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A couple weeks ago, the people at DriveThruRPG were offering this for free and I thought, hey, why not. I remember reading a review of it years ago in the now defunct but once brilliant Arcane magazine, and they seemed to like it, but at the time I thought no more of it, being more of a hard-core horror or historical fantasy fan. But hey, since it was free, I decided to give it a look.
It's a PDF.
Yep. Unlike a lot fo PDFs from DriveThruRPG, however, it's a "proper" PDF rather than a succession of scanned images of the book's pages, which makes for a small file. (well, relatively, it still weighs in at nearly 6MB, but compare that to my copy of Infernalism: The Path of Screams - a third of the page count, three times the file size). It renders quickly on the screen and prints cleanly. Absolutely no complaint about the format. If only they were all like this.
OK, then. So?
So, I like it. I really like it. It comes across like an obsequious yet talented butler, offering you your sci-fi pleasure, whatever it might be. Or maybe it's like that guy from the door of the strip club in From Dusk Till Dawn. You know the one.
Future dark age? Check.
Starships and space battles? Check.
Erich von Daniken-style lost interstellar races who seeded everything and who vanished long ago, leaving Mysterious Ruins and Stuff? Check.
Cybernetics? Check.
Weird alien nemeses (in both inscrutable and bodysnatcher varieties, no less)? Check.
Interstellar politicking, with guilds, church sects and noble houses like in Dune? Check.
Galactic fundamentalist jyhads and star-spanning barbarian hordes, like in Dune? Check.
Psychic powers, like in (wait for it) Dune? Check.
Magic and demons from the Warp? Check.
I think that about covers all your bases. The weird thing is, the setting works. It really works. I mean, with all that stuff, it could end up like that other infamous game which tried everything and turned out to be crap (I forget its name... Synnibar, or something, I think). But it doesn't.
It has an internal logic and it sticks to it. Although some of the alien races which are mentioned in passing and which presumably appear in later supplements sound a bit hokey (bird-people and horse-people, indeed), as far as the core book goes, it all makes perfect sense. The idea is that long ago, a Lost Alien Race conveniently set up jump-gates at the edges of every inhabited star system; human beings, having found and utilised these things, go off and conquer the universe (as you do); it all goes swimmingly until civilisation collapses; new dark age; jyhad against computers; new syncretistic religion with Byzantine and nasty-but-well-meaning structure helps to rebuild Civilisation As We Know It; rise of guilds and noble houses; big civil war, member of honourable but troubled noble house wins war and becomes Emperor of the Universe; stars start mysteriously going out.
Yeah, it's derivative (I found myself half expecting to see the phrases "Orange Catholic Bible" and "Butlerian Jyhad", and I found myself mentally substituting "Atreides" and "Harkonnen" for "Hawkwood" and "Decados"), but, like I always say (all together now) in role-playing games, a derivative idea done well is better than a new idea done really badly. And it's good, actually. Of all the genres you see in RPGs, star-spanning literary sci-fi has always been under-represented, and I think a good general setting can only be a Good Thing. I can nick plots from my Iron Empires comics or from any random sci-fi novels I happen to have to hand, and insert them into the game without screwing around with the setting... well. It's all good.
If there's one flaw in the setting, it's the nagging feeling that if I were to buy supplements for this game, I'd be encouraged to buy into a metaplot. In my opinion, metaplots are bad, kids: they make players into spectators. Your mileage may vary, though, and besides, in the core book it's not quite so obvious. My own reaction to metaplots is simple: I completely ignore them. So it's a niggle more than anything. And besides: it's not fair to subtract points for deliberate and subjective design decisions.
The Game
You have two options for character creation. You can create your character using either a White Wolf-style points build system, where you buy stats, skills, advantages and disadvantages (like unusual character traits, contacts, unusual possessions, legal status, cybernetics) using pools of points. Or, alternatively, you can use a quick and friendly step-by-step "mix and match four or five of these templates" system, where you choose a role, decide what your character was doing during childhood, adolescence and her early career and add a few tweaks at the end. This has the added advantage of creating for you a pre-fabricated framework for your character's history, which you can then embellish, making it ideal for starting characters. They include a sidebar which explains how the two systems add up to the same number of points.
This is how the game works: characters have traits, which are divided into characteristics (basic stats) and skills. Characteristics are divided up into Body (Strength, Endurance, Dexterity), and Mind (Wits, Perception, Tech) and Spirit (divided into three opposed pairs (Extrovert/Introvert, Passion/Calm, Faith/Ego). Skills are divided up into Natural Skills, which everyone has, such as Dodge, Impress, Shoot, Observe, Melee, and Sneak and Learned Skills, which you either have or you don't, such as Read, Etiquette, Remedy (medicine), Think Machine (operate computer), Pilot, that sort of thing. All characteristics and skills go from 1 to 10; each of the three pairs of Spirit characteristics have to add up to 10 or less.
To perform an action, you add a characteristic and a skill together to get a goal number. You then try to roll equal to or less than the goal number on a D20. If you get lower than the total, you succeed, and if you get higher than the total you fail. But - and here's the clever bit - the higher you roll, the better. If you match the target number exactly, it's a critical. If you roll a natural 1 it's always an ordinary success; a natural 19 is always an ordinary failure, a natural 20 is always a fumble. If the task is harder or easier, the GM has the option of making the goal number higher (easier) or lower (harder).
It's simple, it's fast, and it's so elegant. I really love it. It's genius. If you're competing against someone, or if you're doing another roll which is somehow realted to the first one, you divide the number you rolled by 3, rounding down, which gives you a total of "victory points". The more victory points, the better you did. You can then add these to the goal number of your next roll, or roll them as extra damage dice if you're in combat. If two people are competing in their rolls, like in a combat situation, you subtract the lower total from the higher to see how you did.
There's an optional rule which allows players to tinker with their goal numbers. Oh, and if you hit someone in combat, you roll a handful of six-sided dice equal to the damage rating of the weapon plus any victory points you got. Every die that gets 4 or less scores a hit. Armour allows you to roll a number of dice equal to the armour's rating: each 4 or less deflects a hit.
This may all sound nightmarish, but you have to realise that as far as the rules go, that's about it. Honestly. All the other rules - the magic/psionics system, the beefed up combat rules, the starship and cybernetics rules, all which are workable and as far as I can tell decently balanced, are all actually just extrapolated from the basic system. The arithmetic is the hardest bit, and that's pretty elementary (and the character sheet even includes a little table if you're having trouble remembering your three times table).
The Bad Stuff
It's not perfect. The information on the three non-human player-character races, the Vorox (four-armed Wookiees), the Ur-Obun and the Ur-Ukar (like human people only with funny coloured eyes and tattoos and stuff) is a little bit sketchy, and you really need to plunder reference points from SF novels and films if you want to play them. The same goes for the two barbarian factions, the Kurgan and the Vuldrok.
Likewise, the two main NPC antagonist races, the Vaylen- er, sorry, Symbiots, and the inscrutable Vau, are referenced throughout the text, but apart from one very sketchy Symbiot NPC buried in the back, they're not given any stats in the book. Yes, I know you can get supplements for all of these races, but the reason supplements are called "supplements" is because they're supplementary, as in, you know, extra. Making supplements necessary rather than just desirable is sneaky and wrong.
Also, it's highly annoying the way that various concepts are not adequately explained when they should be, and that when they are, they're buried in the text. Take character creation. While otherwise great, the character creation chapter is not really very user friendly. I was only able to work out that a template character started with base scores in stats and skills through working it out from the example, with reference to the character sheet, and later from reading halfway down in the points build section (you start with 3 in Body and Mind stats, and in Natural Skills, while in each of the paired Spirit stats, one of the pair starts at 3 and the other starts at 1). Some ratings like Vitality (wound levels, basically) and Wyrd (magic points) are referenced repeatedly from the beginning of chapter 2 and not explained until right at the end of chapter 3, fifty-odd pages later!
It's pale, and it howls a bit...
With all this talk of WhiteWolfery (trait+skill system, points build system, merits and flaws, stuff missing from corebook so you have to buy This Supplement Here), it comes as no surprise that the game was masterminded by sometime WW staffers Andrew Greenberg and Bill Bridges. It's laid out in the same way as most White Wolf core books: lots of background, brief rules, character creation, magic, permutations, technology, GM stuff, antagonists and a scene-setting appendix. You'll recognise a bunch of artists from from WW, too. None of the art is stunning, but none of it is really horrible.
The GM stuff is very well written, including "Andrew's Maxims", which are pithy advice-bites on the gamesmaster's art.
I particularly like the idea of running the whole thing as a "passion play", a pseudo-religious, mythic and/or moral saga, told as if it happened a long time ago. That would suit my own group down to the ground.
In fact, apart from the annoyingly missing material and the near-opaque character creation chapter, the book represents a refinement of the White Wolf style of game. Most things - system, advice, and style, have been tightened up.
Final Evaluation
The game is decently presented, and although some of the rules are written in a garbled manner, it's on the whole a pretty nice package. 4 for style.
Notwithstanding the missing stats for Vau and Symbiots, the background is subtle, fully realised, and covers all your SF bases. 5, then for substance.
Go buy it. It's the first SF setting I;ve seen since I was about 15 that I've actually wanted to run.
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