Pax Draconis boldly claims:

- to be a unique science-fiction role-playing game

- to be the first game to create a complete picture of a future universe;

- to give characters who are hackers the most integrated roles and richest adventure environment yet

- to be designed for players and gamemasters who demand the best

- to have over 200 detailed planets to explore

Let’s see if it lives up to this.

LOOKS

Pax Draconis is a big softcover book with a colour cover showing spiky spaceships in flight. Layout and cover design isn’t very professional in execution. Crashes in font style, small margins that cramp the text, over-use of underlines and bold type in headers, crowding pictures together in places while leaving other sections without illustration - all things that should have been avoided. A sub-optimal print quality combined with a poor choice of main font makes the book less readable than it could have been. The illustrations themselves are quite good in places, amateurish in others.

It’s not a book you buy for its looks.

SETTING

Pax Draconis is set in an alternate, futuristic universe where Earth doesn’t exist. The history of the game, briefly, is this:

The star-spanning government of the United Worlds was peaceful and prosperous. Then the Swarm, an alien race that only wanted to destroy, attacked the galaxy. Humanity had only one hope: To use the fold drive to travel to another galaxy through hyperspace.

However, the fold drive killed its passengers or drove them insane - except for one man, Myron. Luckily, a new genetically engineered life form, the draconians, proved able to deal with hyperspace travel.

Myron and some draconians were sent off to colonise another galaxy and send back war material. However, Myron proved to be a megalomaniac and blew up the fold drive along the way so that they couldn’t return, hoping to rule the new galaxy by himself. The draconians resented their human masters, and didn’t want to be ruled by Myron, so they dumped him.

The new galaxy was already colonised by humans. Two governments - the Confederation and the Peaceful Harmony - were at war. The draconians worked as mercenaries for a while, to raise money for a new hyperdrive. Meanwhile, Myron produced United Worlds technology and established underground networks.

The draconians made a powerful navy and conquered the galaxy very quickly, bringing peace and prosperity. However, their Emperor Pyros and their Empress Athena had fallen out. Through trickery, Myron started a revolution against the Emperor. Surprisingly, the Empress became President of the new Republic.

So, at the start of the game, the galaxy is torn in half.

I must admit I don’t much like the setting. It’s incoherent and hard to believe in. Not because of the fantastic elements; I don’t mind dragon people, hyperspace magicians (the Savants), star drives etc. No, what gets me is the naïve and dangerously simple solutions to hard problems given in the text. Instead of figuring out how history might actually unfold, given the premises, the author seems to use events just for color. This makes for strange inconsistencies and sociological magic.

Little things like: The Draconians’ children are raised by robots. However, the computers in Pax aren’t much more evolved than ours. AI’s are severely limited. How does a limited AI raise a child?

Or things like: 100,000 adult draconians conquer a galaxy in one week. A galaxy that has war as a lifestyle and ideological foundation. They do it by showing they can bomb a planet in four days, and everyone gets real scared. After they conquer the galaxy, people “flock to the Imperial banner”, and there’s “peace, economic reform and a being’s rights within the Empire no longer depended on race, religion or social class”. That’s what happens when genetically engineered man-hating combat-trained reptilians conquer a galaxy and rule by fear?

Or things like: To fix poverty and unemployment, the poor and unemployed are given a crash course in colonisation and sent off to frontier planets, where they’re happy and prosperous. I don’t even know where to begin.

And, of course, glaring stuff like: Three draconians are on a spaceship with a human lunatic who wants to be their God-like ruler. The draconians are highly trained combat tacticians, who will later show their ruthlessness and brutality and wipe out entire planets. So they decide to let the human survive, and don’t understand that he’s plotting to overthrow their government.

I would have much preferred the author to keep his solutions to himself and just go for the kewl stuff. I’d have liked Pax Draconis much better if the setting was just two or three pages of “The galaxy is ruled by combat dragons! There’s hyperspace wizards nobody understands! There’s a civil war! You can be pirates, or hackers, or aliens!” Much more honest, much easier to read, much less aggravating. If you’re not going to make the setting consistent, don’t pretend that it is.

SYSTEM

It’s fairly familiar stuff. In character generation you pick a race, roll for attributes, pick a special ability, calculate derived attributes... nothing ground-breaking. (Does it have to be? See comments at the end of the review). Things like gender and racial attribute modifiers indicate that the game wants to be realistically consistent. However, character balance, for example, has nothing to do with realism, and is there to make the game fair as a game. A common inconsistency.

The characters are clearly expected to fight. The two first attributes are Hand Attacks and Ranged Attacks, followed by typical combat-useful stats like Strength, Endurance and Agility. This is also shown in the example of play - it’s about characters “attempting to gather clues to a murder mystery”, where the first sentence is “I’m going to roll a knock-out grenade under the guard”. Success is about tactics and good rolls.

Still, the author isn’t totally comfortable with this. In the section “Defining Good Players”: “Good players consider the character’s motivation, feelings and desires before making decisions instead of just considering the tactical advantages or his story ideas”. In “The GM’s Job”, it says: “Role-playing games are about role-playing, not winning”. Well, if so - why spend so much effort on combat systems? And why tie so many of the rules to combat?

A good example of this is the Savants - humans who live in symbiosis with hyperspace entities. The entities “prefer young, open-minded, educated and peaceful people”. The powers they gain, however, are things like “Throwing Attack”, “Physical Attacks”, “Laser Beam”, “Physical Shield”, “Energy Shield”... and even the seemingly non-combat powers like “Transfer of Heat” prove, when you read them, to be combat powers as well - “There are many ways to use this power, but there are two which are primarily useful in combat and therefore most interesting to players and Gms”.

Not unexpectedly, the combat system is very detailed and tactics-oriented. The rules cover not only the usual stuff like initiative, surprise, extra attacks etc, but also take into account fog of war, draconian flight, indirect fire, off-hand firing - it’s all there, if you like your combat detailed. The author has aimed to make tactical choices matter. The focus is clear and strong, and though I personally never use rules like this, it’s a pleasure to see how much work and love has been put into them.

The computer rules are a bit of a surprise, in that - as I’ve mentioned - they assume that Pax Draconis computers are much like ours, just a bit faster and more powerful. Everyone has a computer at home, everyone’s on the net, and some even use their computers as TV’s. Personally, I’d want my futuristic fantasy to have way cooler computers, with alien systems and strange effects. The stated goals of the rules, though, are “First, that people with real-life computer experience could use what they know”, and second, “that groups do not have to have that kind of experience”. Makes sense, then, to make them close to ours. The author seems to know a fair bit about his subject, and pointedly avoids cyberpunk-style virtual reality “katana vs. black ice” hacking. Instead, characters break into computer networks by social engineering (conning users), dumpster diving (trashing) and trusted networks. Hack attacks like “overwhelm” - denial of service - are common in our world, and are fully usable in the Pax Draconis system as well.

ALL IN ALL

So here’s the crunch. Does Pax fulfil its ambitions?

First of all: Pax Draconis is not unique. (Of course, there’s no other game exactly like it - every game is unique - but I don’t believe that’s what the author means). There are a lot of alternate universe SF games, first of all. Most of them have rules for hacking, many of them have conquering aliens, lots have characters with strange semi-magical powers, etc. This is a competent variation on a common genre, not a unique vision.

It’s not the first game to create a complete picture of a future universe, far from it. The level of detail in the 200 planet descriptions is generally low, as expected. The rest of the 10,000 planets aren’t even named. There’s little detail on government, even major NPCs are hardly described, the history of the galaxy isn’t covered in detail at all (which, of course, would be impossible to do in just one book). Pax gives a bare-bones structure that you can build on if you like, and has huge dark areas that the group must fill in to run a campaign.

It does give good, realistic and interesting rules for hackers. It doesn’t give them a very rich adventure environment - there’s little detail of specific networks, for example, or how organisations and individuals use them.

It’s designed for players and gamemasters who want tactical, coherent rules and a good amount of dice-rolling combat and recon action. That’s not the same as demanding the best. Also, within its chosen mode of play, Pax is inconsistent and provides good stuff, but not the best.

It doesn’t have over 200 detailed planets to explore; it has over 200 planets, some of which are detailed, most of which are briefly described.

While fairly solid, and definitely the product of a lot of love, hard work and playtesting, Pax Draconis seems rooted in the early nineties. It’s nothing ground-breaking. Does it have to be? Well, yes, I think so. To me, reading Pax is like watching a action movie. It isn’t bad, and except for setting inconsistencies and layout doesn’t have any real flaws. But why should I spend my time on this, when there’s other, fresher and more interesting stuff around?