 Goto [ Index ] |
The author is a personal friend, and I asked a couple mechanical questions of him to make sure I wasn't missing something important, and verified the history of the game with him. I was given a review copy -- immediately after posting a favorable but mixed review of another game. Also the opinions expressed in this review are my personal ones rather than IBM's official ones, especially about acronyms.
BACKGROUND
Albedo started off as a comic strip, many years ago. The first Albedo RPG was published in 1988, though it didn't seem to catch on very intensely. Albedo: Platinum Catalyst is a modern RPG, based on the comic, written by an experienced RPG designer.
It's science fiction in a setting with a lot of alien races which have strong similarities to Earth animals revised to a human frame. Calling the species dogs and lions instead of, say, Traveller's Vargr and Aslan is a sensible world design choice. It certainly makes it easier to keep track of which species is which. It's quite easy to get started with the game, too: you know a huge amount about what dogs and lions are like, and you can get into their heads quite easily. (Not rabbits, though. Albedo rabbits are scary.)
Or, if you prefer, it's furry. Furry fandom has some stereotypes, about cutesy and horny and queer and so on. Albedo, like other well-made furry games and books, has little or nothing of these in it. Albedo is a hard many-species military SF setting.
SETTING
This isn't Earth. It's Earthlike in a lot of ways, but ... people sprang into existence about 250 years ago, sentient, fully grown, with social and technological infrastructure in place. (Presumably some Creators did that, but there are few clues about the Creators.) There's almost no history, no legends, nothing but the people themselves and their sudden high-tech high-culture society.
The world might have been designed as an utopia, with billions of people on hundreds of planets living in peace and harmony. The rabbits ruined that, though ... the rabbits, and the corporations, and various other forces. There has been a nasty interstellar war, a second one might be coming up soon, and there are plenty of kinds of more localized nastiness.
The Extraplanetary Defense Force (EDF) is the mostly-military organization trying to hold things together -- though not without its internal dooms as well. Players play EDF members, generally officers, and try to deal with external and internal dangers.
The setting presented in the book is adequately detailed to give a sense of how history has gone. It's well-written: many summaries of military history are deadly dull; this one held my attention. Presumably there's a lot more detail in the comic strip.
CHARACTER CREATION
Pick your species, and a couple subsidiary choices of skills and goodies. Pick your homeworld, and a couple subsidiary choices of skills and goodies. Pick your personality (on a Meyer-Briggs sort of scale, though one with actual game effects, which is kind of neat). Sprinkle around a few extra points and goodies. Compute your half-dozen derived stats, and ...
... then you generate four Supporting Characters. You don't do as much detail on them. Albedo is potentially a high-injury game, even a high-mortality game, so you need some backup characters to, well, get injured, or to play if your main character is spending a month in sickbay. The auxiliary characters use slightly different rules than the main one, with fewer chances to modify dierolls.
Character generation seems clean and fast. You already know what all the species are like. The homeworlds are done by category, and there are only a few choices, and they're all sensible. The skills and goodies are familiar. There's not a huge amount of sublety or fancy calculation necessary. There is, correspondingly, not a huge range of kinds of characters that you can make -- the game is about the military, so you're going to play someone (or somefive) who make sense in the military.
MECHANICS
Primary characters have three power pools: Drive (mental), Clout (social), and Body (physical) with up to a dozen or so points in each. These points can be spent for various goodies, like better rolls or extra variations on an action.
The basic game mechanic is: you roll a small number of dice. If one beats a GM-chosen threshold, you succeed. If two beat it, you succeed overwhelmingly. If they all come up 1's, you botch. Fortunately, botches are usually pretty minor, and in many situations can be rerolled.
The size of the dice depends on your skill level. Skill of 1 gives a d4, skill 2 gives d6, and so on to five or more giving a d12. Above 5, your dice don't improve, but the other things you can do do improve. You can spend a point from the suitable power pool to roll two dice and perhaps get an overwhelming success (Pushing), or to roll a larger die type (Risking). Or, for free, you can pretend your rating is half its true value and roll twice (giving a chance of overwhelming success on easy tasks), or take a default average number instead of rolling.
The combat system is tactical and bloody. Getting hit with gunfire is a very bad thing in Albedo, even with good armor. The rules emphasize the use of cover and concealment and movement. I suspect that a combat scene works best with miniatures, and has a tense, almost wargaming-like feel to it.
I very much like one feature of Albedo combat: it covers the psychological side as well as the physical side. As you fight, you take points of Awe -- if you get hit, if you get missed, if you screw up, or even if they see an enemy die horribly. Too much of that, and you're Panicked, or even suffer lasting psychological trauma.
COMMENTS AND COMPLAINTS
A character botches on a roll of all 1's. Since many rolls are made on a d4 or d6, and many others on a d12, there will be a lot of botches.
The Throw attack specifies that you deviate from the target by (7-Throw Score)*10%, or hit it exactly with an 8 or better. (Presumably also with a 7, unless 0% off target is different from hitting it exactly.) I can't find a definition of "Throw Score", but the example hints that it's the number you roll when you make the throw attack. If you have a Throw skill of 1 (the minimum), you get to roll a d4, or a d6 if you spend a point from your Body pool. So, you can never hit: you can never come closer than 10%, and you can only get to even within 20% a few times in a scene. Even with a 2, you have to Push to hit, and you can only do that a few times.
Combat initiative is in order of military rank -- a general gets to shoot before a private does. This sort of fits the character of the game, but is decidedly odd if it is taken seriously in-world. "We can't go up against him! He's a major-general and an expert sniper! The first person to stand up, dies!"
The Albedo world uses an alien alphabet and numbering system, but one that's close enough to ours so that a reader can figure it out casually. The Albedo alphabet is used nicely in the book. Chapter headings are written in both alphabets. Numbered lists use Albedo numbers, giving you a bit of familiarity with them without making much of a point of it.
Character advancement is very coarse. You don't keep track of experience points or anything -- you just play. This has advantages (no bookkeeping!) and disadvantages (no rewards for brilliant playing or other cleverness! Everyone advances in lockstep!).
Every three adventures, you get to improve stuff. After three adventures, you get a small improvement, like +1 on a skill you're not very good at. After the sixth adventure, you get a medium-sized improvement; after the ninth, another small one; and so on. After the 18th, you get a big one; e.g., you can get any character creation advantage. By the letter of the rules, you could suddenly become Young in mid-game, or even Young and Old simultaneously. Or suddenly replace being Old by being Fast. One presumes that the gamemaster will have a say in such matters. (Not necessarily vetoing them -- e.g., maybe you went in for some anti-aging treatments that worked very well and had a nifty surprising side effect on your running speed.) The book doesn't note this.
There's a big crunchy section of guns and grenades and armor and equipment and stuff like that. I generally can barely stand to read such things -- but Albedo is different. Where do long-eared species put their ears when they're wearing high-tech helmets? What do people wear in the rain? How do bird-people manage? There's a good bit of setting description in the equipment section, and it's actually interesting to read.
There are far too many acronyms in this book for my taste. Fortunately, there aren't any in the game mechanics -- the mechanics use short, forceful words like Drive and Clout and Trauma, not HBS and PPC and THAC0. The setting uses lots of acronyms, though: EDF VLCCs may shoot ACVs at ILF MHDs. UGH.
There are some peculiar choices in character creation guidelines. For example, if you come from a research colony, you can be Old or Young (or standard-aged). If you come from a corporate or urban world, you can be Young, but not Old.
There don't seem to be any rules for starship combat -- or even vehicular combat. I understand that there's a supplement in production including them.
STYLE
Steve Gallacci has been drawing Albedo for twenty years, and it shows. The art is very good, and it fits the setting perfectly. Or, rather, the setting fits the art perfectly.
The book itself is a perfectly fine paperback with black-and-white matte paper. Sanguine doesn't overproduce their books. I have no stylistic complaints.
THE JUDGEMENT
If you like military SF games, you will enjoy Albedo.
That's not the judgement I was expecting to give. I was expecting to say something about furryness. The game isn't aimed at the furry fandom; it doesn't particularly cater to furry stereotypes or use furry tropes. It's a self-contained and self-consistent world. Using animal species rather than wholly invented aliens makes it easier to play, and having a many-species culture from the beginning of time is an unusual and interesting choice. But SF gamers will like it, and furry gamers who aren't particularly SF gamers won't -- it's really a military SF game. And quite a good one.
