 Goto [ Index ] |
Starcluster 2 is likely to fall into the niche of not for everyone, but great for some. It is an innovative and well-considered game, with a rather high learning curve despite being relatively simple. I’ll explain that paradox as I progress.
Introduction
Starcluster 2 starts out with an amazing amount of promise. The introduction explains how the knowledge of the impending destruction of the solar system forced mankind to the stars, and how the varied groups that left our solar system traveled over 1200 years to reach the cluster of inhabitable planets and star systems that make up the setting for the game. The possibilities shine right out of the gate – the game looks great when it mixes alien worlds, pre-existing civilizations capable of cross-breeding, and ships full of everything from insane criminals to scientific communities and soldiers who have traveled a millennia to achieve their destinations.
Character Generation
The innovative mechanics begin to show when you reach the first chapter. Instead of just rolling stats and slapping on a background, Starcluster 2 invites players to generate the entire lives of their heroes, from their pre-teen years to their retirement. The players can play through segments of the generation and then skip ahead ten years, developing as they go, to play the same characters a decade later. Players may decide on their own when to stop generating a character and start playing.
The character generation rules explain that for every three years after 34, characters start to decline in their physical abilities. However, skills continue to accumulate, so over time a character becomes more focused and trained, if somewhat less full of raw capability. This balance makes the generation rules work very well, and there are literally almost 100 pages of possible career choices to provide considerable options.
Unfortunately, at this point the book begins to show the downside of small-press publishing. The layout and rules explanations serve to confuse the reader, and require several read-throughs to determine exactly how to make a character. Dozens of occupational tables provide considerable options, but they are also a daunting amount of material to sift through while making a character.
Guide to Skills and Metaskills
As the reader moves into the second chapter, Starcluster 2 continues to be a dichotomy of innovation versus painful layout. The skills rules are explained very briefly, and not referenced again for the rest of the book. However, the use of those skills is brilliant, and the addition of metaskills is a concept I have not seen in games before.
Skills are standard – using a gun, flying a starship, and singing a song work pretty much just as they always have. More levels in a skill indicates more proficiency. Few gamers will be the least bit confused by the skills.
Metaskills, on the other hand, are new. By learning a metaskill, a character learns how to get more out of the skills he possesses. Skills such as Design, Grow, and Obtain relate to nothing on their own. To use these metaskills, players link them with standard skills to modify their chances of success with specific tasks. Metaskills may also be used on their own when appropriate skills are lacking.
Unfortunately, the layout again confuses the relatively simple rules. Skills are resolved on a percentile basis, with each level of a skill adding to the chance of success. What is not always clear is the base number to which a skill adds, and this confusion can be damaging.
Humans and Humanoids
Four player races are initially available to players, though others may be found in supplements. Four of these races are aliens – the sastras, vantors and tagris. These races are all capable of interbreeding with humans, making SaHus, VaHus, and TaHus, and brining the number of options up to seven.
The narrow focus of alien races may seem like a strange concept to those wanting to play a starfaring space opera, but it makes sense within the bounds of Starcluster 2. These races, like humanity itself, were seeded by a master race of space travelers. They all began as the same thing, but evolved to deal with the different circumstances of their home planets.
This section is surprisingly sparse. Short descriptions of each race provide very little to use when deciding what to create, and while the races are interesting, they are not explored in enough depth. Considering the length of this book (almost 300 pages), I expected more exposition on the aliens available as player characters.
Equipment: Personal
Starcluster 2 draws a distinction between equipment you carry, equipment you shoot, and equipment you drive, enough so that each gets its own chapter. The first equipment chapter describes levels of technology and the availability of items on backward planets. Possibly the coolest thing in this chapter is thought-sensitive clothing that can be reconfigured with an unspoken command. Other new tech advancements are also listed, and make for a fairly cool if unadorned chapter.
Equipment: Weapons
My second favorite thing about playing a space opera game is the inclusion of cool guns. Blasters and laser rifles are great, but plasma carbines and gyrojets are better. I love the lengthy weapon list in Starcluster 2, but I would have rather seen more description of the weapons. A sting rifle sounds like a really cool gun, but I couldn’t tell you, because the book never describes it.
Playing the Game
The main focus of this chapter is combat, though there is a some short description of degrees of success and failure and skill mastery. For the most part, though, this chapter deals with fighting.
Initiative is a percentile roll, with the lowest result going first. Each player gets about a half-second, and players may trade points on the initiative roll to modify chance-to-hit or damage. This small but cool modification to standard rules serves to allow cautious players to aim their shots while hot-headed brawlers sacrifice accuracy for speed.
Hitting an opponent is a standard skill check modified by combat skill levels. This is straightforward and easy to see, but players may want to take the game out for a couple trial runs before they realize that the chapter never actually states what a player needs to roll to hit. This rule is not left out – the skills chapter clearly states how skills are used – but it might have been a great deal handier to repeat that, and save me the trouble of flipping back and forth trying to figure out what I need to roll to plug some space pirate.
This short chapter needed to be a lot longer. I would have loved to see a reiteration of the system used to determine base chances at skills, including a lengthier exposition on combat. I felt slightly bewildered as I tried to figure out just how a player would know how difficult it is to shoot someone else.
Starships and Vehicles
I had to admit that I was surprised to discover that this chapter presents only two starships and four surface vehicles. It would seem to me that a game about space travel would have more than two ways to get that done. The ships and vehicles that are provided are good, but there are not enough here.
Ship design might have been a good way to add to this chapter. If the writers didn’t want to give me tons of ships, they might have shown me how to make my own. Sadly, that is not in this chapter.
Non-Player Characters and Player Options
Starcluster 2 continues to waver between powerfully useful and bereft of utility. This chapter presents an exhaustive study of NPCs, including several samples and great rules for generating new characters on the fly. The player options presented here allow players to grab a template and get up to age 26 without going through the process of generation, allowing either pregenerated characters or a springboard to streamline generation.
This chapter is very useful, and I was very pleased that it was here. It alleviates one of my main concerns with the game, which is the apparent length of character generation. It also allows a GM to pull out useful NPCs without extensive prep time.
Star Travel and Space Combat
This chapter begins with a very intelligent discussion of several different forms of star travel, including their benefits and drawbacks. Varying tech levels are considered and explored, with considerable options for describing everything from a bucket of bolts to a sleek vessel. A short essay on spaceports allows a GM to come up with a few basic details for space stations and describe them quickly.
Unlike personal combat, space combat gets a fairly thorough review. Computer and comm checks, firing weapons, and shields all get a good analysis to ease players through space combat. I still would have loved to see a statement regarding exactly how skills apply, using concrete numbers, but overall the space combat is explained very well.
Essentially, space combat is just a series of skill checks using percentile dice. Modifications for crew actions carry forward, as do ship damage and weapon quality. Duties for each crew member are discussed, from scanning for opposing ships to maneuvering away from incoming missiles. Several weapons and ship components are listed for modifying ships.
The downside here is that I still do not have ships with which to fight. As long as the only ships I ever use are the two in the Starships chapter, I should be fine, but if a personal fighter ever takes on a galactic cruiser, I’m up a creek.
Cluster Politics and Societies
This was the chapter I was looking forward to the most. The setting for Starcluster 2 is original and ripe with possibility, and I was excited to dive in and learn more about the varied worlds and personalities of this vast area of populated space.
The chapter begins by describing how an ancient race placed the various humanoid races, and how they evolved. Then it describes a few homeworlds for the races. After that, there is a short history lesson on how some alien race arrived with jump technology, and the future of the cluster was changed.
The two major governments of the cluster are the SaVaHuTa and the Diasporan Community. In essence, the SaVaHuTa is a coalition of like-minded races, while the DC would rather not mix the races. Political boundaries are examined along with a few powerful houses and groups.
The rogue worlds have cast off government from either body, and there are several alien leagues and nations. At this point we are introduced to a large number of new alien species, but they are not described at all. No physical description of the aliens, their politics or planets is provided, and it leaves the reader frustrated to have come so far and learned so little.
The Cluster – Physical Descriptions
This chapter amounts to an 18-page list of planets, denoted only by table entries describing their orbits, atmospheres, and other scientific information. No actual descriptive copy separates one planet from another, so that a GM can choose any planet in the cluster and know next to nothing about it.
Worlds – Settlements
Happily, the information left out of last chapter appears to have made it to this one. Unhappily, the twenty pages of tables provide information just as dry as the last chapter. A GM willing to exert some effort could extrapolate a lot given a planet’s name, tech level, affiliation, status, starport and population, but he would still have to come up with some interesting facts to make the planet worth landing on.
These last two chapters provide further paradox. They are short on information on a planet-by-planet basis, but they do represent an awesome amount of work cataloging and listing hundreds of planets. A GM would be hard pressed to simply describe a planet, but on the other hand, he would have a solid basis for any of hundreds of settlements. The dichotomy of a steep learning curve and a simple game continues.
Aztec System
Any frustration at the lack of useful in the last two chapters is blown away by the wonderful description of the Aztec System. Rather than give a paragraph each on hundreds of planets, the game focuses intently on one system, providing descriptions of planets, space anomalies and other useful information that will allow gamers to start right off. There is still the same odd brevity that haunts the rest of this book, but the chapter overall is the shining spot in this game.
The Rest of the Book
Maps of the cluster, design notes, and rules appendices finish out the book. I would have personally preferred to see the star charts using black type on a white page, but that’s a personal preference.
The design notes give a reader a great deal more insight into how the game is supposed to work, and make up for a lot of the information that seems odd or misplaced. For some games, the design notes are little more than an interesting read; for Starcluster 2, they are an exceptionally important part of the rules. A GM who reads through these few pages will have a much better understanding of the game as a whole and how to run it. These notes probably should have been disbursed throughout the game, instead of concentrating all the information at the end, because a frustrated gamer might never actually reach the back of the book.
The appendix of optional rules adds considerably to the game, and makes it clear that these are options, as opposed to suggested rules that the rest of the game assumes to be used.
Presentation and Summary
It seems that Flying Mice Games worked very hard to make a game that was a paradox in and of itself. The art in Starcluster 2 is great. It resembles modified photographs, and does a very nice job of relating the feel of the game. In fact, as a sometime artist myself, I am inclined to write the artist and ask how he created this unique art. This art would not work in a fantasy game, or even a more fanciful science fiction game. Here in Starcluster 2, however, it is perfect.
Just to make sure we were not too complacent due to the art quality, the layout designer at Flying Mice took the week off. The layout in Starcluster 2 wastes pages, confuses readers and makes a mess of the rules. What could have been a concise and readable 150 page book becomes a 270 page monstrosity. The layout is some of the worst I have ever seen in gaming.
The writers of Starcluster 2 are skilled and talented. The writing is good, but it is hamstrung by the design of the book. The curse of small-press is evident with Starcluster 2; it is a good and original game, handicapped by a budget too low to afford skilled designers and a team of editors.
Style: 2 – The art is great, the background story is awesome, but the layout is bewildering and the rules are often confusing despite their simplicity.
Substance: 4 – There is a good game here, with lots of potential, but this book should have had a lot more information.
