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I’ve read, played, and GM’d an awful lot of games, so I don’t use the term “unique” lightly. Nor do I consider the term a complement in and of itself – a solid gold statue of a nude Barbra Streisand would be unique, for example. (At least, one would hope so.) So let me start off by saying that a/state – a bizarre amalgam of cyberpunk and steampunk by way of Charles Dickens and Clive Barker – is unique, and in a good way.
Of course, even “good unique” doesn’t necessarily mean “good game”. So let’s take a look at this grimy high-tech/low-tech dystopia and the game system that brings it to life.
Content
Setting
This is one of those settings that simply defies my semi-standard chapter breakdown format. Each chapter overflows with so many fine details that taking such an approach here would lead to either a “Reader’s Digest” reprint of the game itself or a review that snags some details nearly at random at the expense of others. So, I’m going to try the overview approach.
You can find a very good summary of the setting on the Contested Ground Studios web site, but as I don’t believe in reviewing by redirection, I’ll do my best here.
Imagine a city – The City – laid out in a circular design 50 miles across, with some canals radiating out like spokes on a wheel and others traversing the city in progressively smaller rings.
Throw in elements of cyberpunk: megacorporations rather than government agencies running the show, body modification, a huge information network, rich vs. poor, etc.
Tweak the cyberpunk elements a bit. Make most computers essentially Babbage engines with small-to-microscopic mechanical parts rather than electronic chips. Replace cybernetics with organic body modification.
Most importantly, crank the “rich vs. poor” aspect on a scale of 1-to-10 up to an 11, until you have a dystopia of Dickensian proportions. The poor aren’t cybered-up punks ready to “stick it to the Man” with smartlinked guns blazing. In fact, they’ll be lucky to have a sparklock pistol – a kind of muzzle-loading flintlock weapon that uses a cranked-up static charge rather than flint. Their level of squalor would make a cyberpunk squatter retch, with dog meat from waddling bred-for-slaughter “meat hounds” being a delicacy and fish harvested from the stinking, polluted canals a staple. Far from knowing the the “pulse of the city,” those among these poor souls who know something of the world beyond their immediate neighborhood may consider themselves savvy.
The rich, meanwhile, live in high-tech, high-security wonderlands, guarded by deadly geneboosted supersoldiers armed with rail guns and laser rifles. Body modifications, while nowhere near as outlandish as those in Transhuman Space, nevertheless push the rich to something resembling a different species from the poor – in some cases, bordering on the fearfully alien. Imagine the nearly superstitious dread of the denizens of a Dickensian hovel seeing unnaturally perfect corporate executives speaking silently to one another using subvocalization, courtesy of vocal chord and auditory modifications.
Take the abuses of the poor by the rich to levels undreamed of in cyberpunk fiction, or even in Dickensian fiction. Imagine, for example, megacorporate military forces maximizing fighter aircraft ordinance payload by minimizing pilot weight – through the use of children as the highly-expendable pilots.
Now add in some supernatural elements.
No, not elves, dwarves, and wizards. No, not vampires, werewolves, and zombies, either. Not even Lovecraftian horrors, although I suppose that’s getting closer to it.
The creatures in question are known collectively as the Shifted, so named because they appeared after a mysterious event known as the Shift that occurred in the City’s distance past. They include the insubstantial, human-possessing Drachne; the huge, faceless Hagers; the whispering, manipulating Lugners; the steaming mechanized Simils with their heads of dead humans; and the murderous Ubel, with their bones of rotting wood and their rusted iron blades. All of these creatures behave in ways totally incomprehensible to the human mind. Even the Simils – the only Shifted with whom humans interact on a regular basis, and who will actually work for human employers – demand seemingly nonsensical payments for their services and throw themselves into hellish combat with no regard for their own safety.
The Shift also left parts of the City… wrong, somehow. Take a shortcut through the wrong alley at the wrong time, and you won’t be walking out the other side.
So why don’t people just leave this hell-hole in a mass exodus? Well, that brings up another aftereffect of the Shift: anyone attempting to leave the city limits vanishes in a flash of light before setting foot in the blasted Outlands that surround the City for as far as the eye can see – a remnant of the Bombardment, a rain of fire immediately following the Shift that also destroyed practically all records of the City’s enigmatic past.
I should mention at this point that the Shift and the City’s history aren’t just mysteries to the players, but also to the GM – the book offers no insights whatsoever, unless you count some small hints here and there suggesting some connection to modern-day Earth.
Generally speaking, I hate for games to keep secrets from the GM. Given the urging to discover the Truth in SLA Industries, for example, I found the Big Secret in that setting to be particularly inexcusable. Considering the default starting point for PCs in a/state, however, this setting’s Big Secret seems more akin to the “Why are the suns fading?” question in the background of Fading Suns – something I find more acceptable, given the small chance of the answer ever really affecting the heroes. Still, with the relative scales involved – a single city compared to an entire universe – the Big Secret in a/state is far more likely to come into play. Thankfully, an upcoming supplement, Iron Ring, promises to reveal both the “official” Truth behind the setting along with at least a couple of alternatives.
The book details – and I mean details – 33 sections of the City (with major NPCs for each), the powerful factions (including the megacorporations, the crime syndicates, and the various churches, both influential and heretical), and even what flora and fauna have adapted to this urban nightmare. (Not to mention the Furies, mysterious genetically-altered monstrosities lurking in the shadows.)
However, when I say “details,” I’m not talking about game stats. In fact, it’s on this point that the writers and I have the biggest disagreement regarding content: the complete lack of stats for the Shifted and Furies. In the case of the former, the authors make the argument that the Shifted should remain mysterious, capable of doing whatever the GM wants them to do. The problem I have with that approach is the same one that I had with it in Little Fears: whenever these creatures become involved in the action, the system falls completely away in favor of GM fiat. Suppose your PCs, for whatever reason, decide to shoot up a trio of Hagers menacing them. What happens? There simply are no guidelines, or even any suggestions.
This becomes particularly grating when it comes to the Simils. The other Shifted may lurk about mysteriously, but PCs are quite likely to encounter Simils on a daily basis – and, given the Simils’ usefulness as soldiers and bodyguards, to fight them.
Furthermore, the authors give no indication in the book as to why the stats for the Shifted aren’t in there. It’s a deliberate omission, but the lack of explanation makes it look like a glaring error.
That said, the book doesn’t neglect the hard numbers altogether. While there’s no bestiary of Shifted, Furies, or other creatures, the book provides stats for 14 typical NPCs, 10 pre-generated PCs, and 29 pages of equipment.
Given the strange mishmash of technology levels in the city, I was particularly grateful for the latter. The equipment chapter covers everything from sparklocks and ceramic knives to assault lasers, Gauss rifles, and power armor.
Perhaps even more importantly for a game focused on the gritty realities of day-to-day existence, the chapter also covers cost-of-living expenses and an impressive list of common and not-so-common non-weapon items, from primitive fishoil lanterns to high-end microscale digins and their accessories.
Vehicles get their due as well: boats (especially important given the ubiquitous canals), ekranoplans (high-speed ground effect aircraft used on the canals), various aircraft from nimble mikefighters to lumbering dirigibles, motorcycles, automobiles, and even warcrawls (a.k.a. tanks).
Finally, some of the more obvious biomods get write-ups, and nanotech headgear – the closest thing to “cyberwear” in the book – gets a passing mention.
Playtest: One area that I really think could use a bit more detailing to make it practical in play is the Dataflow, the setting’s counterpart to cyberspace. The book explains how it works fairly well, but I found myself stumped regarding what sort of information an experienced user might find therein. The player of such a user in my game, for example, came up with a battery of research topics to help the group in its murder investigation – personal histories of the victims and witnesses, patterns to the murder sites, etc. I erred on the side of the information being available, but then I faced the problem of having no idea how hard such information should be to find. Setting Comparisons
A teacher once told me never to describe something with the term “It’s like…” However, I’ve never bought that theory. Sure, describing things in their own terms is a great thing, but a good comparison can save a whole lot of time in getting one’s point across.
So, how does the setting of a/state compare to other settings?
For those who’ve seen it, the movie Dark City might be the most obvious comparison. However, beyond the fact that both take place in grungy, dark cities, and the fact that the Hagers bear some resemblance to Dark City’s Strangers, there’s really not much comparison. For one thing, the City is both higher tech (cyberpunk/transhumanist) and lower tech (Dickensian) than the unnamed metropolis of Dark City. And the author himself asserts no relation between the Big Secrets in the two settings.
In roleplaying game terms, I’ve already dealt with obvious comparisons to cyberpunk settings. SLA Industries comes closer, with its claustrophobic cityscape containing strange juxtapositions of technology levels and a seemingly inexplicable status quo related to a Truth hidden from player and GM alike. In general, though, a/state PCs start even lower on the societal and power level totem pole than the gun-toting badasses of Mort.
The game contains some elements reminiscent of Kult as well, sharing with it images of outrageous brutality, mind-twisting horror, and unbearable bleakness. a/state, however, lacks any grounding in the “real” world. Furthermore, unlike Kult, a/state makes no attempt to explain the Truth. (Yet, at least.)
In a weird way, perhaps the best comparison to the plight of the typical a/state PC might be to the muck-spattered protagonists of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay… except that in the case of a/state, the oppressive noble class is playing Warhammer 40K.
As bleak as the setting may be, however, the game places value on characters actually working to make things better rather than wallowing in the physical and moral muck. “Better,” of course, may be an incredibly relative term in a place like the City, but every little bit helps – even if it’s nothing more than driving a gang of thugs out of the immediate neighborhood.
Playtest: Highly-detailed and exotic settings pose several problems. For one thing, they take a while to explain to players. I found myself repeatedly saying variations of, “Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that.” For another, they contain loads of information for the GM to keep in mind. My players gave me a steady stream of questions for which I had no quick and easy answers. In the long run, I’m sure these problems would fade as the GM and the characters settle in to this strange environment. But that brings up the question of whether there will be a “long run,” doesn’t it? In my game, one player dropped out with no real warning, saying that he’d decided the game just wasn’t his thing. On the other hand, this left the remaining three players feeling varying degrees of disappointment and anger, precisely because the game was “their thing,” and they were having a great time with it. Make of that admittedly small sample what you will.
(And on a related note, as luck would have it, the departing player was playing a character who’d become the glue holding the group together, causing the game to fall apart afterwards. That being the case, please bear in mind that the “playtest” aspect of this review wasn’t nearly as extensive as I’d have liked it to be.)
System
Given the amount of innovation in the setting, perhaps the authors showed wisdom in keeping the system simple. (You can have a look at the lite version of the system here.)
The core mechanic is a percentile system at its most basic – more basic, even, than that of Basic Roleplaying. Both attributes and skills fall on a percentile scale. 1/10th of an attribute modifies related skills. Roll less than or equal to the attribute or skill score to succeed, with 01 an auto-success and 00 an auto-failure. In contested actions, whoever passes by the most or fails by the least wins.
Playtest: I thought that attribute link was a little too tenuous. I’d have preferred maybe 1/5th of the attribute as a skill modifier. That’s it. There aren’t even any success levels involved, although I suppose the difficulty modifiers might be pressed into service for that purpose.
Playtest: The lack of success levels only compounded that problem I had with the Dataflow part of the investigation. Not only did I have no way of knowing what sort of information might be found in the Dataflow, but I also had know way of knowing what constituted a particularly successful investigation in game mechanics terms. Combat
Combat follows the same model, with a few more complications. Base Reaction (the average of Awareness, Intelligence, and Agility) determines the order of initiative. Melee combat is an opposed roll, while ranged combat is an unopposed roll with modifiers for factors such as range and visibility. The rules seem to suggest that melee combat requires making a called shot while ranged combat does not, although I’m fairly certain I’ve seen the writer state that called melee shots aren’t required.
In any event, hit location does matter and must be determined for the sake of damage calculations – which, by the way, is where things get just a little convoluted.
Weapons have Penetration (PEN) scores and fixed Damage (DAM) scores – plus Punch damage for melee weapons, which in turn is based on Strength – and armor has an Armor Value (AV). If PEN exceeds AV, the weapon ignores the armor. If AV exceeds PEN, the weapon’s damage is reduced by the difference of the two. Once it’s determined how much damage has gotten through any armor, the DAM is compared to the target’s Resilience (RES) score. If DAM is less than RES, the target takes a light wound. If DAM is equal to or greater than RES, the target takes a moderate wound, unless DAM is equal to or greater than twice RES, in which case the target takes a serious wound.
Once you’ve figured out what kind of wound has been inflicted, the wound type is cross-referenced on a small table against hit location to determine if the target is merely bleeding (as is the case when taking a light wound to the arm or lower leg), if he has taken Shock Points (and if so, how many), or if he’s been killed outright (as is the case with a serious wound to the head).
For every five DAM above the serious wound level, the character takes an extra Shock Point. Lethal damage automatically causes bleeding, while blunt trauma damage does not; however, armor is generally less effective against blunt trauma. Furthermore, damage from projectile weapons that fails to penetrate armor will still do blunt trauma of DAM/5. Shock Point damage equal to RES requires the target to make a Willpower roll with a penalty of Shock Points x 10 to keep from passing out, and Shock Point damage equal to RES x 1.5 puts the character in danger of dying. As if all that weren’t enough, characters have a penalty of (current Shock Points x 10) to all skill use.
Playtest: I didn’t get a chance to run a combat in my playtest game, so I’ll try a quick one out now. Let’s say a Ghostfighter’s gotten into a spat with a Transit Militia officer, just to use a couple of the pregen characters (see below). Let’s further assume that it’s a hand-to-hand fight, with the Ghostfighter’s ceramic blade pitted against the officer’s billy club. Rather than bore you with a bunch of back-and-forth attack/parry rolls, let’s say the Ghostfighter gets in a stab at the officer’s chest. What happens?
Well, the Ghostfighter’s ceramic blade has a DAM of 5, plus the Ghostfighter’s Punch damage, which is 2, for a total of 7. The officer’s RES is 4, so the attack exceeds it but doesn’t quite double it. The officer takes a moderate wound, and consulting the hit location table, a moderate wound to the chest does 4 Shock Points. Since this amount doesn’t exceed his RES, he doesn’t have to make a Willpower check with a penalty of 40 (the number of Shock Points x 10) to stay conscious. However, he’ll now have a penalty of -40 to all skill use, and he’ll bleed out 1 Shock Point every 30 minutes.
In short, while he may not be down, he’s in very deep trouble. With that skill penalty in effect, the Ghostfighter’s going to get in another hit without much trouble. Another hit to the chest will kill the officer, baring immediate first aid.
But now let’s turn the tables and start the fight at a distance. After all, it’s just like a Ghostfighter to bring a knife to a gunfight, right?
The officer’s packing a heavy sparklock pistol, with a DAM of 9. Ouch. A random hit location roll has the shot hitting the Ghostfighter’s lower right leg. The Ghostfighter’s wearing padded armor with an AV of 3, but the pistol’s PEN of 5 blows right through that. So, the Ghostfighter takes all 9 points of damage. His RES is 4, and the DAM is twice this amount, so he takes a serious wound. The damage table indicates that a serious wound to the lower leg results in 2 Shock Points – not a whole lot of fun, but not enough to even put him in danger of falling unconscious. By contrast, if the hit location roll had come up 1 (for Head) or 2 or 3 (for Chest), he’d have been instantly killed. In any case, he’ll have a -20 penalty when he tries to fight back.
The lesson here is twofold: first, when it comes to a fight be… well, first; and second, hit locations have a huge impact on damage, so make those attacks count.
Overall, I’d say this is a suitably brutal system. There are just a few too many mathematical hoops to jump through for my taste, regardless of how realistic they are; however, given the quick and nasty nature of combat in this game, I don’t think extended fights are going to be a big problem.
Character Creation
The character creation process in a/state almost seems like the reverse of the procedure I’ve come to expect from most games. Attributes and skills come last, not first. Instead, Advantages and Disadvantages come first, then Origin, then Upbringing. Many of the first two impact the number of points to spend on attributes and skills – and note that I said “points to spend,” not a flat bonus. The latter two each include a small selection of “free” skills – well, not free, insofar as the player gets 40 points to spend on them – and a +10 bonus to one or two attributes.
Doing things this way prevents players from getting their attributes and skills down, only to re-shuffle them once they’ve found extra points from various sources. By the time you get to the hard numbers, you already know exactly how many points you have to spend, period.
When it comes time to actually buy skills and attributes, both start at one point per level but become more expensive per point at 70 (x2), 80 (x3), and 90 (x4). Skills tend to be fairly broad, like “Armed Combat,” although specializations like “Axe” may be purchased at half the cost and up to half of the level of the general skill. Conversely, some technical or rare skills (such as ekranoplan piloting) cost twice the normal amount.
The attribute range is about as close to my ideal as its possible to come: Strength, Agility, Dexterity, Health, Awareness, Intelligence, Willpower, and Personality. I’m always a big fan of separating Agility and Dexterity, and I like the fact that the game allows a character to be likeable yet weak-willed or vice versa.
Players also get a choice of character type – a career, basically, although some of them could hardly be termed “making a living.” Among the more setting-specific choices are the Ghostfighter, a master of knife fighting and stealthy attacks; the Flowghost, the setting’s equivalent of a cyberspace hacker; the Lostfinder, a kind of philanthropic private eye; and the Mudlark, a transient specialist in the loading and unloading of canal barges. Ironically, this choice has probably the least impact on the character in terms of mechanics, establishing only recommended skills, a handful of resources (such as holy items and appropriate garb for a clergyman), and the character’s wealth level or range of possible wealth levels.
Given the nature of the setting, the wealth factor easily has the most impact on a character’s abilities. That makes the choice to allow the GM to select the appropriate wealth level out of a given range a logical choice, albeit one that may annoy players. To determine actual starting funds, the player rolls a 1d10 and cross-references the result on a table against the wealth level.
Playtest: Two of my PCs turned out to be fairly wealthy, which allowed them to equip themselves and the other members of the group with weapons well beyond the means of the typical citizen. This really diluted the Dickensian angle of the game for me. I strongly suggest keeping the group at the same general wealth level, with perhaps a couple of poor locals serving as guides to groups of corporate types. A seriously mixed group of wealth levels is likely to result in your street scum suddenly packing ordinance beyond their wildest dreams.
Adventure
With a setting this intricate, I’d consider a sample adventure an absolute must. Thankfully, the book provides. What starts as an investigation into a spectacularly gruesome murder results in the PCs finding themselves in over their heads – a situation the City inflicts all too readily upon citizens wanting to make a difference.
Playtest: I’d rate it as “okay.” It’s not linear, exactly, insofar as the PCs have numerous paths of investigation open to them, but they’re all designed to end up at the same place. I was more annoyed by the fact that the PCs spend the first part of the adventure digging up clues that they won’t find without looking in just the right places – clues they can’t possibly use until they’re attacked by a group of NPCs who will help fill in the blanks once they capture the PCs or are themselves captured. And that’s another issue: it’s far too easy for the adventure to go off the rails. The relatively low skill scores make a complete failure to find needed information quite likely. And what if the PCs kill, rather than capture, those interloping NPCs? That avenue of investigation – and, indeed, the investigation itself – will be shut down.
Style
The word “great” just doesn’t do justice to the writing in an RPG that at times made me forget I was reading an RPG. While exploring the setting chapters – and exploration is what it felt like – I could almost smell the choking smog, feel the grime and the slime, smell the fetid canals, and taste the rancid foods. The writing doesn’t just excel at the down-and-dirty end of the scale, however. It also conveys the City’s terrible majesty, with images such as Inferno, the hellish insane asylum shaped like a vast obsidian block that’s listed to one side over time.
The cover of this 8-1/2” x 11” hardback is among the most arresting I’ve seen since the haunting cover of Blue Planet’s first edition. The simple image of that tattooed face staring out at me from a stark white background gives me pause every time I see it.
The clearly computer-generated interior art suffers a bit from being limited to black and white, giving the humans, in particular, a kind of stark video game look poorly suited to the setting. The original full color versions available at the publisher’s web site, by contrast, are every bit as striking as the cover. I sincerely hope that the game makes it to a second edition in which the publishers can afford to include the full-color versions.
The layout may not be particularly eye-catching, but it’s very clean and makes for easy reading. I didn’t find any major typos, although I did notice that the book omits the stats for the NPCs in the introductory adventure. (This really was an oversight, by the way, and not a design decision as is the lack of Shifted stats. I checked.)
Also, while the book does include an index, I didn’t find it particularly useful – I couldn’t find a reference to the Resilience attribute, for example. Speaking of which, I wish they would have included the derived attributes in the write-ups of the pregen characters. While not a huge deal, it would have saved having to calculate them and write them in. If you’re going to make “grab and go” characters, you might as well provide the whole package.
Conclusion
This is not a game for GMs who demand all of the answers – at least, not right away – nor for those who demand stats for everything the PCs may encounter. It is also not for GMs who find themselves easily overwhelmed by detailed settings. But for those seeking a highly original setting in which the GM and players alike can almost literally lose themselves in a maze of urban darkness, decay, mystery, and horror – a place where life is cheap, but where one dedicated person really can make a difference, even if it’s only as a small candle in the night – then I can’t imagine a more perfect game than a/state. As the game’s cover says: “You will never forget the City.”
SUBSTANCE:
- Setting
- Quality = 5.0
- Quantity = 4.5
- Rules
- Quality = 4.0
- Quantity = 4.0
STYLE:
- Artwork = 4.0
- Layout/Readability = 4.0
- Organization = 3.5
- Writing = 5.0
- Proofreading Penalty = <0.5>
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