 Goto [ Index ] |
The name’s Davenport. I review games.So the other day there’s this extra-loud knock on my office door. When I answered it – hey, I get lots of clients who can make a big racket – I saw good news and bad news.
The good news was that it was Cynthia Celeste Miller – a real friendly dame, a heckuva game designer, and my personal professionalism postergal.
The bad news was that her pretty face was peepin’ out from what looked like a super jumbo Magic Eight Ball with arms and legs.
“Hiya, Cynthia,” I says. “That’s a new look for you, ain’t it...?”
“It’s called a zionite battle pod,” she says, not sounding exactly like her usual cheerful self. “From Tomorrow Knights. You remember Tomorrow Knights, don’t you, Dan?”
“Sure!” I says. “That game you an’ Eddy Webb wrote based on that Marvel Comic from the 90s? The kinda pulpy, kinda cyber, kinda mecha deal?”
“That’s the one,” she agrees.
“What about it?”
“Where’s the review?”
“Whaddya mean?“ I says. “I already wrote it.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Yeah I did.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Oh, really?” she says, and her big Magic Eight Ball starts makin’ with the powerin’ up, lockin’-an’-loadin’ sound effects. “Well, I’m wearing a nigh-indestructible Commie battle pod that says you didn’t.”
“Fine,” I says, not feelin’ like havin’ my office trashed by a big zio-whatzis. “I’ll write you another review, just ’cause I like you so much. How’d that be?”
Turns out that suited her just fine, since she didn’t blow up nuthin’.
Also turns out she was right: I hadn’t actually written that review yet. Hey, when you get a review queue the size of mine, these things happen sometimes, you know?
I wasn’t about to tell her that, though.
Didn’t want her gettin’ a swelled pod about it.
Substance
Chapter 1: Introduction
Not unlike similar intro chapters found in Eden Studios game books (with which I’m passingly familiar…), this chapter provides a quick overview of the source material (a six-part comicbook miniseries published in 1990 under Marvel Comics’ Epic imprint), the setting (including the section from the comicbook giving the original timeline), the rules, and a glossary, along with an example of play.
Chapter 2: Flash-Forward
As explained in this chapter, Tomorrow Knights (hereafter “TK”) takes place the relatively near future – a future pushed back a bit from the timeline of the original comicbook, since some events would have already taken place. (From a practical standpoint, the biggest change is the Soviet Union of the comic’s back-story becoming post-Cold War Russia in the game.)
The story goes that in 2007, Russian cosmonauts discover a new mineral dubbed “zionite” on the moon – a mineral that can serve as the basis for an almost indestructible alloy. This might be a wonderful thing indeed, except that the Russians use it to build almost-unstoppable suits of power armor that they subsequently use against the Iranians. I say “almost unstoppable” because nukes can stop these “zionite battle pods,” and the Iranians use one to stop the Russian advance… which in turn leads to the Russians nuking the Iranians, which in turn leads to a series of small-scale nuclear and/or chemical exchanges all over the world in what would become known as the 13 Hour War.
The U.S. and Russia miss out on most of the fireworks, although Washington, D.C. and St. Petersburg get nuked in what’s suspected of being some kind of “failsafe pact”. Nevertheless, the world takes a huge beating, and the U.N. takes the heat for failing to stop it. The organization disbands in disgrace, and stepping up to fill its role is the United Corporate Council (or UCC), a conglomerate of multinational corporations designed to “temporarily” fill the void the U.N. leaves behind. Of course, “temporary” becomes “permanent” as the UCC ends up overtly or covertly controlling almost every government on the planet, outlawing open warfare but paving the way for global corporate conflicts using every dirty trick in the book, including – most importantly from the players’ standpoint – corporate and freelance high-tech mercenary units.
Mix in the total destruction of New York City by a biological weapon planted by Native American terrorists in 2008, Munich food riots put down by total slaughter in 2013, and a global economic collapse engineered by a corporate mastermind seeking to create a Brave New World on an asteroid in 2022 – the latter being the basis for the comicbook’s storyline – and you have a fine recipe for a cyberpunk dystopia.
Except that, as the chapter goes on to explain, this setting isn’t quite as bleak as it might be. Yes, the world is a generally unpleasant place ruled by coldhearted megacorporations, but it is also a world of pulpish, cinematic action, with two-fisted PCs pitting mecha, cybernetics, and over-the-top stunts against their foes. And those PCs needn’t necessarily be self-involved cynics, either – in fact, the setting’s eponymous freelance mercenary group is on retainer by the U.S. President and has a lot more in common with the A-Team than it does with your typical team of Shadowrunners, for example.
So while characters should be as three-dimensional as their comicbook counterparts and while combat is as gritty as it is cinematic, this is very much a cyberpunk dystopia through a big-budget summer blockbuster action movie lens.
Chapter 3: Character Design
TK uses a point-allocations system for character creation, with all hard-number aspects of the character drawing on the same pool of points – generally 30, although the GM may increase or decrease that number to suit the desires of the group.
Those hard-number aspects fall into two general categories, for the most part: Traits, which are a combination of what in other games might be considered attributes and skills, and Perks, which are analogous to “advantages”, “qualities”, etc.
Trait scores run from -3 to 5 on the human scale, with superhuman scores available through various high-tech means. You can have a look at the full list of Traits on the TK character sheet, available for download here.
Generally speaking, I dislike systems that lump attributes and skills together. However, I’m okay with TK’s method of doing so, and for at least a couple of reasons. For one thing, the system does not separate attributes and skills while disconnecting them. Instead, it makes each Trait specific enough to avoid overlapping with others; e.g., Finesse, as written, doesn’t overlap with Firearms. For another, it lumps Traits into the highly generalized categories of Body, Mind, and Style Traits, so it’s possible for factors to influence all the Traits under one category, not unlike a factor influencing one attribute in an “attribute + skill” system affects all of the associated skills by default.
Traits come in two sorts: Easy, which any character can use and which start at a score of 0, and Hard, which must be purchased to be used at all and which start at a score of -3 with the first point spent. Characters can take negative scores to provide more points to spend. They also may take either broad or major specializations to Traits, with the specialization providing a 1- or 2-point bonus, respectively, to actions falling within the specialty, at the cost of an equal penalty for Trait-related actions outside the specialty. However, specialized Traits fall under the same 5-point limit as do standard Traits.
That last part isn’t a whole lot of fun, in my opinion. This is a high-octane action setting in which the main character sports neither power armor nor enhancements of any kind, relying on his trusty pistols – one of which is a six-shooter. (Okay, a six-shooter loaded with the most powerful armor-piercing rounds available… but still!) That being true, I’d prefer to have the potential for characters to break out of that restrictive Trait scale through aggressive specialization.
The book doesn’t offer a particularly extensive list of Perks, of which there are only 18. That’s a little deceptive, however, as the “Scientific Experiment” Perk covers any weird “superpowers” a character might have thanks to the wonders of corporate research. Two of these, the Doppelganger Project (serial cloning) and the Shadow Demon Implant (electrical powers), come pre-made; however, players also have the option to build their own custom powers. (More on that in a minute.)
Even setting aside Scientific Experiment, the section does present a reasonably nice Perk selection. Some of them are rather clever, too. “From the School of Hard Knocks,” for example, lets the GM warn the player that he’s about to take an action his experienced character would recognize as being really dumb, and “Learn from Your Mistakes” lets a character gain a Seamless Point (see below) on a roll of snake eyes rather than lose one as per usual – in other words, while he still fails, he learns an important lesson in the process.
Players add two to points not spent on Traits and Perks (if any) to get their starting number of Seamless Points, the game’s version of Drama/Fate points. Having played more than my share of Buffy and Angel games, with their fixed numbers of Drama points going to different character types, I like this method’s superior flexibility: players get to determine the specific balance of their characters’ competency as compared to their luck.
Not unlike Deadlands, drawbacks in TK – known as “hooks” – do not provide more points for character creation. Instead, they provide opportunities to earn more Seamless points when they hinder the PC somehow during play, with players earning 1, 2, or 3 Seamless points for minor, moderate, or major hooks, respectively, and taking a maximum of 5 Seamless points worth of Hooks. This method at once encourages players to bring character flaws into play and discourages players from min-maxing at character creation.
One twist I found particularly interesting is the fact that in addition to career and/or inherited wealth, the Numbers Trait – accounting, essentially – plays a major factor in determining how much money the character possesses. That’s a great example of the game ensuring that every Trait matters in some way.
| Playtest: Character creation worked quite smoothly. Coming up with character concepts took much more time than did actually crunching the numbers, although as described below, dealing with powers from scientific experiments complicated things just a bit. Also, creating characters with mecha required some extra points-juggling to ensure that they either had enough funds to purchase the mecha outright or a debt-related story hook tied to the mecha. |
Chapter 4: The Rules
I would describe the mechanics of TK as “easy-peasy” if “easy-peasy” were not one of the most irritating terms on God’s Green Earth.
Trait rolls involve a roll of 2d6 +/- the character’s appropriate Trait and any situational modifiers. Typical target numbers range from 3 (“Dead Simple”) to 18 (“Impossible”), with 9 (“Challenging”) being the most common for something worth a roll. A roll of snake eyes (double 1’s) is an automatic fumble and costs the character a Seamless Point, and a roll of boxcars (double 6’s) allows the player to either add the roll of an extra d6 to the total or take a Seamless Point. (More on Seamless Points in just a moment.)
|
Playtest: And here we discover that little things really do mean a lot. In play, it turned out that 9 was an awfully high target number, resulting in a whole lot of failures. Consider that the Trait descriptions consider a score of 2 either competent for Easy Traits or professional for Hard Traits, but characters with that score will fail at a Challenging task more often than not. This resulted in some increasingly frustrated players.
As it happens, when I brought this up to Cynthia, she told me that she made 7 or 8 the standard target number to address this very issue. I’d like to see this in the official errata. |
Seamless Points
Players can spend their characters’ Seamless Points for a number of effects:
- Spending one Seamless Point after a roll allows the player to re-roll and take the best result, with the player allowed to keep re-rolling so long as he wants to keep spending Seamless Points.
- Spending two Seamless Points before the roll allows the player to roll 3d6 rather than 2d6.
- Spending one Seamless Point allows a player to cancel one Wound (see below), so long as the point is spent during the fight in which it was taken.
- Spending one Seamless Point after a failed shock roll (see below) turns the failure into an automatic success.
Seamless Points may also go towards Trait advancement. Every Trait has three boxes beside it on the character sheet. Spend a number of Seamless Points equal to the Trait +2, and you get to check off a box. Check off all of the boxes and the Trait increases by 1 and the boxes “reset”. Alternately, spend as many Seamless Points as you like, roll a number of dice equal to the number of Seamless Points spent, and every die that meets or beats the Trait +2 allows the player to check off one box. Either way, Traits can only increase by a single point per session and 5 remains the cap for Traits without some form of augmentation.
Reflecting on this some more, I think I see the logic behind that cap. If attributes and skills all fall under Traits, then the same rules probably should apply to all of them. The problem is that while it makes sense for attribute-like Traits such as Muscle (strength) to have a fixed human scale, this forces characters dependent upon skill-like Traits such as Firearms to resort to artificial augmentations to excel. Put in comicbook terms, a Batman-like character would not be able to reach his amazing levels of competence without cybernetics or genetic experimentation. Or, put another way, Hawkeye might be said to be as far above the human norm with his archery as, say, Spider-man is with his strength… but in TK terms, that just wouldn’t work with Hawkeye as a “normal” human. Granted, this isn’t a superhero game, strictly speaking; however, as cinematic as it sets out to be, I don’t think unaugmented-but-spectacular Trait scores are unreasonable.
Combat
Speaking of cinematic, combat involves a roll of an appropriate attack Trait against a fixed target number of 9 + range modifiers (for ranged combat) or an appropriate defensive Trait (for melee combat), with the margin of success (if any) added to weapon modifiers to determine damage. The Toughness Trait plus any armor subtract from damage to determine the final total. All characters can take 20 wounds, represented as four rows of five boxes, each row with a wound modifier: -1, -2, -3, and Dying. Fill in a row, and the character takes the associated modifier and must pass a Willpower roll with a target number of 6 (plus any pain modifiers) to stay conscious. Characters at the Dying level lose one point of Toughness every round until they’re either stabilized or reach a Toughness of -3, at which point, they die.
In theory, I love this design. Higher attack rolls result in more damage, rewarding skilled combatants. Pain matters, and characters can be knocked out long before they die.
|
Playtest: In practice, it’s not quite so slick.
Remember the issue I had with the high default difficulty number of 9? Well, combat only makes that worse, so in play, successful hits tended to have extremely low margins of success. Given the fairly low damage ratings of melee weapons, hand-to-hand combat therefore involved a whole lot of nicking. And while the damage ratings for all but the smallest firearms are enough to fill at least one row of wounds in a single hit, nothing short of a tactical nuclear device is at all likely to kill with one shot. This, in turn, means that knockouts are far more likely than kills on a first successful attack, even if a second hit puts the character in danger of dying. Granted, this is a high-action game, so perhaps PCs ought to be unrealistically durable, but I don’t like seeing that done by making ultra-deadly weapons unrealistically weak. If the goal is to keep PCs alive in the face of extreme peril, I’d prefer to see it done by greater generosity with starting and awarded Seamless Points. It shouldn’t take a tac-nuke to make a player wonder if the Big Ass Weapon pointed his character’s way might actually kill him instantly. |
The system allows for cinematic maneuvers like called shots and attacking with weapons in both hands; however, the former proves worthwhile only if there’s something specific you’re trying to hit (e.g., a weak spot on someone’s suit of powered armor) or if you have time to take careful aim. Generic called shots with the intent to do more damage increase the damage rating of the attack for every point of increased difficulty, effectively canceling out the bonus. For example, if I need a 12 to hit an opponent and get a 13, I do one point of damage added to weapon damage. If I took a -2 penalty and got a 13, I’d have missed; if I hit, I’d need at least a 15… in which case, I’d do one point of damage.
While this makes called shots for extra damage (as opposed to special effects like knocking a weapon aside) in combat basically pointless, characters can spend rounds aiming ranged weapons to get a bonus to hit per round up to +3; in that way, an extra-damage called shot can actually make some sort of tactical sense.
The chapter also includes sensible rules-light mechanics for chases and vehicular combat that nevertheless manage to factor in vehicle speed and maneuverability – a rather important point in a game prominently featuring both cinematic chases and mecha combat.
Chapter 5: The Tomorrow Knights Universe
Not being familiar with the source material beyond what’s presented in this book, it’s difficult for me to judge how comprehensively the game covers the setting. That said, this chapter appears to cover it pretty darn well.
The section starts off with detailed profiles of the members of the Tomorrow Knights mercenary company, complete with character stats, followed by details on other noteworthy groups and individuals, also with stats where applicable.
And those groups and individuals provide a wide range of opponents for just about any sort of conflict. Characters can swim the shark-infested sea of corporate intrigue that is the United Corporate Council, or they can clash head-on with the U.C.C.’s biomechanical enforcers, the R.E.A.M. Team (“Regulatory Enforcement Agency, Mechanized”). They can fight mecha-to-mecha against the Tomorrow Knight’s less scrupulous counterparts, the Totenwulfen, or pit stealth and swords against the neo-samurai and tek-ninjas of the resurgent Shogunate of Japan. They can face the mindless fury of the Hulk-like genetically engineered biomechs or the… uh… Well, there are genetically-engineered “sex techs”, too. Even the Yakuza and the Mafia have turned megacorp, if it’s some gangland action your players crave. And if they prefer their violence at the street level, the steroid-pumped women of the retro-gang known as the 80’s Ladies await their pleasure.
(What? This is the Intenet. Somebody must be into that…)
The chapter wraps up with a tour of the world and its status quo – which, as you might imagine, isn’t all that pleasant. Aside from the economic chaos, the armored mercs slugging it out, and the U.C.C. running roughshod over everybody, the nuclear exchange has thrown the weather patterns into chaos, prompting widespread extinctions. (On the other hand, the increased rainfall helped clear up the radiation, so this isn’t Gamma World we’re talking about.)
As a side note, space exploration’s become the pervue of the U.C.C.; unfortunately, the most ambitious project, a self-sustaining asteroid colony, was the project of the megalomaniac who wrecked the Earth’s economy to build it. Also, it was blasted off into a 50-year orbit around the sun. Other than that, there are just a few moon bases and refurbished space stations. (Sorry, no FTL travel or Little Green Men.)
Chapter 6: Technology
I guess I’d call the technology level of the setting “comicpunk”, or perhaps “comecha” – cyberpunk and mecha seen through a not-quite-four-color comic book lens. And the focus of that lens rests firmly on the kick-ass and the cool: cyber enhancements to make recipients faster, stronger, sneakier, and sexier; nearly indestructible katanas and explosive bolos connected by a deadly monomolecular line; mini-rail guns, plasma stun guns, and wrist-mounted missles; and, of course, powered armors, mecha, and robots.
Perhaps nowhere does the comicbook nature of the technology stand out more than it does regarding cybernetic and biotech implants, which lack any form of balancing “cyberpsychosis” or the like. If you’ve got the cash and survive the surgery – which does grow more difficult and dangerous the more extensive the implant becomes – you’re good to go.
I like the fact that weapons have both accuracy and damage ratings, allowing for precise weapons as well as devastating ones. However, as mentioned in my discussion of combat and damage, those damage ratings seem a little out of whack – especially when trying to describe weapons that should cause massive trauma but don’t.
|
Playtest: The one that comes most immediately to mind from the playtest is the molecular bolo. Here you have a weapon comprised of two explosive charges connected by a molecular wire that’s described as being able to take out mecha at close range, yet not once in combat did one take somebody out with a single hit. And how do you describe a "nick" from a weapon that lops off arms and explodes when it hits?
One other minor note about equipment: one character had an MDA (Memory and Data Assistant) implant installed – a kind of cybernetic PDA. That’s a cool gadget, but when the player wanted her character to do some cyber-snooping, I realized that I had no idea what kind and degree of information she’d be able to dig up. On the bright side, the tek-ninja power armor, with its super-leaping and spider-climbing features, inspired great glee in the aforementioned character’s player. I was a little confused, though, as to why neo-samurai armor would offer stealth capabilities but tek-ninja armor would not. |
I certainly can find no faults with the selection of vehicles and mechs. Land vehicles cover everything from two-door sedans to tanks. Air vehicles include everything from jet backs to low-orbit strike fighters and armored drop-ships. And the battle armors range from relatively human-scale Iron Man-like suits to hulking two-legged tanks, with some remote-controlled mechs thrown in for good measure. (Well, I guess I can find one minor fault in the lack of watercraft.) Players may trick out battle armors as they like using the available slots for add-ons, thereby making the mechs truly their own.
Chapter 7: Game Master’s Section
There’s not much here in the way of GM advice that you haven’t seen elsewhere. What stands out is the quality and quantity of that advice. I honestly think someone totally new to the hobby would be completely up to speed on what it takes to run a good game after reading this chapter. It even goes so far as to discuss player absences and off-topic chatter and dares the dangerous waters of narrative styles and their respective merits.
From a more setting-specific standpoint, the chapter discusses the elements that make TK what it is – cyberpunk, mecha combat, pulp-style action, and intrigue – and the narrative techniques that make stories in this genre mix really pop.
For some reason, the book places the rules for custom scientific experiments (a.k.a. low-end superpowers) in this chapter rather than with the rest of the character creation rules. They’re pretty functional, covering basics like regeneration, natural weapons, gills, immunities, and (perhaps most importantly) Traits increased to possibly superhuman levels. Unlike cybernetic enhancements, however, cost is not a factor here – the presumption is that the PCs literally are the subjects of experiments, not visitors to some super-clinic. Instead of cost, the balancing factor involves flaws resulting from the experiments – lower-than-normal Traits, missing limbs, special sensitivities, and the like.
The problem I encountered with this system is the fact that there’s no scaling involved, nor is there any built-in tie between powers and flaws. Also, while the text suggests that GMs should feel free to create their own powers and flaws, there’s no discussion of what powers might be too “out there” for the setting – something that would have been quite helpful to someone like myself who is unfamiliar with the source material.
| Playtest: One player wanted his character to have the ability to turn invisible, with the drawback that he’d be blind while invisible. First of all, I wasn’t sure that flat-out invisibility (as opposed to, say, some form of Predator-like cloaking device) would fit in the setting. And even if I allowed it, the conditional blindness idea really didn’t mesh with the listed flaws, none of which are that severe or limited to the use of the power. In the end, we ditched the blindness idea and allowed the invisibility, albeit in the form of a boosted Stealth Trait with a reduced cost for not being always “turned on”. |
Still, the very presence of weird science mutants helps really open up the scope of the setting and what’s possible within it. After all, if science can produce low-end supers, it can surely produce any number of misbegotten monstrosities for the benefit of players who tire of espionage and commando raids and want to do a bit of old-fashioned beast bashing.
Chapter 8: Adventure Briefings
Ten adventure ideas, each including the setup and the real story. (And given the espionage element to the setting, the real story’s seldom what the PCs are led to believe.) The adventure seeds may be small, but they do tend to favor maximum flexibilty for the PCs.
Chapter 9: Toxic Apocalypse
I value introductory adventures for two reasons: (1) they give me, as a time-strapped GM, an instant jumping-in point, and (2) they give me an idea of what a typical adventure should look like from the perspective of the game designers.
“Toxic Apocalypse” serves the first function perfectly well. The second? That I’m lukewarm about. Granted, it pits the players against a major threat strongly tied to the history of the setting, but beyond that, there’s just not much here that really screams “Tomorrow Knights!!!”
Essentially, the heroes must figure out the truth behind a theft, fight some low-rent thugs, find the figures behind the truth behind the theft, fight some high-rent thugs and the aforementioned figures, and possibly chase the aforementioned figures down if they make a break for it.
And that’s it. No super-tech gadgets. No cyber-goons or bio-engineered killers. No robots or mecha. In fact, backstory aside, there’s really very little about this adventure that couldn’t fit in a modern-day game of espionage. And not even an over-the-top James Bond-style espionage game, either – just a typical espionage setting, insofar as such a thing exists.
So, either I’ve completely misunderstood the nature of the setting, or this adventure doesn’t really do its job.
Appendix
As an “M&M Superlink” product, TK here offers a complete conversion to Mutants & Masterminds – so complete, in fact, that it includes the strength modifiers for battlesuits inadvertently omitted from the standard TK rules. While I have only played in one short-lived game of M&M and don’t feel qualified to judge the quality of the conversion, I can, at least, offer the observation that using M&M takes care of the scaling issues I have with the standard TK system.
For the record, the chapter recommends that characters start at Power Level 6 rather than the default four-color Power Level 10 of standard Mutants & Masterminds to reflect the more realistic nature (relatively speaking) of TK’s setting.
Style
As only makes sense, the book relies very heavily upon images from the comic book series for its artwork. This proves to be a good thing and a bad thing, to my mind. While the comic frames convey the look and feel of the setting like nothing else really could, the comic itself seems to have had a very… well… comic book-y approach to the subject matter. The art’s detail does a good job of illustrating all of the lovely high-tech gadgets, but the dialogue leans very strongly toward a hammy late-Silver Age style compounded by an abundance of “*ZAP!!*” sound effects that would feel right at home in the old Batman TV series.
Granted, this is a review of the game, not of the comic, but the comic sets the default tone for the game. And frankly, that tone seems somewhat at odds with the gritty action described in the text. That’s not damning by any means, but it’s worth noting. After all, while the Buffy RPG works for a variety of settings and styles, perhaps its greatest accomplishment is its ability to faithfully evoke and emulate the source material.
Also on the subject of the artwork: the cover really hurts my eyes. I mean, there’s one person in power armor flying and firing up and to the left, one in power armor firing in the same direction but looking down, one guy in a rather odd martial arts pose apparently ready to take on whatever the aforementioned guy looking down sees, one Shadow Demon subject poised to zap something straight ahead, and an oversized head-and-torso view of the team leader overshadowing them all and gazing off in yet another direction.
Even typing that made me dizzy.
That aside, the interior artwork stays crisp, clean, and consistent, as does the friendly, no-nonsense writing. (No pointlessly cutesy alternate terms for “Game Master” here, thank you very much.) The layout (unlike the cover) is very easy on the eyes, and while I have to knock off a bit on the readability score due to the lack of an index, the end of the book offers a nice selection of important tables. Only three editing/proofing errors stood out to me: one minor, two not-so-minor. The former involves a Trait apparently transposed in one place from the Midway City RPG – unsurprising, since the TK system was developed for that game prior to Midway City’s publication – while the latter are a lack of a throwing Trait (awfully handy for those molecular bolas) and of Muscle scores for any of the mecha.
Conclusion
I’ve wondered more than once about the value of licensing obscure settings, but this one certainly stands on its own merits above and beyond any linkage to the source material. The sheer fun of the setting and the game’s thorough coverage of it alone are worth a “5” from that standpoint.
Seemingly small issues with the mechanics, however – the default target number, constricted trait scale, and damage system, for example – all conspired to make playing in that setting less fun than it should be. None of these problems were crippling by any stretch of the imagination, but I think I just had such high hopes based upon the coolness of the setting and the streamlined rules that less than optimal performance grated more than it might have.
That being the case, I can’t quite give the game a 5 for Substance. However, the ease of adjusting for those issues, I certainly can’t give it anything less than a 4, either. And if Mutants & Masterminds is your thing, those drawbacks might not even apply, kicking the game back up to a 5.
In either case, if you’re a fan of two-fisted sci-fi action along the lines of Dark Angel, Robocop, Total Recall, and Minority Report, then Tomorrow Knights is definitely worth a look.
SUBSTANCE:
- Setting
- Quality = 5.0
- Quantity = 5.0
- Rules
- Quality = 3.5
- Quantity = 4.0
STYLE:
- Artwork = 4.0
- Layout/Readability = 4.0
- Organization = 4.0
- Writing = 4.0
- Proofreading Penalty = -0.5
