The adventure and rules are written entirely in German, while it's one of my first languages it's rusty after 10 years of disuse but I was still able to understand the majority of the adventure, which is more a testament to how well it was written than my German comprehension skills.
Style: The cover graphic is quite nice, as are the border graphics on each page. The text is clear and easy to read and is organized according to the content. Regular text is what is read out to the players (in the adventure portion), italicized text is for the GM only and red text is for the game mechanics. That extra level of separation is quite nice, especially as I had enough work trying to understand everything, let alone figure out the purpose on the fly. The adventure was fairly simple and straightforward, and the layout is equally simple and straightforward. Once again easy enough for me to go through without too much difficulty despite my rusty German skills. The only thing which keeps the product from getting a Style rating of 5 is that the drawn characters for the 4 sample characters are barely better than the artwork for the GURPS Basic Set. Normally I wouldn't penalize a product for bad art, but when everything else is this good I'm going to be picky.
Style rating: 4
Substance: It's rather hard to rate a 12 page product high on substance, but it is free and considering the small space it is very good. It starts out with the obligatory "What is Roleplaying" blurb, and compares it to boardgames, initially describing it as being like a board game without the board or play pieces, but it still retains the dice. It was a rather refreshing change of pace from the "Remember when you were a kid and playd cops and robbers/house/dressup? - RPGs are like that except...." that is common in english RPGs.
The next section is "Start Early", good advice for the GM, especially inexperienced ones. It's nice that this is one of the first things mentioned, as a common mistake of new GMs (at least the ones I've been around, including myself) is to try to run the adventure without having read through it first. This is followed by "Running the Game and (Contents?) of the Adventure" it states that the rules of the game are only described in the relevant portion of the adventure. I think this is a great way to introduce the game to new players (especially those not experienced with RPGs) as they can basically get into the game right away and not have to worry about the rules until they're relevant. It also spreads the rules out so that not so much has to be absorbed at once.
Pages 3-8 are the adventure. I won't describe the adventure in detail to avoid spoilers, but the main portion of it takes place on a derelict spaceship and has equal doses of puzzle-solving, exploration, character interaction and combat. It's nicely balanced out.
The mechanics seems to be quite consistent throughout, although there weren't too many examples, and while the sample character sheets appeared to be complete only about a third of the stats actually got used. The adventure was cleverly designed so that each sample character gets about an equal amount of time in the spotlight.
It seems that the only die type used is the D6, but there could be other dice used in the full rules. Each ability/attribute/skill etc. that is to be used for an action gets divided by 4. The resulting number is the number of D6s rolled. The remainder is added to this roll. So an ability of 17 gets divided to 4.25, since .25 D6 can't be rolled, the player rolls 4D6+1. 15 divides to 3.75, or 3 remainder 3, so the player would roll 3D6+3. The player must exceed the difficulty number for this roll to succeed. The exception to this is combat, in which case the attack roll sets the difficulty number that must be exceeded for the defense roll. So someone with an attack score of 14 rolls 3D6+2, and the defender with a defense score of 11 must exceed the attackers result on the 3D6+2 with 2D6+3. Damage is dealt according to the weapon, and the protection afforded by any armor or clothing worn is subtracted from the damage dealt. Damage is dealt according to hit points (in this system Constitution) -NOVA doesn't use the wound system. Another interesting mechanic was where 3 skills were required to accomplish a task. The 3 skills had to be used in order, and the combined rolls of all 3 skills had to exceed 37 to be successful. Complex tasks can be done in concert with other characters, which requires a successful Intelligence test by all characters. The Instinct stat caught my attention as well, as it was used in the adventure it is set up to allow the GM to give hints to the players on a successful Instinct check (the GM decides when it's necessary to roll and the necessary difficulty number to beat). It's a nice little feature to help players out that are missing something the GM or adventure designers thought would be fairly obvious. I liked what I saw of the system. It used an internally consistent mechanic throughout and it doesn't seem to deviate from it without reason. I also like the fact that it just used D6s. I'm rather partial to systems that use only one type of die, and especially partial to systems that use D6s as they are easy to come by and almost everyone has them. As I mentioned in the style section, these rules were introduced throughout the adventure wherever they were relevant.
Pages 9-12 are the 4 sample character sheets. The characters provided have a fairly detailed background story and the stats provided appear to be complete. At least more stats were provided for each character than were needed throughout the sample adventure. The main rules might expect more detail but judging from the size of the main rule-book it appears to be a fairly rules-light system. One of the characters has psionic powers and these powers and their uses are described on the sheet. Also for all characters the uses for the equipment they carry is also described. They even clearly state that a gun with a 6 shot magazine can be fired 6 times before it needs to be reloaded. I would imagine this would be self explanatory but I guess it's nice that they erred on the side of caution instead of assuming the players and GM would automatically know how to use something.
Considering only 11 pages of actual content (not counting the cover page), NOVAstart! Der Stachel des Skorpions is quite solid. It has a short, sweet and to the point introduction. It has a simple, yet complete adventure that is well designed to show various aspects of the system and demonstrates the mechanics. The characters are robust and look like they could be could be used in further adventures using the full rules and the several paragraph backgrounds are a nice touch as well. Considering the goals of the product I can't think of any reason not to give it an excellent rating!
Substance rating: 5
NOVAstart! Der Stachel Des Skorpions can be downloaded for free from the NOVA website at www.nova-rpg.de The website is German only.
