The guys over at Rogue Games have crafted a sweet space rpg using their 12º System. (The authors are Jim Maliszewski and Rich Iorio II, who frequent these forums, by the way.)

Ok, those of you who follow this Critical Kobold's work know that I loves me some sci-fi. Lately I've been in the mood for a light, quick, simple system. Thousand Suns has that covered.

I'm tellin' you right off the bat, Thousand Suns rocks out. This game is more fun than a tribble in your jammies. It's been a long time since I've read a rule book that made me desperately want to start playing the game before I've even finished reading it. Thousand Suns made me want to do just that.

(Um, start playing, I mean. Not put a tribble in my pajamas. Just so we're clear.)

Thousand Suns prompts you to adventure in an "Imperial" sci fi setting. The idea is that mankind has spread throughout the galaxy, formed some sort of empire or federation or consortium or big-ass republic. Most likely this interstellar empire has now begun to crumble, or at least stagnate. Of course, alien races have been encountered, wars have been fought, star systems colonized and then forgotten about; all the mainstays of classic star faring tales. While the rules lend themselves generically to any background, the ambience and tone of the game reflect this Imperial milieu for your stories. The idea is for your PCs to have a humongous chunk of space to boldly go mucking about in.

"1kS" characters have five standard abilities:

• Body – How powerful, macho, tough, and resilient you are.
• Dexterity – How… um… dexterous you are. Also, how fast you act in combat.
• Perception - Your awareness, intuition, and savvy, and used as a rough intelligence stat.
• Presence – Your charisma, wit, and charm. Your Rico Suave factor.
• Will – How determined and resolute you are. Useful for psionics, if your game allows that voodoo.

Each ability is rated from 1 to 12. (An ability score of 7 is average for a human.) You start with 25 points to divvy up as you'd like amongst your abilities. You're warned that ability scores are not likely to change during the course of a game, so choose your stats wisely, young Jedi. See, you'll pick skills next, and skill scores are based on one of your abilities. So for example, if you plan on choosing lots of science-y skills for your PC, make sure you've got a decent Perception score, since that's what skills requiring brains will be based on.

Now, you're also sporting two other traits, kinda' like sub-abilities. Vitality is your hit points. Your score will be determined using your Body and Will scores. This'll tell you how much bashing, lasering, blasting, smacking, and explosive decompression you can take before you croak.

Resolve is a totally cool mechanic in 1kS. Determined using your Perception and Will scores, this is a social stat, serving the same role that Vitality serves in combat. In order to sway someone to your view or get someone to do something for you, you may need to overcome their Resolve. You do this by making "attacks" against their Resolve ability score using non-lethal skills, such as diplomacy, bureaucracy, empathy, or intimidation. Successful skill uses eat away an opponent's Resolve (much like the fully automatic laser pulse rifle would eat away at their Vitality, only with less messy clean-up!) This way, your character sways them from a "neutral" view of your PC towards a "friendly" view, for instance. This is the area of expertise of the con man or intergalactic huckster.

Now that your stats are set, you need some background to help determine your skills. First, you choose a homeworld. Now, 1kS is a generic rpg toolkit, meaning there are very few pre-fab worlds statted out in the book. But there *is* a simple system of Homeworld Packages, you lucky space dogs! You can really invent your own home planet, heck, even your own star system, if the GM gives you the thumbs-up.

You just decide whether your PC comes from one of the following:

• Core world. The oldest, most advanced/ sophisticated/ populated planets, in the center of known space.
• Civilized world. Not quite the focus of interstellar society as the core planets, these worlds are still well populated and culturally advanced.
• The Marches. These are planets on the fringes of known space; the most diverse of the Imperial societies, and the most independent-minded. They tend to be of lower tech and rugged, self-reliant culture.
• Wildspace. These include non-human worlds, lost colonies, or primitive societies way the hell far away from the Core worlds. Wildspace worlds can be highly advanced; 'wild' really just means they're outside commonly known Imperial space, not necessarily uncivilized.

Your choice of homeworld will automatically give you certain skills at specific ranks, based on the homeworld's predominant civilization. For example, a PC from a low-population Marches planet receives Survival 2 and Technical Sciences 1, among other talents, because those would be appropriate for that planet.

The biggest determining factor for skills, though, is your Career Package. Starting PCs get to choose three "stages" of careers that they've had in their lifetime. (I'll explain in a minute.) The careers are common intergalactic space jobs, such as soldier, diplomat, trader, barbarian, doctor, athlete, pirate, or tribble.

(Ok, I made that last one up.)

Your career gives you a boatload of skills, naturally geared towards your job tasks. Marines may have tactics and weapons skills, whereas aristocrats will have bureaucracy and socializing talents.

If your homeworld and your career packages double up on skills, you get to add those skill ranks together. Por ejemplo, if your civilized homeworld gave you Science skill at 2, and your profession as a scout gives you Science at 2, you now have Science at level 4.

OK, lemme explain the 'three stages' of careers I mentioned earlier. You get to choose occupations you've had during three periods of your job history. For each stage, you can choose a different career if you want. So it's possible to be a criminal/ trader/ rebel, for instance, in which case you'd get all the skills for all three of those careers. You'd be 'novice' level at all three though, since you jumped around to so many careers instead of sticking with one. To focus your PC's talents more tightly, you could choose to stay with one job for two or for all three legs of your job history, therefore getting 'veteran' status, with three levels of, say, a civil servant career under your belt. The benefit of fewer careers is that you get higher ranks in the skills geared towards that one profession. (So, a PC with three levels of soldiering will have a higher skill rank in firing blasters than a PC with only two levels of soldier, and one level of athlete.)

If you have a hankerin' to play an alien PC, there are a few races provided in the book, with full descriptions of their physical and cultural traits. You can choose to either be very alien, as in, "What the heck is that ?!" or you can choose to be one of several sub-races of human. Your race will affect your abilities and skills a tad, but it'll be your cultural and philosophical backgrounds that'll make for some interesting social interactions with other species.

Almost done with char-gen. You just need to pick some Hooks. Hooks are bits of background or personality info about your character. You start with five hooks, which you get to invent yourself. These can be almost anything, like "absent minded", "wanted man in five systems", "good in bed", "curious", etc. These help flesh out your PC, but they also serve to let you use Action Points.

During the game, if you can find a way to apply one (or more) of your hooks to the situation at hand, you can spend an Action Point to either reroll any dice toss, or subtract from the difficulty level of any one task check, as long as you convince your GM it's reasonable. (So if you chose "eagle-eyed" as a hook for your bounty hunter, you could reroll a botched attempt to track your quarry through a busy starport terminal by rationalizing that your eagley-eyed gaze caught sight of the fleeing targets as they ducked into a doorway.) You have a finite number of hooks per game session, but you can use the same one more than once if you want.

If you bring a *negative* hook into play, you can gain extra Action Points for the game session. If you wanted to have the hook "Owes lots of money to Big Squishy, the criminal lord of Quadrant 43", the GM could occasionally have Big Squishy's bounty hunters show up to try to capture your PC. Each adventure that they showed up in, you'd gain an extra Action Point as a reward for the plot complication.

There's a section on psionic powers, if you want them in your campaign. These can be played as actual mind powers, or mutant powers, or the Force, or even super-duper high tech alien gizmo effects. Whatever crackles your Krispies, the rules are there to use as you will. They include a list of psionic powers, none of which should surprise anyone: combat sense, healing, telepathy, telekinesis, mind probe, etc. Rules for psionic combat are provided, but follow pretty much the same pattern as physical combat (which I'm getting to, shortly, but first I gotta explain the game's resolution mechanics).

The mechanics for 1kS are easy as sneezing. You add together your relevant attribute score and your skill rank to get a target number, then use 2d12 to try to roll under your target number.

Dudes, that's it.

So if my scientist has a Perception score of 5, and I use my "observe" skill which has a rank of 6 (and is based on Perception), then my target number is "11". I need to roll eleven or less on a pair of twelve-siders to succeed in observing something.

Naturally, the gamemaster will add modifiers on as she sees fit. A Simple task such as downloading a commercial holovid game to your home computer may earn you a +4 to the target number, while something Routine such as reprogramming the security access code on your hovercar may only earn you a +1 bonus. A Challenging task, such as shaving your pet tribble, imposes a -3 penalty, while an Impossible task such as guiding your careening, flaming shuttle into spacedock with no flight controls and a blown-out navigation computer garners you a -4 penalty.

Now, all task resolution is handled that way, including combat. Mostly, *how much* you fail or succeed in a roll doesn't matter, except in cases of ass-kicking. When in combat, every point you beat the target number by (known as your degree of success) increases your damage.

Weapons have a static damage value. For ranged weapons, you multiply your degree of success by this damage value to see how much butt-whoopin' you just delivered to your opponent. A laser pistol, f'rinstance, has a damage value of "4". If my Shoot skill is a 14, and I roll and get a nine, then my degree of success is five points (five below the 14 that I needed to roll). I multiply the pistol damage of 4 by my success of five, and so my laser does 20 points of damage to his cylon butt! An average PC is going to have perhaps 30-40 or so Vitality points, so a solid hit from a high caliber weapon can put a hurtin' on you fast.

I suggest you avoid getting shot. Especially by someone who's good at shooting. Trust me on this one.

Weapons range from the archaic 9mm revolver and 18mm shotguns to the more future-ific blasters, sonic grenades, and pulse rifles. For a sci-fi game, the arms list isn't heavy on super advanced high tech instruments of death; most of the entries are slug throwers and grenades, honestly. Those of you looking for lightsabers and tac nukes will have to design them yourselves.

Characters reduced to zero Vitality will die in a matter of minutes without medical attention. Damage in general heals at a few points a day. If things go really poorly for your PCs wellbeing, there's a rather extensive section of cybernetic limbs and other organs, with explanations of the benefits and drawbacks to each.

A fair selection of space gear is offered to round out your PC: computers, personal force fields, exploration gear, communication rigs, drugs, sensors, survival equipment, disguise kits… all the necessary doodads to get your intergalactic do-gooder out there doing good. The game is simple enough to promote easy importation of gear from other games, too. There's no reason some technological widget from D20 Space, Saga Star Wars, Traveller, or Transhuman Space can't easily be used with your Suns campaign with about three seconds of fiddling. Heck, I noticed a half dozen items lifted almost directly from Star Frontiers in the book.

Vehicles described include hovercraft, ground cars, tanks, gyrocopters, and auto-taxis. It's a nice collection with just about any sort of transport your hero would need to get his hands on, except animals. No horses or dinosaurs or other critters for you to use as mounts. You'll have tom come up with some stats for beasts of burden yourself.

Starship types are given good coverage, with over a dozen examples from fighters to attack cruisers with which your PCs can launch themselves across the vastness of space. Interstellar vessels are equipped with the mysterious "D-drive", the FTL technology that lets PCs jet from star system to star system within a few weeks. Starships and spaaaaace combat are treated rather perfunctorily though. Ships are more or less just like any other piece of equipment. There are no lists of ship gadgets other than weaponry. That means there's no fiddling with advanced sensor types, comm gear, upgraded armor components, different engine styles… no rules for modifying ships at all really. They're very much just for tootling around the universe in, and what few stats they have are all geared towards fighting. Those of you who wish to make your starships more personalized parts of the game, such as Han Solo's Millenium Falcon, simply wont have much to work with, sorry. (There's a passage in the book explaining that in Imperial SF, all technology is basically a prop, something for the PCs to use when convenient. This explains the shortage of advanced weapons and starship details in the game.)

The final chapters contain detailed sections on creating worlds and alien races. A few simple charts allow you to design planets in moments, including terrain type, climate, gravity, atmosphere, government and tech levels. More lists help round out your alien races with cool traits, such as low-light vision, pheromone repulsion, acidic saliva, lethargy, or perhaps a prehensile tail. (Sounds cute, eh?)

The idea of the Travelers, a staple of many sci-fi backgrounds, is included as an option for your game. The Travelers were a race (or races) of ancient advanced aliens who blundered about the cosmos building civilizations and seeding planets with new species and whatnot. They all died out or left eons ago, and some of their relics, artifacts, tech, and other goodies can be found littered about on thousands of worlds. This gives you an excuse to invent all sorts of wacky beings for the PCs to encounter, and introduce funky gizmos that no one knows exactly how to use. Dig it.

The authors have designed one whole small example star system and a few xenoforms for you to play with, and to serve as ideas for your own creations. Plop these into your game, or use the as springboards for your own tweaks.

The XP section is brief but practical. PCs should expect to earn only about 2-3 experience points for each session, if they achieve their goals. Role playing well may get you an extra point. XP in 1kS is spent to boost your skills up in rank, or to purchase new skills. You could also buy more Action Points, as long as you choose a new hook to go with each Action Point you buy.

So, let's sum up all this spacey goodness…

The GOOD

I said it in the first paragraph of this review. This is a simple game, but its potential made me excited to play before I'd finished reading even the first few chapters. I've been jonesing to run fast-paced, action adventure games in the nature of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Ice Pirates, or even Firefly, and I have no doubt that Thousand Suns can support any of those ideas. 1kS is a clean, complete, yet uncomplicated system that can emulate any movie or book you've been dying to make into a game session for your players, with very little effort.

The NEUTRAL

The core book does not have an extensive campaign background ready to use by players. Now, I couldn't care less, because I prefer to design my universe myself, but if you're a GM with little time or desire to create your own planets, systems, empires, etc., then you may be less than thrilled with this. Thousand Suns is, as the authors plainly state, a toolkit, not a pre-fab setting. That said, the authors have included a "metagame" timeline and sketchy background for you to use if you'd like. The material covers the 'official' 1kS background that future supplements in the game line will use as their setting. It's certainly a good start for those of you who don't want to do it all yourself.

In a similar vein, while there's an impressive array of starship stats to use for your game, there are no rules for creating your own. I'm listing this observation under the Neutral section instead of the Evil section only because the authors have promised expanded starship lists and a design system in the forthcoming book, Fighting Ships of the Thousand Suns. I've been burned before with designers promising books that never appear, but this game is just so damn sweet that I'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt and optimistically wait impatiently for that book to appear.

On a personal note, I'm not thrilled with any aliens presented in this book. They're all a bit goofy. The description of one race sounds like walking palm trees, another one like hostile, bloated starfish, and the third like a giant shrimp. It's like the designers came up with these ideas while sitting in a Caribbean-themed restaurant someplace, after a few margaritas. There are also some mutated humans, treated as different races, but I don't find that they do anything for me either. So, the aliens are there if you want to use them, but I'll be inventing my own, thanks.

The EVIL

Ok, the core book has very little to say about robots. In a sci-fi game.

Now, the justification is that robots aren't a popular staple of Imperial sci-fi literature. That genre is mostly about mankind's place in a futuristic world, and not so much about Terminator meets Robocop. I can respect the loyalty to the source inspiration, but they could have thrown us robophiliacs a larger bone than they did. What we get is two (2) examples of robots that –do- exist, and a note that if players really want to create a robot PC, they should just design a PC as normal and say he's a robot.

In the metasetting, there's mention of Von Neumann's War, where AI units and their robot soldiers attempted to destroy their creator human race ("Exterminate! Exterminaaaaate!"), and so humans are understandably jumpy about playing with robots now. While I'm still not thrilled with the anti-robot facets of the core rules, this does at least set up a gnarly Battlestar Gallactica vibe, eh?

Lastly, the naming conventions used by the authors sometimes go squirrely. In their otherwise standard English text, suddenly a jarringly bizarre term is thrown in for no apparent reason. For example, ten types of armor are listed. Most have standard spelling: flight suit, heavy combat armor, survival suit, etc. Then, in the middle, is Ŝteleco armor. Yeah. With a "Ŝ". I don't even know how the hell to say that. What's wrong with a regular "S"? I suppose they're trying to be interesting or add some zing or something, but it's just odd and slightly distracting.

And it's not just spelling; sometimes they throw in an entire word that has no meaning on its own, like the "cirkuo". This is a type of hover car. Now, the rest of the list includes entries for hoverbikes, hovercars, hovertrucks, hovertanks, even a hoverbus. So where the hell did "cirkuo" come from?! Can't we just call it a hoverboat, since it basically just goes on water? Did we need one lone term for this particular hover vehicle? That's just weird, man. And there are several instances of other goofy-for-no-reason words sprinkled throughout the book as well. Like the "kodumulo", which is a computer device containing a single program. Isn't there a more sensical name we coulda' called this thing that actually gives you some vague idea of what it is? I know the silly names don't hurt anything, but again, it's just distracting. Maybe if there were actually a lot more of them, but there's just a random few. Just enough to make their inclusion puzzling.

All in all, I can't say enough good stuff about this game. Give it a look-see and I think you'll be impressed. Just the right amount of mechanics, a dash of setting flavor, and immensely intriguing campaign possibilities.

Now, get moving, boy! There's a whole empire out there waiting to be discovered! Evil overlords don't overthrow themselves, you know! Find yourself a starship, and go to meet your destiny!!

And take this talking palm tree with you. It keeps leaving its kodumulo in my cirkuo.