In space, no one can hear you scream... At least, not if you're there because of Lost Colony. Pinnacle Entertainment's third game in the Deadlands Universe, Lost Colony takes place in the distant star system known as Faraway. Thirteen years prior to the introductory chapter of the rulebook, the Last War sealed the Tunnel, the only means of accessing Faraway from Earth. This left approximately three million humans trapped in the middle of nowhere alongside ten times that many angry aliens. One thing led to another, and now there are a lot fewer people of either species. This book is dual-statted for D20, but since I do not play that system, I will only comment on the Classic Deadlands material.
This, and a significant amount of detail on the people and places of Faraway and its inhabitable planet Banshee, comprises the first chapter of the book. The chapter is structured like most "State of the World" sections in Pinnacle products, meaning it is a transcription of a lecture/interview with a character from Banshee by the name of Debbi Dallas (yes, she jokes about it too). This is also the only chapter completely usable by either Classic Deadlands or Deadlands D20 players. All chapters after this are more numerically involved, and most gamers will only use one of the statstic sets anyway. Which brings me to Chapter Two, which is the character creation rules. Introduced for the first time in a Deadlands product are rules for creating a character who was at no point in time a human being. The Anouks, or "grapes" in Banshee vernacular, bear strong resemblances to an idealized view of the Native American populations of North America. They are grouped into two general "types" Warriors and Shamans. Warriors are Anouk fighters who use a mystically charged substance called tannis (sic) rock for all their weapons and armor. This being Deadlands the stuff has a secret, but I will not spoil it, other than to recommend Marshals read the 5th chapter, which is the real scoop on all the stuff from the first 4 chapters, as well as a brief bestiary. Anouk Shamans do their thing by drawing on the mystical connection to the planet all Anouks possess and create magical effects with it. These two types are more fully explained in Chapter 3, along with their powers and gear. The sole new human character type is the Mute (short for transmuter), a new Arcane Background that uses nanotechnology to break down scrap and rebuild it into new weapons, devices, vehicles, etc. And Chapter 4 gives them a LOT of stuff to build. There are guns, armor, tanks, APCs, spacecraft, and all sorts of man-portable nastiness. In addition, there are guidelines for re-pricing existing HoE/DL goods to fit in with the non-salvage based economy of Banshee. The biggest problem in this chapter is that some of the table entries are offset, and the word gauge was misspelled "guage" in EVERY. SINGLE. INSTANCE. This may just be a pet peeve, but I found it highly distracting and well below Pinnacle's normal quality standards. As I mentioned earlier, the Marshal's Section in Chapter 5 has the real 411 on all the stuff covered in the first four chapters. The information I found most enlightening was the True and Secret Origins of The Skinnies (TM). In closing, I found the book to be well worth the money despite it faults, and I recommend it to everyone who loves Deadlands, in either of its incarnations.
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