The Inside Scoop on Gaming

This review hightlights the the new changes in v1.1 (reprint) of the game. For a detailed review of the system etc look elsewhere (I might even post one myself soon).

SLA Industries, the cult British dark sci-fi RPG, is finally back on full release after a five year absence, and it's looking better than ever.
SLA industries has had a complicated career, moving from company to company and back again. It is now being produced by Nightfall Games Ltd, a British company which includes two of the original three partners (Dave Allsop and Jared Earle), and published by Hogshead Publishing Ltd, who also publish Warhammer FRP and other games. The game blends hard sci-fi, supernatural horror, slick violence, cyberpunk bureaucracy, media manipulation and extremely black humour, a mix which the spine calls "Futuristic Urban Horror". Players take the role of Operatives in the gigantic, oppresively decaying city of Mort, working for SLA as something between FBI agents, storm troopers and spin doctors. Their job is to make sure the company doesn't get embarrassed, and they have an extremely broad remit.

The cover is the first change you notice in v1.1. The old front illustration, of a brown-coated bloke with bleeding eyes walking through the rain, was subtle at best. Its replacement is a gorgeous full-colour picture of the notorious serial killer Hallowe'en Jack sitting in a ventillation duct, painted by a leading comic artist, Glenn Fabry and it's really stunning. Even more stunning is the binding, which actually works. The old version of SLA was famous for falling apart almost as soon as you first opened the book. There's a full index too, another long-sought-after addition.

Inside, things are more or less unchanged. The new version was printed straight from a copy of the old one (a bit of resizing happening at the same time), so most of the material is just a straight reprint. There are a few small 'emergency tweaks' to minor rules elements and some of the more glaring layout errors have been corrected, but the main difference is in the fiction. Due to a legal issue with some of the material in the old book, v1.1 includes four entertaining new short stories, and two new full-page illustrations by Dave Allsop, the game's creator. There's also a quick-start into sheet towards the back of the book, so that people who haven't played the game before can get an overwiew of what's going on.
One or two of the pages have come out a bit dark, and there's a couple of spots where the paste-up revsions are noticeable, but the great majority of the changes are improvments. The rule's tweaks resolve a few issues, and the new material is fun, and the index is wonderful. It looks like the new chapter in the story of SLA Industries is going to be a good one.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 5 (Excellent!)

SLA Industries 1.1