Dark Stars is a short, eighteen-page-plus-cover PDF document. It’s intended as both a mini-supplement to any SF game and a stand-alone mini-game of SF horror roleplaying, and is billed as a fusion of SF horror films and the eldritch horrors of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos stories.
Style first. Beyond some minor layout work on the front cover (which identifies the game as “A Product Of Sign Corp”, with an angular depiction of the infamous Yellow Sign of Robert Chambers’ macabre Cthulhu Mythos stories), the document is laid out in the two-column landscape format Dan has been using since The Matrix Prohibited. It’s well spaced and quite readable once printed (two-column formats rarely lend themselves well to smooth screen reading, and while Dan’s minimalist style helps, it’s still limited by its basic nature), but there’s nothing to really catch the eye; it’s just bare text and no art. Also absent is page numbering, which can make arranging the printed pages a chore (as I discovered). I’d give it a Style of 2.
On to the Substance. The book itself is written under the assumption that you’re already a roleplayer and running or intending to run an SF campaign of some sort. Past the title page is the Introduction, which spends two of five paragraphs summarising the book’s aim, its inspirations and the content of the coming sections. The other three paragraphs are setting, system and colour advice that would perhaps have been more appropriate either in a section of its own or blended into other sections.
Sacrifices, the core rule concept of Dark Stars, is explained next. It’s intended to simulate the harsh choices and terrible risks facing the protagonists of SF-horror films such as Alien or Event Horizon. It’s presented as both an add-on to an existing RPG system and as a stand-alone, die-based, task resolution mechanic for SF-horror one shot games. I won’t go into specifics, as Sacrifices is pretty much the rules meat of this $2.50 product, but basically, Sacrifices improve player characters’ chances of success.
The problem is, both versions of the Sacrifices rules seem only halfway developed. Determining how many Sacrifices a player can or must take is explained well in both versions of the rules, but while negative aspects of Sacrifices are explained in colour terms, no suggestions are given as to how those negative aspects should apply to the characters' game statistics, nor quite how severe said impact should be. The deficiency, while fairly easily correctable if you’re using Sacrifices as an add-on, is glaring when you’re using the stand-alone mechanic, as taking Sacrifices makes no difference to a player character’s three capabilities (a PC’s only game metric).
It seems expected (but never stated) that players will just roleplay the results of Sacrifices, and the GM will decide when a player character has died or gone uselessly insane for game purposes based on the colour alone. There should be some sort of game measure that the players can watch their characters rapidly running out of, to provide that wonderful tension generated by dwindling capabilities or resources so common to SF horror (i.e. the ammo situation in Aliens).
Neither is any thought given to how to manage how lethal a horror episode can be, especially when used as an interlude in a standard SF campaign. Dark Stars gleefully offers one-shot advice like permanently damaging or killing off player characters, with little recognition given to campaign play expectations that the player characters will continue to the next session.
After admiring how Dan Bayn encouraged players to detail their actions by offering them bonuses fort each embellishment in A Wushu Guide to The Matrix, I was a little disappointed that his rule for Final Sacrifices doesn’t provide any encouragement beyond how cool it might be to come back from the dead as a villain (assuming said option is available). R. Talsorian’s Dream Park is the only game I’ve seen that pulls off something like this, where players can get some of the XP they lost by dying back by playing a zombie. I will admit, though, I can’t think of an in- or meta-game justification for any such rule in Dark Stars.
The monster rules for the stand-alone version are nicely pared down and quick; the level of danger is left to the GM in a similar fashion to the Stress rules from InSpectres.
The next section is devoted to four Alien Threats, two of which seem to be the Predator and John Carpenter’s The Thing with the serial numbers filed off. This seems odd when the intended audience would likely know enough about said celluloid nasties to not need a write-up. Although the latter of the two, the Breeders, is tied in with a Cthulhu Mythos major power, the race as written would be no different without the tie-in. There’s not quite enough uniqueness or session-specific suggestions (beyond the obvious) to make them worth the purchase price.
The last concept, the Tormenters, feels more useful to gamers as written, as they’re more a generic alien mindset applicable to any physicality instead of a specific and recognisable type of creature. Some interesting session ideas are posited around them as well.
Next are the Eldritch Horrors, four powers from H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. I think the minimal SF-space-horror twist Bayn gives these beings could be cribbed together from the Call of Cthulhu RPG or Lovecraft fiction, and either of those is mandatory of you’re even remotely serious about injecting a Lovecraft flavour (and not just the mosters) into the atmosphere of any game. It just can’t be covered in the four pages Bayn dedicates to the Eldritch Horrors, and if you’re selling to gamers already familiar with the Mythos, it’s exceeding likely they already have Call of Cthulhu on the shelf, rendering these three or so pages redundant.
Finally comes Project Carcosa, a six-and-a-half-page mini-adventure set on a distant space station (plus another two pages with four pre-generated player characters). From one perspective, it’s a fairly neat action film with weird shit that will scare and/or not make sense.
From another… There’s usually a moment about two-thirds into any SF-horror film where after all the hints and investigation the protagonists finally realise What’s Going On and are faced with the choice to either run (i.e. Alien) or fight (i.e. Predator). Project Carcosa is packed with references to Robert Chambers’ fiction, which the players will probably need to be familiar with in order to get, and it throws in four loosely linked nasties, two Alien Threats and two Eldritch Horrors. If the players are Mythos nuts, they will probably figure out half of what’s happening and maybe appreciate the name-dropping, but the characters don’t get the opportunity for the Revelation and the Choice. Instead, they pretty much stumble from incident to incident just trying to find a way out.
The plot also hinges on the psychic character, who’s basically spoon-fed clues as horrifying visions and expected to take Sacrifices as a result. It’s a rather nasty railroading technique, and actually goes against using the add-on version of the Sacrifices rules with an existing game system, where the player chooses whether and how many Sacrifices to take on for a given roll. While the book makes it clear that psychics should be going crazy left, right and centre, it’s sad to see that the player of the psychic character is given little choice as to when, where and how she loses it.
Finally, even the most unsympathetic SF-horror protagonists (the cast of Alien make for a pretty good example) usually have enough everyman for us to empathise with and thus fear for. There’s nothing really attractive or potentially redeeming about any of the pre-generated characters as written; I’d be tempted to run them into the first threat I encountered to rid the galaxy of the sad bastard or bitch.
I think that by trying to cover two big concepts in one small package, Dan Bayn short-changed himself on both. You can’t cram the flavour of the Cthulhu Mythos into eighteen pages, let alone convey how to work it into an RPG session, and while you probably could distil the main concepts and recurring themes of SF horror into an eighteen page RPG, the short form Cthulhu Mythos gets in the way.
Dark Stars has a potentially great and very genre-appropriate mechanic, but in my opinion Dark Stars needs to a) follow through on developing it and b) explain how to get players to feel as afraid for their characters as the audience of an SF-horror film gets afraid for the characters on screen instead of providing lists of monsters. I’d be willing to pay $3, or even $5, for that. As it is, I have to give Dark Stars a substance of 2.
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