Dahdahdahdah DAH DEEDEEDAH!
God, I love Farscape. It was a TV series that ran for four seasons on the Sci-Fi Channel in the US, and on BBC2 over here, and it was mad mental fun. If you don't know what it was about, basically, it had your Buck Rogers/ Flash Gordon premise: John Crichton, a clean-cut American astronaut, scientist and all round Top Bloke, is on the maiden flight of a spiffy new space module, Farscape One, when he gets sucked through a wormhole, and ends up on this ship, this living ship, right, which was full of escaped prisoners of various species. His arrival coincides with the arrival of Aeryn Sun, a commando from a group called the Peacekeepers, who are basically the Space Nazis. Anyway, this good-looking, hard space babe in a black leather uniform from the only species that look like humans, isn't allowed to rejoin the Space Nazis because she's "irreversibly contaminated" or something, and so John, Aeryn and the ship full of aliens go on the run, and have all sorts of insane adventures.

Except that the cool thing about it, it repeatedly stood the sci-fi cliché on their head. It was like, like Anti-Trek or something: instead of the aliens learning stuff from the enlightened and superior human, he's always the last to get things. It's Crichton who spends most of his time tied up and in need of rescuing. And he's not a can-do hero. He gets screwed around with, duplicated (for most of the third season, there's two of him), beaten up, tortured, brainwashed, and right from the start, you get the distinct impression that the whole experience has left him unhinged. Main characters die. There's an awful lot of sex in it. Drawing from the example of the brilliant 80s Flash Gordon movie (Flash! Aaaa-aah!), half of the aliens look like they're dressed in bondage gear. The arch-villain, Scorpius, looks like a cross between, the gimp and a really nasty alien. Which he, um, is. Anyway, you get the picture. Go rent out some DVDs. I recommend the episode "Crackers Don't Matter", meself. And it has a brilliant theme tune.

I'm sorry. I thought you were reviewing a role-playing game, Wood...
Um, yeah. Sorry.

So, anyway, I begged, begged, I tell you, my Comic Shop Guy to get this book in as soon as I heard of its availability. Eventually, I got it, just after hearing the news in late 2002 that Farscape had been cancelled. I understood soon after that there weren't going to be any supplements. Ah, well.

The Book
It's a fat, matte hardcover, with glossy full-colour paper. The text is in a nice sans-serif font, which feels about right. It's stuffed with photos from the series and most of the publicity photos that are out there. The original art, of which there's a wee bit, but not much, is fine. Nothing special.

There's a few little goofs in the editing, fixes for which can be found at Farscape errata page. It's a very nice looking object.

The book's divided into two halves: a background section, and a game section. The page borders have the look of the show, which is nice, and, in a nice touch, have a different edge for the crunchy game system bits than they do for background stuff.

The First Half
The Farscape RPG covers Seasons 1 and 2 of the series: for fans, this means that the main rulebook only covers the races and planets seen in those first two series: fans will be disapponted to find no Interions (like Jool), no Kalish (like Sikozu) and no Noble Scarrans. One assumed that if Farscape hadn't have been cancelled, Alderac would have produced Season Three and Season Four sourcebooks (as it stands, though, there's rules for Noble Scarrans, Kalish and Interions on the Alderac Farscape website). Since only two seasons had been completed while they were working on the thing, it's reasonable enough, and they're pretty thorough, with one really glaring omission.

There's a bit of so-so fiction, the obligatory "what is roleplaying?" section (which is stupid, since this is a D20 book, and you need the D&D Player's Handbook to use it... duh), and then there's the full and really, really detailed episode guide. They sat through the whole lot repeatedly and took notes. Not being the kind of person who buys episode guides, but being the kind of person who realises that to run an RPG based on a TV show, you need to know the show inside-out, I think that this is a really, really good thing, not least because of the ideas just browsing through it gives you.

Then there's biographies of all of the main character, except for Stark, and and after that there's detailed and well-written overviews of all of the recurring races from the series (Sebaceans, Luxans, Hynerians, Scarrans, Nebari, Baniks, Delvians , but not Pilots) and several others, several of which appeared more than once (Sheyangs, Ilanics, Vorcarians, Tavleks, Zenetans). All of these species are offered as PC races, which is why Pilots are buried in the Gamesmaster section, I suppose, since they're always NPCs, to which I say, "no fair," because I quite fancied a Pilot player character. To be honest, it's nice to have a variety, but no one who's seen the show (except for the most anally retentive fan) is going to want to be a Zenetan, when they can be a Sebacean, a Luxan or a Delvian.

Then you get an overview of planets, mostly referenced from the show (as in, at least mentioned if not shown), several of which have intresting tensions and hooks. Which is good.

The Crunchy Bits
It's D20. I have to admit here that the last version of anything D&D-related I played was in 1994, so the new D20 system is not something I'm hugely familiar with. If I'm inaccurate or tell you stuff you know already, my apologies. If I criticise stuff that's been done to death, again, I can only plead ignorance.

Systemswise, the only things missing from this game (ie. the parts you might want the Player's Handbook for) are level advancement rules and ability generation methods; frankly, most gamers could make up perfectly workable systems themselves for the missing bits. I know I'm going to, because frankly, I refuse to pay twenty quid for a book I'm only going to read three pages of. But then, most gamers have the D20 books in some form or other, so this shouldn't be a problem, really.

Quick rundown: I'm giben to understand that the bits which are very different are just like Spycraft, so if you know that game, much of this should be familiar. Most of the racial abilities are given to the classes, except for the Luxan tongue sting, for some reason, which is a feat, although the Scarran ability to manipulate heat is not included in the list of abilities. Bit of an oversight there.

The races are the ones I mentioned above, the classes are Aristocrat, Warrior, Commando, Pirate, Rogue, Scavenger, Priest, Mystic, Scientist, tech. They mostly do what you expect. Prists and Mystic get powers which are like spells, except you spend "control points" to use them. Control points are interesting. While Priests and Mystics use them as magic points, other characters can use them to get bonuses in combat. They get them according to their class, with a bonus by race, as opposed opposed to hit points (here called Wound Points, for no readily apparent reason), which are determined by race. So, for example, each level Luxans get +1 Control Points and 1D12 Wounds, and Pirates get 1D6 Control Points and +3 Wounds, so a Luxan Pirate gets 1D12+3 Wounds and 1D6+1 Control every level.

There's kind of a perfunctory system for the effect of injuries, so that if you're reduced to a fraction of your Wounds, or lose a lot of them in one go, you get penalties, but it's a bit odd - A 1st level Luxan Warrior gets a standard 15 Wounds; a 1st level Hynerian Diplomat gets 7. If the Luxan who gets reduced to 7 Wounds, how come he's in a worse state than the Hynerian who gets reduced to 6? Nosir, doesn't make sense. Still it's a nice try at making that whole hit points and levels thing make sense, so points for trying.

There's a ship combat system that's wargame based. Not sure if I'll use it, but it's serviceable, so that's all right.

What else? There's a collection of homegrown monsters, some well-written gamesmaster advice, and sample stock NPCs (a very good thing). In the back, the characters from the series are statted up, so no Stark (that one big omission I mentioned) but also no Pilot (who, I guess, must be therefore the same as all the other Pilots, with stats as given in the spaceships chapter). I nearly choked when I saw that they'd given Scorpius Str 8 and Con 9, but thankfully that's a mistake. His real stats are included on that errata page I linked earlier, along with an apology to Wayne Pygram, who plays him.

And quite right too.

The Verdict
The first half of this is top-notch. If it was just the first bit I was referencing, I'd give it 5 for Style and 5 for Substance.

The game stuff was a bit disappointing. It didn't capture the feel of the game. The combat rules are involved, rather than fast-and-furious, and while the idea of spending control points did sort of feel right for heroic sci-fi, there are Farscape-specific things that got left out. Scarrans aren't as mean as they should be (I'd have rather have had them as an NPC race with their raft of special powers intact).

Also, and this may just be me here, but I would have liked to have seen a sanity mechanic. Characters go mad all the time in the series. I'm not asking for a proper balls-to-the-wall SAN mechanic like Call of Cthulhu (although the weaker, not-so-scary version which I understand is found in D20 Cthulhu might fit the job), just something which refelcts the mental balance of a character. But as I said, maybe that's just me.

On the whole, they've done a splendid job of turning the background into a worthwhile role-playing game, gievn that they had to shoehorn it into a generic system rather than create a system for the setting. The book itself looks lovely, the background material is top-notch, and I don't regret buying it in the least.

And one last thing...

They're bringing Farscape back! Hurrah!