My name is Charles Terrault, and this is my first review. I have an ongoing Realities 2015 campaign going on for three months now, which means I do like the game. I first played the French edition, and then switched to the English edition as soon as it became available. I have no affiliation with Studio Mammouth, even if their place of business is about fifteen minutes from my apartment.
This review may be a little lengthy. If you get bored, you can skip to the Conclusion, where you’ll get the good, the bad and my opinion on the game.
The Game
The basic idea for Realities 2015 is simple: our world has entered a reality nexus, where it exists simultaneously with seven other realities. This is not a good thing, as some kind of tidal forces between the co-existing realities are tearing them apart. Our world is still relatively unaffected, to the point that the general populace isn’t aware of what’s going on. The situation was discovered by some scientists who decided to create a secret society to fight the incursion of foreign worlds and creatures into our universe, and help stave the demise of our own reality. In order to resist the mutating effects of the others realities, that secret society, called The Lodge, employ people that have been changed by their contact with other worlds, called Talents. Because of their condition, Talents can modify the rules of our world for those of another reality for a little while, meaning they have access to a wide range of powers. The game is a mix of simple monster hunting (monsters are called Outsiders in Realities), conspiracies, occult mystery and sci-fi.
These themes are not really original, but the game does a good job of mixing them in an original way.
The format
Realities 2015 is a full-color 127 page PDF, including the front and back covers, as well as three pages of publicity for upcoming games. The file is in portrait format rather than landscape, meaning you have to scroll to read the bottom of every page. The game comes zipped with a printer-friendly version, an interactive NPC sheet (an interactive PC sheet would have been nice too), and a video trailer for an upcoming game, Inquisition.
The Realities 2015 universe will be published in a four book collection, of which Colliding Spheres is the first installment. Everything you need to start playing is included in this first book, and the other three will focus on different aspects of the game world, like technology, politics, and the Lodge itself. There will be new rules in those books, but they’re not supposed to modify existing characters or the way the game is played.
Visual aspects
The layout of the book is simple and efficient, making it very easy to read. The game fictions and the news section get a more graphic treatment, but stay readable.
The artwork is a mixture of color, grayscales and line art. The quality varies from passable to excellent, averaging on good. The art does contribute to get a good feel for the game, even if it’s not as varied as one would wish. This being said, I really don’t like the cover. It’s not representative of the quality of the art inside.
The content
The book is divided into three parts: the fluff, the crunch and the scenario.
The book opens on a short story about the capture of an Outsider (a monster from another reality). You get to see a team in action, with their powers and hi-tech gadgets, which is nice.
It follows with the 6 O’Clock News, a mood setting piece in the form of a news bulletin. The newsflashes are interesting and give the reader a quick insight on different aspects of the world of 2015, from current affairs, to politics, to technology. If you read between the lines of some of them, you can see the actions of Outsiders and of the Lodge. This section is the only one I made a mandatory reading for my players.
The next chapter, The World in 2015, gives a good view of the shape of the world a few years from now. It races through world politics, high technology, the media, the corporate world, and entertainment. It gives a good overview of the setting, with enough details to run a game, but still leaves you wanting for more. The technological advances are hard to swallow at first, but a good case has been made on Studio Mammouth’s forum (the Technology Thread, where you’ll be amazed by today’s cutting edge technology, making Realities 2015’s technological level believable).
Colliding Spheres explains what’s happening to the world, with the Nexus and the other realities. It’s important to note that you can’t jump from one reality to the next. The other worlds are so different from ours that we can’t survive there: Nirvana is a pre-Big Bang universe where time, space and matter are the same thing; Pandemonium is a world that has been in the Nexus long enough to start collapsing, making time and probabilities erratic; Sheol is a dead universe, where memory is a law of physics and the ghosts of its former occupants still roam the void; and so on.
The Lodge presents some basic information about the shadowy organization employing the PCs. You get the history of the Lodge, its goals, its current organization, some of its procedures, and the feeling that most of what you read in this chapter is a smokescreen.
The second part of the book features the game mechanics, called the Persona System.
Flesh and Blood cover character creation. Six archetypal characters are presented (for those who want to start playing quickly), as well as the complete creation system. More on that under my comments on the Persona System.
A Hail of Bullets covers the game mechanics. More on that under my comments on the Persona System.
Fire with Fire is the chapter describing the powers and their side effects. The realities affecting a character dictate what kind of powers he have access to. Each reality has three aspects, and each can be used to create different effects. Like in Mage, players are encouraged to use their imagination to come up with interesting effects, either by using a single aspect, or combining multiple aspects of the same reality. For those lacking imagination, over 80 possible effects are presented. While the possibilities seems pretty large, a side note announces that the second book of the series will deal with the mechanics for combining aspects from different realities to give even more possibilities.
Big Guns and Gizmos is the equipment chapter.
The Good, the Bad and the Mutie is the bestiary of the game. This chapter provides description and characteristics for human and non human foes, including a good selection of Outsiders.
The last section of the book features the scenario, Baptism of fire, which is not very interesting but provide ample opportunities to test the game mechanics; six scenario seeds with good potential, a few tables and an index.
The index is worth mentioning, both because it’s both very useful and stupidly useless. I printed the book as soon as I got it, and in printed form the index is very good and useful. However, after reading comments on the Internet, I realized that they had problems with their page count with the PDF version: the cover was included in the page counts, so when you enter the page number you want, you end up two pages early. This is a silly mistake that should have been caught before release. The bookmarks however are very good and provide useful navigation help.
The Persona System
One of the strongest points of Realities 2015 is its game system. At first glance, it looks like the old Storyteller system (you roll some D10 against a target number to score successes) mixed with elements from other game systems. However Persona is more than that. The most interesting element is the fact that the successes are used by the player to customize his actions: you state loosely what you want to do, you roll the dice, and then you use the successes to purchase your special effects. There are many effects mentioned in the game, but players can come up with whatever new effects they want to do and the GM assigns them a cost in successes. Since the players rarely announce complex maneuvers before rolling the dice, they rarely completely fail their action. Some modifiers can be applied, based on the situation in which the player is. The system takes a session or two to get used to, but once everyone is comfortable with it, the system becomes very dynamic, fun and utterly simple to use. After a few sessions, I rarely needed to go back to the rulebook. A big plus in my book.
Combat follows the same simple core mechanic, with a few added rules and options. You roll Initiative and can use the successes to act sooner in the round, act more than once or prepare your defense. Combat is very dangerous, but you can build a Defense dice pool using successes from Initiative or attack rolls and save yourself a lot of pain. Woe to the group that is not careful enough and gets surprised by their opponents: since you have to build your Defense dice pool from the ground up at every fight, the first few rounds can be particularly deadly for an unprepared group. Like any other action, attack rolls generate successes that you can exchange for effects, from extra damage to bleeding wounds to pushing back your opponent or outmaneuvering him. The equipment (weapons and armor) you use give you more choices to spend your successes: armor piercing bullets can make short work of heavy protection, devastating weapons like a chainsaw can dismember the opponent, finesse weapons (like fencing swords) let you use your Agility instead of your Vigor to calculate damage, etc. Finally, there are mechanics to allow a group to plan and coordinate their attacks. An organized team that collaborates in combat is much more effective than a disorganized one. This is represented by the use of a Group dice pool in which every member of the team can invest and use a certain number of dice according to their function and their Traits. It’s easy to use, meshes completely with the rest of the system and allows for great “SWAT-team style” of play.
Character creation is also simple, but complete enough to allow creation a wide range of characters. At the basis lays a priority system reminiscent of the old Shadowrun, yet more flexible. All the characteristics are lumped into five categories (Attributes, Skills, Traits, Realities and Experience) each ranging from 1 to 5. You get 15 priority levels to spread as you like between the five categories. You are not restricted to having one priority at each rank, but you can assign three priority levels to three categories, five to another one, and one to the last if you want to. Thus you can create the character you want to play.
The Attributes and are divided into Vigor, Agility, Intuition, Spirit and Presence. Vigor covers both strength and endurance, Agility is self-explanatory, Intuition covers your reaction time both mental and physical and acts as the basis for Initiative, Spirit is both your willpower and adaptability, and Presence is your charisma and your commanding aura.
The skills are very wide, and could be better described as occupations. Each occupation (soldier, doctor, accountant and so on) encompasses all the skills normally needed to perform that occupation (a soldier not only knows how to use a gun, but knows about tactic and strategy, military organization, military technology, etc..). These wide skills can be a little disturbing at first, especially when players start abusing them (“yes, I learned to use a gun while I was a supermodel!”), but it’s easy to get the hang of this system.
Traits are more like Feats in D&D than merits and flaws. Each of them gives you a specific advantage in a situation. Dramas are bad issues that your character still has to deal with. They are purchased with Trait points, and actually cost you points instead of giving you extra points. However they have a direct use in play as the main method to gain Coolness dice.
Coolness is a generic pool of dice that can be used as automatic successes. In the Persona System, no experience is awarded for good roleplay. A good roleplayer receives Coolness dice that he can use right away or stored for later.
Another interesting point with this system is the possibility to start with experienced characters. Right from the beginning characters starts with a certain amount of Experience points based on the number of priority levels you invested in this characteristic. You can get more Experience right from the start by making a contribution much like in Amber Diceless RPG: keeping the character’s personal journal, writing a one page novel, etc. You can either spend this experience before the start of the game and thus purchase Attributes and Skills at a level higher than usually possible, or keep it for later.
Conclusion
Realities 2015 is a good game, with an interesting universe that allows for different styles of play, strong and innovative game mechanics, and good support in the form of a web forum where questions are answered within 48 hrs. For 12$, it’s well worth the money, if only to discover a good game system that I’m sure will make some noise in the coming years.
The good - Interesting game world with many styles of play possible - Great and innovative game system geared toward the players - Cool, easy to use powers
The bad - Game split between four books, even if only the first is necessary to play - Index unusable unless printed - Weak sample scenario
The result Get this game is you’re a fan of the conspiracy genre, modern horror genre, cyberpunk genre or even superhero genre.
You can get more info on the publisher website: www.studiomammouth.com
