarily -- doom even the most competent character, which seems pretty un-fun in a game centered around heroic action. Think of a first level AD&D mage -- they're not much fun to play, because they tend to live or die mostly by blind luck. Now think of a whole party of them going into combat and you get the idea. Speaking of combat, Raven Star combat is divided into "turns" which shoot by at 50 to the minute (or 3000 to the hour, we are helpfully informed). I guess a second is just too little time. The book also comes with character generation software, which is a good idea, but with typically lousy implementation. For starters, the program doesn't print out anything approximating a character sheet to the screen -- you have to look at attributes, skills, equipment, etc. separately, one at a time. When you do finally print out the character sheet, the borders and logo look "smudgy," like they had been printed out and then scanned (badly) onto a computer as a bitmap, at least on my printer. The software also doesn't warn you when you're breaking rules like exceeding racial attribute maximums. It's easier just to use paper, pencil and the book. Writing and Editing: Raven Star is almost breathtakingly badly edited. Typos appear on almost every page, and I have a hard time believing even basic proofreading was done. Punctuation is often missing or misplaced, line spacing is inconsistent, and both capitalization and subject-verb agreement seem to have been left to chance. At least the book has the merit that the many misspellings are occasionally humourous, due mostly to the fact that a spell checker was obviously trusted to fix most of the errors, and often picked the wrong words. Thus, it is possible to sneak aboard a "costume designed" "Navy Battle Ship," sidle up behind a "grad" and disable him with a "never pinch," thus averting "cretin death." The errors seem to actually get worse as the book goes on, and by the end you're treated to sentences like "a Merc is shoot [sic] up and suffered [sic] form [sic] a total 24 LMP lost rendering [sic] him at [sic] (2)F-8 wound stage." I couldn't make this stuff up. Of course, I doubt I'd find it as funny if I had been unfortunate enough to have shelled out my own hard-earned cash for the privilege. Magic: It is in reading the magic section that my already-wavering opinion of Raven Star changed from "amateurish" to "rip off." After some typically vague and meaningless mumbo-jumbo about how magic works ("Some say magic forces are derived from nature."), we are plunged into the system. Which is a complete rip off of the GURPS magic system. Anyone who knows GURPS will instantly identify the prerequisite system, spell categories, the effects of high skill levels on casting, and virtually every spell there. Even the GURPS rule of requiring one character point for minimum competency is carried over, despite the fact that it doesn't mean much in the Raven Star system, where one point is the minimum anyway. There's no excuse for this. None. The gaming industry has always has always bordered on the incestuous in its approach to "borrowing" mechanics and ideas across systems, but this is theft, pure and simple. I was willing to overlook the AD&D-esque attributes and GURPS-inspired skill system -- there's only so many ways to do that kind of thing, I suppose. Even the Cyberpunk 2020 cybernetics list that Raven Star copies -- after all, most of what they had was either common sense or borrowed from novels and movies. But this -- I mean, it's one thing to use a system you like as the basis of your own homebrew system: lots of people do it, and more power to them. But to take it and actually _sell_ it is plagiarism, and it made me angry. It's a case of the author, A. Siddiqui, taking Steve Jackson's hard work, passing it off as his own, and charging unsuspecting consumers for it. Conclusion: Any positive qualities the game might possibly have instantly vaporize in the face of the blatant plagiarism. While I suspect it wouldn't be worth it for Steve Jackson Games (or any of the other companies Raven Star steals from) to take legal action, it is the kind of dishonest, unethical, lazy behavior that can ultimately hurt the vast majority of creative, hard-working game designers. For this reason alone I would recommend no one buy this game and on general principle give the author and the company a wide berth. Even if the mechanics were more original, though, I don't think there would be any way I could recommend the game. The background is nothing more than a few hoary cliches mixed together, with nothing that hasn't been done better a dozen times before. The writing and editing are atrocious -- very little effort was made to make the material presentable, let alone professional. I doubt even the very young and inexperienced gamers Raven Star seems to be targeted at (the disclaimer advises parental discretion for gamers under the age of eight (!)) would get much out of it. In general, this seems much more like a homebrew system and setting combining the author's favorite games than the original product it pretends to be. The idea that gamers are expected to shell out their good money for it is offensive and insulting. Final Note: After writing the above, I went to Deja News to see if there had been any Usenet discussion of the game. One article in particular caught my interest. It was a list of passages from the first edition of Raven Star and analogous passages in GURPS Space and Cyberpunk 2020. They were identical, or very nearly so -- Mr. Siddiqui had simply copied the SJG and RTG material into his game word for word. Somehow, this did not come as a shock to me. The passages in question have been changed a bit for the second edition, but they're still on the same numbered pages, which leads me to suspect that those are the only changes between editions. To find the article I read, go to Deja News and search for the keywords 'raven', 'star', and 'copyright'. Oh, and one of the races of cat-men is apparently supposed to be a race of bear-men. Style: 2 (Needs Work) Substance: 1 (I Wasted My Money)

Raven Star 2nd Edition