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The Good: The author pays a remarkable amount of attention to astrophysics, endeavoring to create an interesting setting that is largely supported by real world science.
The Bad: The editing here is extremely poor, making the product painful to read at times. The writing is long winded, and often the author writes pages of text that serve little useful purpose. The scant rules and charts are repeatedly reprinted, unnecessarily, and just serve to use up space. Character creation is very bland.
The Physical Thing
This 411 page black and white softcover showcases below average production values for its $23.59 price tag. The formatting is very poor, and the way the author has used a wordwrap function sometimes results in large spaces between words and general ugliness. The editing is also very poor, with one or more errors per page. While they don’t hinder understanding of concepts, the sheer volume of errors is annoying.The artwork has both good and bad moments. Many pieces nicely show off setting concepts and link up with the text, but many of the planet illustrations are so plain as to be useless. The index is very detailed, though it may be too detailed for a book with such sparse mechanics and an already very detailed table of contents.
The Ideas
In the far future humanity has left a dying Earth in great seed ships. Piloted by advanced artificial intelligences and containing genetic material to recreate humanity on a distant world, these AI went beyond their programming and worked to create a perfect humanity. Called NuManity, these beings do not know lust, greed, aggression, or any of the other bad or distracting human qualities. They live in a perfect utopia in a star system far away from their original home. When they sleep they Cast – send their consciousness into artificial bodies called Shells where they either work or live out their dark and repressed fantasies. This way NuManity’s waking like is an idealic paradise, and they never recall their work and toil.Dark emotions still linger in the subconscious, and these are excised by having NuManity Cast into bodies meant for indulging in these emotions. Whole worlds are dedicated to bloody warfare, physical pleasure, and the acquisition of wealth. By Casting there and working out their subconscious fantasies a NuMan awakes with such dark desires gone – and almost no memory of the experience.
It’s a perfect existence, but sometimes things go wrong. People don’t leave their shells when they’re supposed to, a problem develops on one of the worlds, or the broken remnants of the real humanity (who dwell at the edge of the system) prey on a NuManity vessel. For these problems Unity (the great consciousness that regulates everything) uses Lucids – people who remember their Castings and can exercise greater control over their Shells. These troubleshooters solve problems across the star system and serve their people in a unique way.
Under the Cover
SettingA binary star system filled with habitable planets and moons, Ruby’s setting is a mix of fantastic and dull locations. Every world presented is important to the setting. One is a tropical war world where robots and altered humanoids do constant battle so that casting NuMen can fulfill their subconscious need for aggression. Another is a highly radioactive gas giant where the last vestiges of humanity barely manage to scrape by on some barely habitable moons. But the grandeur of the Ruby system is at contrast with the perfection of NuManity. In their normal state people live quiet lives of luxury, with no desire for sex, aggression, or anything else. They don’t do research or expand their horizons – they just paint and enjoy lives of artistic expression. Only the Lucids break this mold, and even they live the same boring lives as the rest of NuManity – at least until they Cast.
Ruby’s setting really isn’t about NuManity, though, but about a group of virtual immortals Casting into Shells and solving problems throughout the system. It’s about exploration, mystery, and brutal combat wrapped up in a very standard mission-oriented RPG framework. Unity tells you there’s a problem and that you need to do something, your character is put in a Shell selected by Unity, and then you have to fix the problem. This could be killing a NuMan Shell that’s causing problems on the war world by being far too successful and not leaving to stopping a criminal plan on one of the greed-oriented moons that threatens Unity’s assets, to even attacking and killing the humans at the edge of the system who threaten NuManity.
Ruby details every planet and moon in the setting, which is good in that it provides a number of quick adventure locations. Variations on gravity, atmospheric pressure, and other conditions given each location its own unique feel backed up with a specific purpose for everything in the system.
Mechanics
Ruby makes use of small dice pools of D6. A result of 4, 5, or 6 indicates a success while a 1 subtracts a success. Players want to either beat an opposed dice roll or beat a set difficulty, typically ranging from 1 to 4. The dice pool itself is determined by six Statistics while Aptitudes (skills) allow the player to re-roll dice. This results in a player rolling around 2-5 dice once and then re-rolling some dice if they have a relevant Aptitude. If a difficulty exceeds a character’s dice pool – so it’s impossible for them to succeed – the player gets extra Inverted Dice so they have a chance to succeed – but these dice subtract successes on 1, 2, and 3, and only reward a success on a 6 – making it fantastically unlikely the character will succeed.
Body, Grace, and Vitality make up the three core physical Statistics. Every Shell has its own physical Stats, so these Stats aren’t even chosen for player characters. While Body represents physical strength, Grace represents dexterity and Vitality represents physical hardiness. Reason, Volition, and Ego make up the three core mental Statistics. Reason represents intelligence and learning capacity, Volition represents mental strength and willpower, and Ego represents confidence and self worth.
Let’s build a character!
Lucids are given 7 points to spend on the three mental Statistics.
| Example: I’m making Mars, a young man who creates delicate glass animal figurines in his daily life as a NuMan. While Casting, however, he has developed quite the warrior’s spirit. I put two points each into Reason and Ego, making him about average. Three points go into Volition – Volition is used with Grace to determine how many actions a character gets and, thus, having a higher Volition makes him more capable at combat. |
Characters also receive 5 points of Aptitudes. Aptitudes are similar to a skill tree. Players first purchase a very broad skill, then they may purchase increasingly specific skills. The more specific skills result in more points to spend on dice to re-roll, thus giving a person a choice between having broadly competent characters or narrowly focused characters.
| Example: I buy Criminal > Security > Disarm for 3 points, Technical, and Academic. Criminal, Technical, and Academic are all very broad Aptitudes which allow 1 re-rolled die. Security is a more specialized form of Criminal – when doing Security stuff I get to re-roll two dice. Disarm is even more specialized – when trying to Disarm a security system my character has 3 points to spend on re-rolls – not bad! Since Shells often have their own combat Aptitudes I’m doing ok with not buying any combat skills. |
Characters also have Drives and Instincts. Every character has three Drives – one for Love, Fear, and Hate. When acting in accordance with a Drive a character may gain a bonus, but sometimes a character will have to roll an Ego test to avoid acting on a Drive. Instincts, similar to Drives, are programmed into Shells and meant to help Casters fulfill their purpose. War Shells want to fight, pleasure Shells just want to have fun. Characters must also roll Ego to overcome these hard-wired instincts.
| Example: Mars has Love: Interesting Animals, Fear: Water, and Hate: Unity. He doesn’t care for the orders the Lucids get from Unity and thinks they could do a better job on their own. |
That’s it! Let’s see the mechanics in play!
| Example: Mars is trying to overcome a high tech security system in order to gain access to an armory. The GM has decided this is really tough, setting a difficulty of 3 and basing it on Reason. I roll 2 dice for my Reason and 1 Inverted die. The 2 dice come up 5 and 6 (successes), but the inverted die comes up 2 (subtract 1 success) for a total of 1 success. Even level of a tree gives 1 point to spend on re-rolls, so the just having the first rank gives 1 but a 3rd rank, like Mars’ Disarm, gives 3. Re-rolling a neutral die costs 1, re-rolling a negative die costs 2. In this case I spend 2 points to re-roll that negative die and get a 6 – a success! With 3 successes Mars manages to defeat the security system. |
I do have two major complaints here. The first is that characters are strongly limited by their Statistics as to what they can do. The second is that characters receive so few Aptitudes – for a highly advanced transhumanist setting where characters spend a lot of their time jacked into machines one would expect they’d start out knowing a few more tricks.
Let me tell you a little more about the game system. While there are some sparse social mechanics, it’s the combat mechanics that the game is most focused on. During each initiative pass characters have a set number of actions based on the average of their Grace and Volition. Actions are used to both attack and defend, so being ganged up on by several opponents is a serious problem in Ruby. I strongly dislike this because I believe it makes the two Statistics far too necessary and because it can result in characters being pinned down and just defending to keep alive – but I can’t back any of that up with actual play.
Combat generally seems lethal, with dice being rolled for damage (after a successful attack) against Vitality + Armor, effectively resulting in two opposed rolls (attack, then resistance) before damage is calculated. Damage quickly inflicts penalties and death based on a Shell’s Vitality, with damage becoming Wound Points which add up. One of my dislikes for combat is that any attack which inflicts 2 Wound Points or more of damage knocks the target back one or more meters. This applies to all weapons, even lasers and fists, and beyond making little sense can result in a sort of “ranged kiting” where a character continuously moves and shoots to keep an opponent without a gun from reaching them.
While physical death doesn’t occur in Ruby, Shell death can result in trauma and mental instability. Unity helps to regulate this by providing drugs to the Lucids, but even that is an imperfect solution.
Ruby does include a variety of example Shells, some general guidelines for constructing Shells, and a very simple weapons chart. On the whole, however, most of the work is left up to the GM to stat things on the fly however she thinks is best.
My Take
I love both science fiction and transhumanism quite a bit, so it surprised me when I quickly realized I didn’t care for Ruby. Not only do I have serious concerns about the mechanics, but the presentation is so poor as to make the book unpleasant to read. This is unfortunate because I think there’s a lot of potential here. Maybe a more polished product, complete with more helpful and clear examples, would excite me. At the very least cutting the book down two hundred pages or so would be a wonderful revision, as the current text tends to be unfocused.I have a few other complaints as well. Character creation is very bland – I don’t have any sense of what the character is like from assigning three mental Statistics, nor can I easily figure out how to turn a concept into that. Playing someone whose only life experiences are living in perfect happiness and then going on linear missions is also highly unappealing. The setting itself is far from compelling and has little of interest going on. It’s hard for me to imagine interesting scenarios here beyond “go help this person” and “kill these things.”
If Ruby sees a second edition with concise writing, clear examples, editing, an evolved system, and a more compelling setting filled with interesting hooks then it may be worth your time. Until then give this one a pass.
