This is the licensed roleplaying game set in the universe of the popular television show Stargate SG-1, itself based upon the motion picture Stargate. Most of this review will assume some knowledge of the TV show, but for those who are uninitiated, it expands upon the theory that the pyramids were built by aliens.
These aliens, the Goa'uld, in fact ruled Earth thousands of years ago, using their advanced technology to proclaim themselves gods. Some of the more powerful Goa'uld such as Ra and Anubis have lived on in our history, despite being banished from Earth by a human uprising many thousands of years ago. This uprising was made possible by the Goa'uld's reliance on Stargates, portals allowing instantaneous travel between worlds no matter the distance.
On Earth, the Stargate was buried in the desert by the rebels, only to be uncovered in the twentieth century and secretly reactivated by the US military. Since then, the Stargate Command (SGC) has been exploring the universe through the gate, clashing with the Goa'uld and making new friends and enemies. The game sets the players as one of these teams, traveling to distant worlds and having adventures.
Note that the game requires the use of the Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook from Wizards of the Coast. Hence this review will assume basic knowledge of the d20 system.
Style
The book is a large hardcover nearly 500 pages long with full colour art and layout. The cover is a photo of the SG-1 team posing in front of the stargate, with a deep blue background. The interior art is entirely composed of photos from the series, and they do the job adequately, although I felt they were a little on the small and sparse side. I guess this would have increased the size of an already hefty book though so there may have been little choice.
The rest of the colour is mostly shades of blue, used to ease the separation of info in tables and providing a border to the page. The binding is very solid and durable, and the book has a nice heft and weight to it, something I was pleased with. Overall, the book has very high production values and I give it a 4 out of 5.
Chapter One: History of the Stargate
The first chapter of the book (27 pages long) is a summary of the events of the motion picture and of the first six series of the show. The more important episodes in each season are described briefly, and the chapter gives a useful overview of the background of the series. If you are not a committed viewer of the show, it can bring you up to speed on major events more knowledgeable players might bring up, which was the main use I had for it. To be honest, whilst I can see the need for some GMs to have a chapter like this, who really cares what SG-1 is up to when your campaign focuses on another team? But they could hardly have omitted it, and it does a good job at covering what it is intended to.
Chapter Two: The Stargate Program
The second chapter describes the structure of the SGC, mission profiles and procedures, the Cheyenne mountain complex and clocks in at 29 pages. I found this to be a much more useful chapter, describing life at the SGC and helping convey how to run a military game. It also covers how the stargate is operated and the operational procedures such as dealing with biological contamination and alien infiltration. The best parts though, or the parts I refer to most, are the mission profiles and team/personnel roles, useful for planning adventures and putting in something for everyone to do.
Chapter Three: Through the Gate
This chapter covers the bulk of the setting, depicting most of the more important worlds discovered by the SGC such as Abydos, Cimmeria and Chulak, as well as their inhabitants and some of the alien races encountered (with the notable exception of the Goa'uld, who get their own chapter). It is a very solid chapter, both in page count (43 pages) and in usability. It does a great in-depth examination of the setting and gave me a much better understanding of the Jaffa, Tok'ra and Asgard, and of the universe as a whole. The only odd thing is the extensive coverage of a race called the Reol. I'm not the kind of person to go buy the series on DVD and there are certainly many episodes that I've missed, but I'd never even heard of the Reol before I read the book, so I wonder at the level of detail given.
Chapter Four: The Goa'uld
Chapter four is entirely devoted to discussing the Goa'uld, mankind's chief enemy, immortal supremely powerful megalomaniacs who have half convinced themselves they are gods. It details their biology, history and socio-political structure, as well as giving a rundown on the past and present system lords, the scheming warlords who tend to ignore the Tauri (as they call Earthlings) in favour of battling each other for influence and power. Being the primary adversaries of the SGC, they are given 21 pages devoted to them, and it is a good workhorse chapter. It ends with a quick lexicon of the language of the Goa'uld, with translations of fun phrases like Shol'va! (traitor!) and Obi-tan! (halt!). A nice touch.
Chapter Five: Character Creation
Well that's the setting done, the rest of the book is made up of rules and advice for GMs running stargate. We kick off with character creation (47 pages) and perhaps surprisingly for a d20 book, with a lengthy set of questions to help a player flesh out their character. I was most impressed, and I use many of the questions in other games when I feel a player needs to add some personality to their stats. For the actual character stats, it's fairly standard d20 with a couple of changes. Apparently most of the Stargate rules are an adaption of the Spycraft game also by Alderac, but I don't have it so I can't tell you the differences. You don't need it to play regardless.
In addition to races such as Jaffa and near human, you can also come from a 'macro-specialty' if you come from Earth, a background such as the Army or Civilian Specialist. These function just like races, giving you attribute modifiers and special abilities. Further most Macro-specialties and Macro-races have subsets, or specialties to further define the character's background, such as Army Ranger etc. Most of these are interesting and help make each character unique but there were some options that were a bit dubious in my mind, better suited to NPCs. The asgard especially irk me – the idea of one running around with a SG team is just a little ridiculous to my mind – they have much bigger fish to fry. Also allowing players to play NID agents seems a little iffy, there would have to be some trust issues there. But the GM can just outlaw these like I did so it's not a major problem.
Next we have the classes, six core classes: Explorer, Guardian, Pointman, Scientist, Scout and Soldier; and six prestige classes: Bodyguard, Field Analyst, Field Medic, and Officer, Prime, and Sniper. It doesn't sound like a lot but each of the classes are quite broad and multiclassing is quite easy. In combination with the Specialties and Feats, there is room for a lot of customization and variation between characters. There are a few minor quibbles with balancing – why does the soldier get Will as his best save? And really, just how useful is a bonus to Profession (Military) from one specialty when compared to a bonus to Move Silently? But on the whole, each of the classes are useful and each brings unique talents to the team.
Chapter Six: Skills
This is a very long chapter weighing in at 59 pages, and makes for very dry reading. But there's not much alternative, and you can hardly fault the thoroughness of the chapter. Each of the skills (and there are several changes from D&D to bring it up to modern day) gets a comprehensive description of various tasks that can be accomplished with that skill and what is involved. One significant change is that the skills now have an error range and a threat range, which means that you can get critical failures and successes on skill checks, a nice change.
Chapter Seven: Feats
One of my long standing problems with d20 is the lack of variety between characters – the difference between two 4th level fighters can be very thin. Combined with the specialties described earlier, chapter seven goes a long way towards changing my mind. There are so many feats to choose from (29 pages worth), divided into basic combat feats, ranged combat feats, melee combat feats, unarmed combat feats, basic skill feats, advanced skill feats, terrain feats and style feats, and given that most of the classes get bonus feats from one or more of the categories they can be used to customize a character considerably. Unlike standard d20, skill feats actually seem worthwhile as in addition to a +2 bonus, they also increase your threat with a skill.
Chapter Eight: Finishing Touches
This chapter may be short at only 7 pages, but it introduces two very significant changes to the d20 rule set: backgrounds and action points. Backgrounds are Stargate's take on the disadvantages/flaws found in other systems, with a twist: you have to buy disadvantages like Enemies or Secrets with skill points. Why would you do this? Well when that background comes up you get extra experience. It's a nice variation on the old theme but the payoff seemed a little slim when you consider that some classes like soldier only have limited skill points to spend.
Action points are a great addition however, and really make the game into an action adventure. You get a number of dice each session that you can roll (they start off as d4s and increase in size as you gain levels) and add to ANY dice roll, whether it be skill check or damage roll, AFTER you roll the check but before you hear the result. You can also spend them to increase your defence for a round or spend one die to activate a threat into a critical, or activate an enemy's error into a critical failure. The GM also gets them to amp their NPCs and activate your errors.
An interesting point here – you don't get a confirmation check on a threat, you have to spend the action dice or it remains just a success (or failure on a one). But you can earn action points by doing cool stuff, whether that be stunts or quips. So if you live up to the genre, you can get away with more cinematic stuff. My players and I simply loved this mechanic – it helps counter some of the excessive randomness in d20.
Chapter Nine: Gear
The chapter on Gear is another hefty chapter at 71 pages, detailing an extensive collection of weapons, armour, alien devices and other equipment. The list is quite comprehensive, although I would have liked more weapons. But then maybe I'm just a gun bunny. One significant change is the use of bundles – instead of buying equipment with money, being a military organization, each character is issued one or more bundles of equipment each mission. Some characters also receive gear picks to supplement this allocation with some custom gear or additional equipment. Whilst I understand the reasoning, this is one of the things I hate most about the system. Picking new equipment each mission takes forever, even with the bundle lists printed out to speed the process. Combined with leveling characters up after a mission, this process can really slow down a game.
Another minor note of annoyance is that the book curiously omitted the stats for Jaffa armour. You can find them online (and in the first campaign sourcebook) in the errata, along with revised stats for the Staff Weapon.
Chapter Ten: Combat
Combat is at heart still very familiar to any d20 player, yet with several tweaks to simulate the genre. Probably the largest change is the implementation of a vitality/wound system to replace hit points. Wound points remain constant so characters can no longer shrug off terrible injuries at higher levels, and vitality plugs the gap, representing a combination of luck, energetic diving out of the way, and near misses. Eventually you run out of steam/luck and start taking injuries. Or if you take a critical hit, it goes straight to wounds. It's a system that works well at emulating action movies/TV series.... provided you can ignore some of the logical disconnects. There are plenty of arguments about this on the Alderac forums – if a hit to vitality is a miss, how can a zat gun or taser stun you?
Armour is also different, providing damage reduction rather than a boost to AC (or Defence Class as it is called here). It also helps protect you from criticals. I have to say this system makes a lot more sense to me and I liked it a lot. Once again though, there are some quirks here that had some of my players grumbling – wearing armour makes it easier to hit you and soldiers get worse Defence bonuses than scientists. Again, I suppose this is a genre thing – it makes soldiers wear armour whilst scientists can usually rely on their defence and shun armour.
The third major change is in the initiative system where the old static initiative check is replaced by a thing called fluid initiative. First off, let me say that I found the class dependent initiative bonus (increasing with levels) a refreshing change – something that should have been done a long time ago. But my group just couldn't get a handle on the fluid initiative and in the end we just went back to static (which to AEG's credit is a supported optional rule). The system just seems needlessly complex – some actions and circumstances like aiming or failing a save modify your initiative count for the next turn and on top of that you have specific initiative actions like regroup to shift your initiative count higher. I consider our group to tend towards the crunchy end of the spectrum in our tastes, but this was just too much.
Having said that, there was a lot of crunch that we did like (37 pages worth), such as the many different actions you can take in addition to the old standbys. Suppressive fire and covering fire were two standouts, getting a lot of praise from the group, but there are many others we liked nearly as much. The system feels like it has a lot more tactical depth than D&D, and it actively encourages using tactics and taking cover, giving a nice authentic military feel.
Chapter Eleven: Gamemastering Stargate
The last chapter (67 pages) is a bit of grab bag of extra stuff that didn't fit elsewhere but didn't merit it's own chapter. It covers the GM's use of action dice, mission and campaign design, GM advice, NPCs, environmental hazards, traps, disease and poison – fairly standard stuff. It also has the rules for using the stargate, world creation, NPC disposition and morale. Which is a bit unfortunate in my opinion, because while the rules are solid, they tend to get buried and forgotten in this chapter. The entire chapter seems very disorganized and some of the rules would have been better moved to other chapters (morale should really be in the combat chapter) or given chapters of their own. It finishes up with a massive twenty-three pages of tables, which may scare some readers but I can assure you there is a lot of good stuff there and I've found it invaluable – just about anything you might think of looking up can be found.
Appendix One: Crossovers
Seven pages of crossover notes for other settings. It covers DragonStar (from Fantasy Flight Games), Naranjan (from Green Ronin), Nyambe (from Atlas Games), and Theah (from AEG). Since I am unfamiliar with any of these settings I can't really comment too much. Suffice to say I generally dislike these crossover chapters in books – I would have preferred the space be spent on other material.
Appendix Two: Characters and Creatures
This short appendix (17 pages) is somewhat more useful, if only for interest or comparison's sake. It gives a character history and stats for all the major characters in the TV show, as well as providing a couple of critters like the Abydonian Mastadge and the replicators.
Index
The index seems adequate – I had little trouble finding anything I was looking for in it.
Playtest Notes
My group created a rather 'unusual' team, with a covert ops bent. Hardly surprising really, given the prevalence of ninja lovers in the hobby but I was a little taken aback. We had a Tok'ra Undercover Operative / Pointman 2 / Soldier 2, a Jaffa Shol'va / Pointman 2 / Guardian 2, a Air Force Pararescue / Scout 4, an enlisted marine / Soldier 4, and a Navy Officer / Scientist 2 / Soldier 2. As you can see they had a fair amount of cross-over in classes, but they each remained quite distinct with different niches, and no-one had any problems creating the character they wanted.
As I have previously said, the worst part of the game is without doubt the gearing up section. I've downloaded most of the aids available to help speed up the selection of bundles and gear picks but it is still a tedious chore.
Interestingly the skill feats were very popular choices for the group, a complete switch from D&D where they only taken very rarely. The introduction of critical successes and failures for skill checks and the ability to use action dice to make up for a poor roll went down well. Given that Stargate is not predominantly about combat, this was a must and the system worked well, being quick and easy to resolve.
Of course we have had a couple of combats in which I tried to mix up the scenarios, something very easy to do in the Stargate setting of course. With the exception of the overly complex fluid initiative, we enjoyed most of the changes and additions to the combat system. Some of the things we had raised eyebrows over before like the very low defence classes all the PCs had soon proved the logic behind them – it sounds crazy but the system comes across as quite realistic and dangerous – the players soon learned that if they didn't use cover and tactics to support each other as a team they would be cut to shreds. Combat does take a while, but none of us thought it time misspent, finding it rather more satisfying than usual.
In Summary
Although it may appear a little pricey to some, the Stargate rpg is good value for money. The book is handsome and packed with an enormous amount of content. Be warned that most of this content does come in the form of rules - the setting information provided is substantial but if you have no interest in using the d20 rules you may have difficulty in justifying the cost. I would urge you to try the rules out however, as I think they are without doubt the finest implementation of the d20 rule set I have seen to date.
Character creation is greatly expanded, with enough variation to make every character interesting. Combat is a much richer tactical experience and the use of action dice really helps lend a cinematic quality to the game. There are some drawbacks like the gear selection and bundles – this game requires a LOT of preparation as a GM. If your tastes tend towards a rules-lite experience, this probably isn't the game for you. But if you like Stargate and like your rules medium to crunchy, you owe it to yourself to check this out.
Style: 4/5 Substance: 4/5
