 Goto [ Index ] |
Meet the new grown-up Spectrum Games, so to say. The small US label, which first made an impact three years ago with the Origins-nominated roleplaying game Cartoon Action Hour, is now trying their darnedest to not be permanently tied down to one particular public image. Instead of being known only as “those 80s guys” or “the action cartoon dudes,” a reputation easily gained if you are the creators of Cartoon Action Hour, they now plough on with a range of new products that do not belong to that game line, at all. In 2005, they have released two further stand-alone pen & paper roleplaying games with a set of their own rules each: Tomorrow Knights and Midway City. The former will be reviewed in the following text.
Hard, uncompromising science fiction takes center-stage; mecha-action fiction, “noir” type science fiction, a near-future scenario, a postnuclear political thriller – all those are terms that apply equally. However, one thing Tomorrow Knights is certainly not: It’s not a “cyberpunk” game! You will not find any “deckers” or description of a “virtual world” within this book, just as you will not encounter any enchanted artifacts, cuddly space aliens, mutants, or portals leading to another dimension. It’s true that this new RPG is based directly on an eponymous independent comicbook series from 1990, yet that series was not your typical superhero melodrama. I am the last person to say something against honorable, superhuman avengers wearing bright spandex, but those have been given a whole slew of roleplaying game systems dedicated entirely to them. However, I should point out here that this softcover volume, amazingly slim and trim at only 128 pages, contains not only its own independent rules engine, but also an 8-page appendix at the end with full game stats for the system of Mutants & Masterminds (M&M). The latter uses Wizards’ ubiquitous OGL as its core, but does constitute a stand-alone superhero game by Green Ronin, a company with which Spectrum Games and Z-Man Games have now collaborated for the second time. In order to use TK with the M&M rules, you would logically have to waive most of the Powers and drastically lower the amount of points made available at character creation. Amongst the game master hints in the book, you will also find a small number of recommendations on how to play TK entirely without dice – if you want to, as an e-mail-based or chatroom-based game, for example.
A few more lines about the background: You’ll be surprised to learn that regular politicians, even parliaments, live on still, on the national level for example, but they are either completely ineffective, or they are merely willing assistants kept on the leash of the industry and the UCC. You should easily be able to spot parallels to our real-world society today. The private agencies of mercenaries are not strictly covert units, or some guys operating far beyond the boundaries of legality – so it’s not exactly the A-Team on the run we’re talking about. They work pretty much like legitimate small businesses. You can look them up in the phonebook; they maintain an office; they have their own secretaries, their company logos, and their paychecks. Even slogans are not uncommon … The slogan of the professional mercenaries of Starkweather Limited for example reads, “Chivalry lives … for a price!” Since they are so chivalrous, they soon acquired the nickname “Tomorrow Knights.” The game that bears this name gets its personal touch and its special pep and flavor from the usage of formidable combat robots and mecha armor, the setting’s trademark battlesuits.
A typical introduction to an adventure in TK would be that you are part of a unit given the task of keeping certain substances, or component parts for combat armor, from falling into the wrong hands. In addition, this world is rife with the spreading of new drugs, implants or chemical experimentation upon human beings, something which can result in new “psionic” or “paranormal” abilities. An even mission should include about equal portions of opportunities to engage in detective work, chase scenes and fight scenes. Typical job definitions or templates for player-characters are, for example, the battle armor pilot, the mechanic, the negotiator, the bureaucrat, the weapons expert, or the experimentally enhanced super-agent. There is even a type of professionally trained sex agents, usable as PCs and NPCs. In the fictitious street-lingo of the future, female sex-techs carry names like “matas” (named after Mata Hari) or “marlenes” (after Marlene Dietrich).
When artists Rod Whigham and Roy Richardson first released their series Tomorrow Knights, the Berlin Wall had only just fallen, and Mikhail Gorbachev was still chairman of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. What hit me while perusing the book’s introduction and the enclosed adventure “Toxic Apocalypse” was chiefly, how this mini-series that originally came out a little over 15 years ago has gained a realistic, in part an eerily prophetic dimension: suicide bombers, Al-Qaida, chemical warfare, riots in the streets, uncontrolled nuclear proliferation, the shady deals of arms manufacturers, a discussion about civil liberties and the rise to power of raw, take-all-you-can capitalism – those are all very real topics we are faced with today. In some areas today’s technology might even be advanced to the game setting. For example, the internet is only given a glancing mention; the missions of the agents are partly more reminiscent of a fine old James Bond movie with a little Mission: Impossible thrown in.
At some moments I even found this book almost a little too depressing and gritty for a game world in which I’d like to experience adventures on a regular basis. When I am sitting down with an RPG, wanting to engage in my happy, joyous hobby (!), do I really want to be reminded of the things I see on CNN and in the evening news? That’s a touchy point, something to be decided by every reader for himself. The work does excel however due to its “in medias res” style, which catapults the reader directly into the futuristic world of the series’ own universe and remains firmly in place for the duration of the whole book. The typeface is maybe a tad too simple or matter-of-fact for me, but it goes easy to read. In addition, almost every page is adorned by a black & white illustration from the series. This artwork is integrated beautifully with the rest of the lay-out. It is in this regard that the volume clearly profits from the unique case that the creators of the original comic were also on board for its adaptation into an RPG and supervised every step of the work process.
The rules system specially devised for this project by Spectrum comes across as matter-of-fact, unpretentious, almost spartan. To a roll of two six-sided dice you just add a simple ability rating, which is a number between -3 and +5; then you compare the result, which should be as high as possible, with a difficulty number. In principle, that’s about it. In today’s market, this may not rate as a particularly revolutionary type of approach to the task-resolution rules anymore, but it does make TK undeniably elegant and effective. A few welcome secondary rules, all explained in a section at the beginning, help to jazz up the game in a major way: for example, the possibility to “burn” fate points (Seamless Points) to ignore wounds already sustained, or to repeat die-roll results. A unit’s degree of cooperation can be enhanced by a special rule for “teamwork”, which has all of a team’s members assist their team leader with half of their ability rating each. Not a bad idea, either, since this allows you to lessen the risk of the whole team embarrassing themselves.
Altogether, a brisk, newbie-friendly kind of game. You will be done with the rules section proper after only 14 pages. This should please supporters of rules-light games very much. Even in the area of the battlesuits the writers did not make the mistake of smothering the reader with dozens of additional rules, “tabletop-style”. I only really have mixed emotions about the comparatively rigid campaign setting.
