The Great War of Magellan RPG
Media tie-in RPGs are an odd bunch. On one hand, the art tends to be good. Anyone who can afford the costs of licensing such a property can usually afford to hire decent artists, plus in the case of movies and comic books you can usually dragoon in stills or existing artwork. On the other hand, they often don’t take as much care as they should with the design of the game’s system, relying instead on the weight of the franchise’s name to carry the product. The Great War of Magellan RPG (GWM?) is different from this stereotype in many ways. One of the most obvious is that usually an RPG comes out after its parent franchise is already quite well-known and capitalises on the success of that parent. Here we have a science fiction series that has yet to be released, preceded by its associated RPG. This could well be the first instance I am aware of where a franchise uses the RPG as a publicity tool, rather than the other way around.
This is not the only divergence from the trend, but it does make the job of the reviewer that little bit harder. I have no way of telling quite how accurately this game portrays its subject matter, since all the general public has seen of this series so far is a four minute publicity trailer (which, incidentally, is included with the book on a CD ROM). As such, all I can do in the circumstances is rate the game on its own merits. The coolness or anti-coolness of the series can have no impact upon this review whatsoever.
This is a long one. Hope you brought a packed lunch with you.
Presentation
For a licensed product, the book looks sloppy and rushed.
The first big divergence from the licensed RPG mould is painfully obvious. The book’s production values are pretty low. The book is softback and competently bound, and it follows the popular double-column spread with artwork to break up the text. Some lines break awkwardly across pages, but no major fubars in the layout department.
There is a lot of artwork in this book, the majority of it hand-drawn and of varying quality. Some of them are pretty nice, some of them are pretty bad, and a few of them, not many but a few, are outstanding. All in all, a very mixed bag. There are some stills from the series included alongside the traditional artwork, but their quality is… pretty abysmal. I’m not certain, but I think all of these shots are taken directly from the trailer. They are often blurry, as if they’d been blown up from television resolution using nothing more than standard Photoshop anti-aliasing, a lot of them are just portrait shots of the various characters, some are too dark to clearly discern the details on, and one of them looks like it was taken during a scene transition, with one picture faintly superimposed upon the other. Although this last case could be intentional, it still looks sloppy.
All in all, the artwork is an extremely mixed bag of different styles, media and qualities. It wouldn’t look out of place in the average indie product, but I’ve come to expect more of licensed RPGs. The main font used is also Abaddon, and if you’re not familiar with its name you’ll soon recognise its shape as it’s one of the most overused fonts in the industry. I believe it first appeared on the cover of ‘Sorcerer’ and its supplements, and since then hundreds of other indie and small-press companies have used it because it’s attractive, thematic and free to use. The problem is really only that it’s everywhere you look these days, and I for one am sick to death of seeing it.
The book has no index, but it has a fairly comprehensive table of contents so referring to it isn’t too much of a chore. It could be easier, but it’s not as bad as some books I’ve seen that do have an index, so I won’t harp on about it. The author’s writing style is clear enough for the most part, but a trifle bland and informal. There’s not much flavour there to spice up the information. In a few places that information is lacking in detail, and specifically the game mechanics are often vague and left for the GM to interpret however he sees fit. This is most obvious in the chapters about mystical powers. The book is also chock full of spelling and grammatical errors, way above the average allowance even for RPG’s.
Core System
GWM uses a simple roll-between system, but confuses matters with pointless details.
The core concept is that you roll 2D20 of different colours. One of these is the Special Die – more on that later. Right now we’re interested in the normal die. If you roll less than the total of your statistic plus an appropriate skill, then you succeed. If the GM wants to make the task a little more difficult or if you are making an opposed check, then passive opposition comes into play. Basically, you have to roll higher than the passive opposition but lower than your skill. In opposed rolls the passive opposition (or lower bracket if you prefer) is equal to half of your opponent’s relevant statistic. In unopposed rolls it is set by the GM to simulate level of difficulty.
This ‘bracket system’ is a good idea on the face of things because it reduces the need for mathematics. You don’t have to do any adding up or subtracting to make your roll. GWM ruins this however by stating that you can also add modifiers to the player’s stat/skill to represent Impaired Capacity. Usually this is due to damage. It doesn’t have much of an impact on the game’s speed in all honesty so it’s no big deal, it just seems a shame that a minor advantage of the system is pretty much negated.
And now my main complaint against the system: the special die. The result you roll on the special die doesn’t always matter, but if you roll certain results you might end up doing something spectacularly well or hideously badly. “Ah,” I hear you say, “I expect the higher you roll the better, yes?” Well, no. I’m afraid not. Instead, you have to refer to the game’s massive 95-page list of skills to find out what happens. Each skill is further subdivided into several actions that the player can use it for, and each action has its own special results associated with it. The numbers that cause special effects differ from skill to skill, the effects themselves differ too, so your only recourse is to either ignore the special result rules entirely, or constantly refer to a huge chunk of manual to find out if you’ve done well or not.
Shoot me now.
Combat is fairly straightforward. Initiative is calculated by adding up a bunch of stats, and players act in order of initiative – no rolls. Damage is deducted directly from all your physical statistics, reducing both your ability to attack and defend yourself. This leads to a pretty steep death spiral. For those who don’t know, that means the more damage you take, the less likely you are to avoid taking more damage so the first hit in combat is often decisive. Some people like death spirals, some people hate them. This one doesn’t seem to be too steep, fortunately. Once any one statistic hits zero, you’re unconscious. Armour is therefore pretty darn essential to your survival.
In combat, the hated special die dictates when a critical hit occurs and what location is struck. Another indication of how brutal combat is can be derived from the fact that the average human has a 1 in 5 chance of suffering a critical hit from any blow that strikes home. Also, some of these critical hits have multiple results. Yay, more rolling of dice.
I’m starting to sound like a real negative nancy, so I’d like to point out one thing that’s good about the combat mechanics. They can easily be adapted to both social and spiritual combat just by changing the statistics involved. It would’ve been nice if more was said on this subject, but it’s not difficult to introduce house rules.
Apart from the basics there are also a bunch of special rules for combat. Mostly these don’t need much examination. They do their job adequately if not particularly innovatively. There is one I’d take exception to though. Taking one round to aim means you can adjust the number on the special die by one point. Now, there’s already a 1/5 chance that you’ll suffer a critical hit. If somebody aims at you, they’ve got a 3/5 chance, more than 50%! OK it means they have to spend a round doing nothing, and doing nothing in combat is a good way to get yourself banjoed, but I still don’t like those odds.
Vroom Vroom!
GWM is a space opera game, and what space opera would be complete without vehicular battles? One thing I cannot fault the game on is that it has statistics for a great many vehicles. However the rules for using them differ little from standard combat. There are statistics for acceleration and ‘deacceleration’, a few minimal special manoeuvres, crashing into things, the usual. Some more detail would have been nice, but I’ve seen worse. It doesn’t really evoke the whole space opera genre to my mind, but it’s there and it’s playable. Just another average feature in a distinctly average game.
Character Creation
Well, the book has no character sheet, but having looked at the sheets included on the CD ROM that ships with the book that’s probably a blessing (I’ll come to that later.) Note however that when the book says the character sheets are PDF files, it means Word Document files. If you don’t got Word, they should work in OpenOffice which is available for free on the ‘net.
The basis of character creation is your species. There are 13 to choose from (some of which require GM permission to play) and each comes with a set of basic attributes, maybe some special abilities unique to their race, and a number of development points to spend on skills and other abilities. You then roll 1D20 for each base statistic and consult a table to find out how much to modify that statistic by, varying between -3 and +3. Naturally the more extreme results are those that are least likely to occur.
Most species get 15 to 20 development points to buy their skills and other abilities. This is where we return to that humongous skill list I mentioned earlier. I count 112 separate skills, and some of them cost more than one point each to purchase so don’t expect to be working your way up to massive levels of proficiency any time soon. You can also spend them on mutations and other special abilities. You earn more development points through play, and skills cost the same after creation as they do during it. Statistics cost 10 points to improve.
About Those Aliens
Let’s talk a bit about the aliens in the book next. After all, good science fiction needs its aliens. Magellan follows the familiar Star Trek concept that all intelligent races came from the same father race which then evolved, which explains why they all of them look like humans with latex prosthetics and funny-coloured contact lenses. Few of them diverge vastly from humans. There are thirteen races in total, which are (briefly)
Kyronians : these guys are the humans of the setting.
Kitaan : The stock bad guys. They’re basically racial purist vampires. They can drink blood to absorb some of their victim’s skills, and they turn you into one of them by biting you. They also have a hive mind and can sense members of their own species nearby. And they’re out to assimilate all other humans.
Cirans : imagine a cross between Klingons and Brian Blessed. That’s the Cirans. They were a warrior culture who attacked anyone who came near, but they got their asses kicked halfway to hell and now there aren’t enough left to make a decent army. They can also see in the dark and scare people poo-free just by staring at them.
Bokruni : Kinda mer-people. They don’t breathe underwater but they can hold their breath for hours. They can’t drown, but enter suspended animation instead from which they can awaken automatically. They heal fast, oh, and they can hear what you’re thinking. Yes really.
Grulnian : Wolverine with an inferiority complex. They have pointy-sharp nails that are as good as claws, dig tunnels really well, and are agoraphobic. This is probably the most fairly balanced species in the book, bar humans.
Seiblings : Humans with wings that can be conveniently folded away inside their bodies to save the special effects crew having to glue them on for every damn scene. Even more susceptible to critical hits than any other species due to their wings.
Cree : Native Americans who tend to adopt people then protect them forever (Go! Plot hook!) They can also read your mind in a limited fashion – yep, these guys too – sense other Cree in the vicinity – ditto – and perform ancient spooky magical rituals.
AIs : Data from Star Trek, with all the usual factions (human loving ones, independent ones, and downright homicidal ones.) They regenerate, and can learn new skills from being programmed as well as learning. They can also be reprogrammed to adopt the morals of a different faction. Would anyone like to guess how many episodes we’ll watch before this happens in the series?
Half-Mechs : Cyborgs. Not really a species in their own right, just other species with metal bits tacked on. The more metal, then the less emotional they become. Could have been lifted straight from Cyberpunk, right?
Zorks : Mutants. What, you weren’t expecting there to be mutants in a sci-fi? Again not really a species in their own right just a means of altering other species to be more interesting.
Those are the standard playable races. There are also five non-playable ones for the GM’s use only. And why the Kitaan aren’t in this list I do not know.
Shevans : the Kitaan’s masters. They always have a Nephilim buddy (see below) who they can commune with and also receive special spooky powers from. They share the same hive mind as the Kitaan and they get a bunch of free skills to boot.
Dru-acks : Demons, more or less. They’re black-skinned, bat-winged monsters genetically engineered by the Nephilim to use as host bodies for possession. They’re immune to diseases and poisons, their bite has a paralysing effect, they get the same nephilim powers as Shevans and they can suck out your innards so that you can’t be resurrected. (Yeah, a sci-fi game with resurrection. Go figure.)
Nephilim : The real bad guys pulling the strings of all the other bad guys. They’re disembodied spirits so they can’t do much without a host body, but they can travel instantaneously to anywhere in the universe, they get nephilim powers as you’d expect and they can possess certain species for short periods.
Kitaanites : Good-guy Kitaans with mystical powers. They can turn Kitaan into Kitaanites by blood injection. They don’t get the hive mind ability, but they can sense nearby Kitaan.
Masuri : you can’t start as one of these, but you can become one later. Basically, these are the ancients reborn into the bodies of the… er… moderns. They’re the same as the species they started from, but get funky groovy mystic powers on top.
Now, how can we play havoc with those?
Munchkin Tip #1: the Kitaan ability to absorb skills is permanent – nothing in the description says that the points of proficiency gained ever go away again. Also you don’t have to drink blood or eat brains to try it, a good kiss or sexual intercourse works too, just not as well. However there is a 1 in 20 chance that when you use this ability you change species to that of the donor. Now here’s where the loophole comes in, it doesn’t say that the ability doesn’t work on other Kitaan! So, if everyone plays a Kitaan and chooses different skills, they can spend the first few days of their adventure swapping spittle and bonking, and soon enough everyone will have the same levels in every skill and be more competent than a beginning character should be.
Munchkin Tip #2: the Ciran ability to make people crap themselves can turn animals into their obedient pets, permanently. I don’t think I need to spell this one out to you.
Munchkin Tip #3: AIs can be programmed with new skills by more or less anyone with computer programming experience. See tip #1. Oh, and yes, Kitaan can absorb skills from AIs, so just fit these characters into the kiss / bonk cycle and that’s even more ways to overpower your PC.
Munchkin Tip #4: Want to play a non-human but don’t want to sacrifice five of your skill-purchasing development points? Play a half-mech. They get the same number of DPs as a human but all the abilities of the base race, and they can mount cyberware.
Munchkin Tip #5: when you’ve finished getting your party of Kitaan boosted up to ludicrous levels of skill proficiency, have the local friendly Kitaanite step in and convert them all. You get spiritual powers on top of everything else, and you get to be the good guys again!
The Magical Lottery
That’s pretty much all there is to characters, apart from one thing that bears mentioning. Certain characters may buy pseudo-magical abilities. However if they do this through experience, the GM is the one who decides what abilities they get and they also have to make a skill roll to obtain them in addition to spending their hard-earned experience points. And they don’t even know what they’ve got or if they’ve got ‘em until the GM tells them that their character has used the new ability accidentally. Dang, do I find that annoying! This is apparently to simulate the way that these abilities develop. They aren’t trained towards like a skill, they just turn up like a wart and you get what you’re given. Easily fixed with house rules, thank goodness!
Resources
Now, I’ve spent a lot of time complaining about various aspects of this game. Truth is, those aspects that I haven’t complained about I found mediocre at best. There’s very little innovation in GWM. There, I said it. However what it does contain is a lot of resources in the shape of weaponry, equipment, vehicles and funky powers for the players to mess around with. The sheer number of them is something I can’t complain about, especially since so many RPGs neglect this area woefully. In fact a lot of this information could prove useful to people who want more resources for other game systems, and it wouldn’t be difficult at all to come up with simple conversion rules to a number of other systems.
Stuff you can Buy
There’s plenty of things in the catalogue that you can purchase, and a lot of it is pretty well-illustrated too. There are a couple of oversights however, for instance I can’t find weapon damage explained anywhere. I assume that ‘DB’ means damage bonus, and is added to the amount of damage you cause when you use the weapon, but I can’t find a sentence that explicitly says this. If this is the case however, then it’s safe to say that two or three hits from most ordnance will take down the average human.
Anyway, back to those weapons. The manual takes the route of describing types of weapon rather than individual makes and manufacturers. On one hand it makes it easy to intuit a lot of different firearms from the same statistics, but this is more useful in a modern-day campaign when you know what is available. Still, the workings of each type of weapon are described and handy tables have been provided to catalogue the important details all in the same place for easy comparison. The tables themselves look like they were created in Microsoft Word and aren’t very pretty, but they do their job which is the important thing. There are plenty of types and grades of weapons too, from the familiar to the exotic. Post-apocalyptic fans will also be happy to know that melee weapons like swords and clubs are also on the menu. A big thumbs-up from me on variety here.
Talking of weapons, there are also several modifications and variant ammunition types that can be applied to some of them. Each of these has its own description and set of rules, and there are quite a few to choose from allowing them to be combined into a bewildering array of options. Rules munchkins will have a whale of a time working out how best to combine weapon, ammo and modification to create the ultimate sidearm. This does mean that, whereas the combat system is pretty light and simple, the weapons themselves can be rather rules-heavy depending on the options you choose.
That said, some of the weapons are way over-powered. Take the Morph Bearing for instance. This is a throwing weapon that returns to its owner once used and has several modes, including a capture mode (which immobilises the target unless they can make a ludicrously difficult strength test) and decapitate mode which kills you stone dead if it hits, and ignores all armour. That’s right, if it hits you, you’re dead no matter what. Ok, this is a Masuri weapon and there’s no way in hell that the players could buy it because of its rarity, but even so it’s a bit ridiculous.
Along with the weaponry there is also a broad selection of armour and miscellaneous equipment too. This really is the strength of the product, and it makes an excellent idea mine even if you do not intend to play the game as it is intended.
Use The Force, Juke!
Let’s look at spooky occult powers next. The game has four basic types of these. Masuri and Nephilim abilities are the more powerful, and are separated into three levels each. Juke mysticism and Cree rituals are less powerful. All of them work from the same resolution mechanics as skills. Pretty much all of these pathways consist of a list of abilities, each of which has one specific use. It’s a fairly standard method of ‘magic’ that does its job, but I’m not particularly excited about it. On the other hand these mystical powers seem to be fairly well balanced, a lot more so than many of the racial abilities in fact.
Masuri abilities are mystic powers derived from the ancient progenitor race the Masuri. It’s all pretty standard stuff – telekinesis, astral travel, that kind of thing – and makes me think even more of Jedis. Especially ‘Redirect Energy’. But hey, Jedis have been around so long that they’ve become a meme themselves now and many sci-fi series have an equivalent so I shouldn’t complain really.
Nephilim abilities are similar, but more hostile in nature. A lot of it is designed to attack or manipulate the target, unlike the Masuri stuff which is mostly about hiding or protecting oneself. There are several abilities that control the actions of others, from making them paranoid to killing the target’s soul and taking control of his body (which isn’t as overpowered as it sounds, since the target can fight back.)
Juke mysticism is heavily based on the old concept of sympathetic magic. Most people would think of it as Voodoo (which is actually a bit unfair on that misunderstood religion, but the comparison with Hollywood voodoo is obvious.) These rites mostly place nasty curses on their enemies like sending them to sleep or causing them terrible pain. They’re a bit impractical to cast during combat since many of them require special ingredients (such as pictures of the target, or bits of their anatomy) and also quite lengthy rituals. However since it appears that they don’t have to be cast in the presence of the target, this isn’t necessarily a huge problem. Some are very worthwhile though. There’s one in here for raising zombies for instance, and those zombies last as long as they aren’t killed. Pretty powerful if you have a lot of fresh corpses to work with.
Finally we have Cree rituals. Like Juke mysticism these tend to be lengthy, but unlike it Cree rituals mostly work by enhancing the statistics of the caster and maybe a few select allies for a while. I can see that these would be extremely useful if you’re expecting combat sometime soon, but given how long it takes to perform them you’d have to be pretty certain of when the attack was coming or you wouldn’t have time to prepare.
Uglies from the Stars
The game also has a comprehensive list of mutations. You can really make your character look like a total freak with these. In actual fact though, these are some of the best thought out and balanced concepts in the book. There’s certainly enough of them to keep things interesting, and the rules by and large make some kind of sense. That said there’s nothing really new here, but at least what they present is useful.
Setting Detail
Much of the game’s setting detail is subsumed in other parts of the book rather than laid out neatly in its own chapter. There’s a two-page history at the beginning of the book, and a sixteen-page chapter near the end describing life in the cloud. Naturally, since the sci-fi series hasn’t aired yet, there is no information at all about the primary characters or the plot of the series. At this point in time I guess that doesn’t matter, and this is labelled as a ‘Preview Edition’ after all. However once the series picks up speed I get the feeling that fans will be clamouring for more about its principle characters. Maybe that’s on the cards for future supplements but for now, at least as far as I can tell, nada.
That isn’t to say there isn’t much setting detail in here. There’s actually quite a lot, it’s just hiding in other chapters. Character creation gives a fair amount of detail on each alien species for example, while the abilities of the ancient and extinct Masuri race have their own section. It takes a bit of digging but the information is there. I only wish it were a bit more personal. No specific characters are mentioned anywhere that I can see, just stereotypes. It’s all fairly standard science-fantasy fair. I can’t help thinking of Jedi whenever I read about the Masuri for example. Magical powers. Mystical leanings. Seem to like swords with strange properties. Name ends in an ‘I’. It’s not unbearably close, and certainly not anything I’d mark the product down on without seeing the series, but I can’t help ‘feeling a disturbance in the force’ nonetheless.
As an overview, I found the setting detail lacking in cohesion. Since it’s spread around so much you have to hunt for it, and because of this you end up with a lot of little bits of information that you have to piece together like a jigsaw. I’m not at all sure how most of it hangs together. When the TV series comes out I expect that won’t be such a problem, but until then I’m rather left scratching my head and wondering what to do with the game.
Bonus CD ROM
I mentioned at the beginning of this review that the book ships with a CD ROM taped to its inside back cover, thankfully with that cool easy tape that comes away without leaving any gunk or ripping paper, if you pull it gently. The review wouldn’t seem complete without going into what’s on that disk, so here we go! I already mentioned the four-minute publicity trailer (which struck me as being cheesy as all gorgonzola hell) so I’ll briefly run through the rest.
Firstly, the disk allegedly contains character generation software. I say ‘allegedly’ because it completely failed to function on my PC. There’s also a Mac version on there, so maybe that will work. Apparently I don’t have the right DLL’s though, which is a major mistake on the part of the programmer really since it’s near impossible to fix without knowing precisely what DLL’s the program is expecting to find on your system. In any case I couldn’t get it to work. If someone can tell me what I need to run it, I’ll happily amend this. However it doesn’t run ‘straight out of the box’ at all.
Secondly there are the character sheets. Remember I said the main book doesn’t have one? This is why. They’re on the disk, about 13 of them. For some reason the makers of the book thought it best to create one for each species, including all of their special abilities and notes. Fair enough says I. A far better idea is that they are presented in Word format with a table that you can fill in with the details you want. Great idea. Unfortunately that’s all they are, a word table with some text in them. No artwork at all. I’m not kidding. They are ugly as sin and it’s only a blessing that there’s so little information on them because they wouldn’t be at all easy to refer to if there was.
Thirdly there are two music files, one which is probably the main theme and one entitled ‘Action’. I say probably the main theme because guess what? I couldn’t get THAT to play either. Do I have a faulty disk or something? Yikes!
Finally we have five short PDF documents that are a bit like bonus supplements. At last here is something that does work and is useful. Nice way for them to do themselves out of cash, since these could have been sold at a later date, but what the heck, why complain? These contain a bunch of resources, some of which claim to be excerpts from future releases in the series. In brief they are:
O A bestiary of alien critters with full stats. Very useful.
O A slightly amateurish but nevertheless useful deck plan of a starship
O An extremely printer-hostile star map of negligible use (it’s almost all black!)
O A selection of stock templates (which are in the book’s appendices anyway.)
O ‘Swords of Power’, a bunch of swords that give the wielder magical powers.
Hold on, swords of power? Are these things important artefacts in the series or something? Bit of an oversight not mentioning these, methinks! I recognise some of the pictures of the swords too. I’ve seen them online in various armoury catalogues. Some of them are definitely Muerto blades. I presume this is because Muerto blades were used in the filming of the series, so it’s probably OK for them to use this art.
In Conclusion
The game’s system is both mediocre and fundamentally flawed. The background material is rather too diffuse and doesn’t make any mention of the principle characters in the series, or indeed any specific characters at all. The book’s main attraction in fact is its wide range of weapons, starships and weird magical abilities which could prove a worthy idea mine for homebrewers.
