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I’ve been waiting since last summer for someone to post a playtest review of this setting, but since no one’s spoken up yet, I’m stepping in with this capsule. Slipstream hits the Savage Worlds sweet spot dead center—pulpy action-adventure, in this case Flash Gordon-style. In a pocket universe accessible only through a black hole, a thousand alien races suffer under the depredations of the self-appointed Queen Anathraxa and her countless minions. A small band of heroes is drawn into the resistance against this galactic tyrant—can these brave souls end her reign of terror?
True to Pinnacle’s Plot Point formula, Slipstream provides a ready-made campaign sequence, along with a wide variety of less-detailed adventure kernels, in addition to the setting rules and description. Setting rules make only minor departures from the Savage Worlds core system (the current Explorer’s Edition, in this case).
Warning: the following review presumes familiarity with the Savage Worlds system. For further reference, check out one of the RPGNet reviews. (I'd provide a link, but I don't trust my very limited HTML skills not to screw it up.)
Premise
Slipstream is a pocket universe where most of the laws of physics follow the conventions of Saturday-morning space-ranger serials. One enters through a black hole—any black hole, it seems, will do. Entire planets tend to break up during the passage, but their remaining fragments can support life—and each one, no matter how small, has Earth gravity and atmosphere. Almost all races breathe the same air that Earthlings do. There are no stars—they couldn’t fit through the black holes, I suppose—but ambient radiation supplies a pale, full-moon light. A spiraling wave of graviton energy pushes rocketships and space debris toward the center of the universe, but leaves the planetary fragments hanging in space. A thin but breathable atmosphere fills the space between fragments.
Slipstream is nakedly, proudly derivative of its science-fiction serial forebears. Wade-Williams insists on using the terms “rocketship” and “ray gun” in preference to more modern-sounding alternatives. Computers run on ticker-tape and punch cards. Alien races with names like “Bird Men” and “Lion Men” abound, alongside crystalline “Gemopians,” desert-dwelling “Aridians,” and so forth. Their homeworlds invariably have but one type of terrain and climate each. Good guys are good, bad guys are bad. If this is starting to seem unbearably hokey to you, go play Traveller instead.
All of Slipstream’s inhabitants are descended from involuntary immigrants whose planets or ships were sucked in through black holes all over the universe—except for those who themselves are first-generation involuntary immigrants. Many of these species arrived on fragments of their home planets; others came through in rocketships of various types and sizes. With rocketship technology, trade and travel among the various Fragments is extensive. It has its hazards, including space pirates and the occasional hostile primitive race, but the greatest menace to life, limb, and liberty in the Slipstream universe is a tyrant named Queen Anathraxa, whose rocket fleet and armies of minions extort, oppress, and enslave everywhere they go. Anathraxa takes tribute in valuable goods and slave males, destroys or steals technology she considers threatening, and ruthlessly suppresses psionics wherever she finds them. Of course, she provides the primary motor for the campaign’s plot.
Player Characters
Character creation will be familiar enough to those who’ve done it in other SW settings. Wade-Williams provides nine detailed races, including Earthlings. This might be enough for many players, but he also includes 37 other playable races in stat-capsule form (short description, racial features in game terms), as well as a mechanic to allow players to create their own races. However, the more fully fleshed races tend to have a lot of racial features - generally five or six, with at least two Hindrances. One race (Robot Men) has nine features, including one that prohibits them from taking certain Hindrances. These features can make it harder to personalize your character, as the racial Hindrances tend to limit your choice of individual Hindrances.
It’s a sound principle of SW setting design that setting rules should add as many possible Hindrances as the creator can reasonably justify; they’re not just point generators--they arguably do more to individualize player characters than any other feature of the rules. Slipstream does an okay job of this, with eight new hindrances--although one of these (Exotic Atmosphere Breather) basically requires a player to create a new race in order to take it. I particularly like I’m With Him, which forces the PC to start out as a noncombatant sidekick and pick up combat skills during the course of the campaign. (Yes, it’s a Major Hindrance.)
Wade-Williams has also added some nifty general-purpose Edges, such as “Improvisational Fighter” (negating the penalty for improvised weapons) and “Bring ‘Em On” (reducing opponents’ gang-up bonuses), in addition to more settting-specific ones such as “Trademark Rocketship” or “One of a Kind.” (This last gives your character a +2 Charisma bonus for being the only member of his/her/its species in Slipstream.) Among Arcane Background Edges, only Weird Science and Psionics are available, and Psionics comes with social baggage thanks to Anathraxa. Those who do brave the evil queen’s wrath, however, will find new powers available, such as Mind Probe, Block (defense against psionic intrusions), and Mind Riding (what it sounds like).
Skills are almost completely unchanged from the core rules. The only new feature makes the Weird Science skill available to characters without the Weird Science Arcane Background, permitting them to repair (but not create) Weird Science devices.
To the usual shopping-and-swapping for Edges, Skills, and Hindrances, Slipstream has added a wrinkle that might prove interesting (and is certainly suggestive of Wade-Williams’s experiences as an SW GM). If a player can allocate her character’s initial four points of Hindrances without taking Heroic as one of them, she may then give her character the Heroic Hindrance as payment for an extra Edge--one which may have higher experience requirements than the character would ordinarily qualify for.
Setting Rules
This type of setting shouldn’t require many departures from the basic SW system to work, and indeed Wade-Williams keeps them to a minimum. Most of these are designed to enhance the atmosphere. He retools the Wound Table to make combat less lethal for Wild Cards—a change not everyone will like, but one which undoubtedly suits the concept. He adds some nuance to the Wild Card/Extra hierarchy with Henchmen (who get a Wild Die but not a Wound Track) and Hordes (Extras who drop at the first blow, without the opportunity to be Shaken first). I’m not too certain about the value of these innovations, especially Henchmen, but they’re easily ignored by GMs who don’t want to use them. (Wade-Williams has irritatingly spelled “Hordes” as “Hoards,” but that’s a nitpick about copyediting rather than a criticism of the rule.) He also provides a number of useful GM tricks for nudging the story along—suggestions more than rules, really.
A rocket-obsessed setting needs rules for rocketship piloting and combat,and here Wade-Williams has also merely tweaked what SW already provides. Ships have multiple systems, requiring either multiple crew members or pilots with Edges that allow them to double or triple up. Ship combat combines elements of SW’s aerial and maritime rules, allowing for boarding actions in addition to dogfighting and supplying new material for maneuvering, loss of control, and critical hits—all to reflect the zero-G nature of rocketship combat. Like most SW combat, it remains simple and flexible, and although I haven’t test-driven it yet I don’t see any reason that it shouldn’t work as well as ordinary SW vehicle combat. One lapse is the lack of floor plans for the various types of ships, considering how frequently they might come in handy—one plan is provided, but it’s too small for convenient use, and it only represents one of a fairly wide variety of rockets that might be involved in an action. [Free downloads from Pinnacle provides two sets of plans, one of which duplicates the one depicted in the rules as “War Rocket Achilles,” this time as a generic rocketship; the other is an updated plan for the Achilles. I would still have liked to see more, even if they had been simple black-and-white grid plans.]
Plot Points and Beyond: The Slipstream Campaign
The Plot Point and fill-in adventures follow a familiar pattern: one quest leads to another, building gradually up to a climactic confrontation with Anathraxa herself. [The lack of originality shouldn’t be a problem in play; note previous observation re “nakedly, proudly derivative” and just bask in it.] The adventures take place across the Slipstream universe and cover a wide variety of environments and encounters—combat, roleplaying, and skill challenges are all well represented. In addition, Wade-Williams has given some thought to carrying on a Slipstream campaign beyond the last Plot Point, giving GMs tools and ideas for further adventures and campaigns. Extending the use life of a thirty-five dollar game supplement—always a plus.
Production Values
At first glance, Slipstream is a good-looking book: Clean, Deco-influenced design, full-color illustrations, easily readable two-column format. The art ranges from so-so to gorgeous, topped by Gil Formosa’s spectacular splash page introducing the GM’s section. The weaker illustrations are a little too cartoony (and not in a cool, Alex Raymond kind of way, either). A few typos and misspellings seem to have eluded the copyediting process; these are annoying, of course, but not so common as to ruin the book.
Summing it up
It’s hard to separate style from substance here: so much of the substance is devoted to sustaining a particular style. Overall, it does a good job of evoking the feel of its source material, and I admire Wade-Williams’s willingness to embrace the nonsense rather than try to fix it or spoof it. Character generation suffers a bit from feature overload in some cases, but provides some fun new options in exchange. Rule patches on the basic SW system are few and for the most part enhance the intended feel of the setting. The campaign material is derivative but fun, with tools and room to build upon what Pinnacle provides. Production shows a few cracks in art and copyediting, but is solid overall. Four out of five on both counts.
