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The Galactic Underground books remind me of the Rifter of Palladium games in that it is a mish mash of new articles, optional rules, new races, equipment and other game resources smashed into a sourcebook. However, unlike the Rifter it is not fan-made material, but actual official material from the company.
The Book Itself
Galactic Underground is a 114 paged black and white soft cover. The cover artwork depicts a Kizanti bounty hunter holding a wanted poster and packed with weapons for the hunt. It is a nice piece and actually makes me want to play a Kizanti. Once again the production value of the book has been upped by SSDC from previous editions. Also as I said before the book seems written more like a periodical type sourcebook because the various articles and chapters sometimes feel like they jump around and are not necessarily placed in a flowing theme.
Chapter Breakdown
Chapter One: Race Expansion (Pages 3-27)
After a title page and one page table of contents chapter one begins with three new player races to add to the already nice list from the core. The three new races are:
- Goola-Goola-The Goola-Goola are basically mixing the idea of purple skinned space dwarves with gnomes from Dragonlance. They are tinkerers and love to work and “fix” any and all equipment. They loudly proclaim that they can make an item better than before. The problem is they are occasionally right, the rest of the time it blows up in their or the users’ faces. Most don’t want to take the chance with a Goola-Goola screwing over their favorite weapon even though they seem to be the best repairers and custom item makers in the galaxies. Of course in the case of a problem a Goola-Goola says his work was better than perfect and the user obviously caused an “ID10T” error.
- Kizanti-The Kizanti are very human like in appearance except that they lack external ears, have oval eyes, and all of them seem to have a stronger more muscular body look. They are an aggressive and war-like race that hunting other races is a great past time for. They particularly hate the Phentari and rightly so seeing the Phentari almost wiped out their species. They have the unique ability to innately teleport small distances known as displacing.
- I-Bot-The I-Bot is the Battlelords equivalent to an android. The I-Bot is very reminiscent of Data from Star Trek in the early seasons of The Next Generation. They are somewhat naïve in the ways of sentient races and have trouble understanding the reasons behind the other species motives. Unlike the other races we have seen in the game so far, I-Bots have fixed stats (based on package) and their skills are decided by picking a specific package of skills that it was built with. They have high stats in everything but Intuition and an average Charisma. I-Bots can also pay money to increase their stats to a certain point.
One thing I wish I had mentioned in the core book review, I will here. Each race has, below its racial title heading, a font of what I would assume is their species name written in their species language. I have seen similar things in other games like this and find it a nice touch. It adds to the feel of the race and the chosen fonts or styles are excellent in conveying those feelings.
After the racial write ups are three “Archetypes” or pre-made characters, one for each of the new species. Each of these write ups appear to be completely finished PCs including their equipment. If you use pre-made characters for introducing new players or for conventions these are wonderful tools. I personally feel that character creation is one of the best aspects to teach a newbie, so for me they are handy as GM NPCs.
The chapter finishes with two articles that flesh out more detail into the aspects of two of the more popular species from the core. The first is the Eridani Swordsaints. Most of the article is more fluff on the Eridani and their, what most would say, arrogant ways. The most interesting bit for me is the description of the different levels along what the Eridani call the “Path to Truth”. The Eridani follow a Zen like philosophy, the major difference from Zen being that it is inherently a martial and often aggressive study. As an Eridani gains levels in physical and weapon skills they can move to a new title within this study and earn respect and fame amongst the Eridani ranks, not to mention badges of honor such as decorative jewels for their swords. The section also covers Eridani hairstyles which are displays of the Eridani mission or goals in life and Eridani Death Cards. The Death Cards are an Eridani’s mark and calling card left on their kills and victims.
The second article is a narrative piece from Phelinssarious the Indomitable. It is written like a journal or interview. It helps understand the Phentari by reading the words directly from one. It is a nice piece of fiction and truly helps get the feel of the species. After “Phil’s” words is a list of Phentari’s favorite equipment and why they love to use them.
Chapter Two: Character Background & Features (Pages 29-41)
Chapter two starts with lots of charts and tables for determining various aspects of a character and their background. It should be noted that all these charts include all races from the Battlelords main setting as of the revision by SSDC. This means they cover every species except the ones in Beyond the Rift, which covers its own galaxy and species. These tables cover things such as starting age, age categories and the modifiers for them, skin color and texture and eye features.
The chapter finished with the ever loved I was Just Growing Up, Fickle Finger of Fate and Fortune tables. These tables seem to be different than the core ones. While they may have some of the same results for the most part taking a quick look at both leads me to believe the tables here and the ones in the core are quite a bit different. I would guess it adds more options and the players can choose which they want to roll on. These charts are extremely fun to roll on in character creation; even the bad results are often exciting for players as the possibilities of their background unfold.
Chapter Three: Skills Expansion (Pages 43-63)
This chapter adds some new optional rules for skills. Some of these are rules are on training times and weapon specializations. It also adds a new rule called general certificate. Now instead of having only a primary and secondary occupation, a character may add general certificates for any skill area that they have accumulated a lot of points but are still not a full occupation in. This rule allows PCs to add to their salary for being somewhat competent in other fields than their occupations.
The most useful part of this chapter is a reprinting of the entire skill lists and their descriptions. This comes in handy when you’re tired of your players stealing the core book every few seconds to check out the skill lists.
The Graffiti Wall (Pages 64-65)
The graffiti wall makes its appearance here in this book. As far as I know the graffiti wall picture is in every Battlelords book and each one has completely different graffiti on it. As I said in the previous review, this adds a lot of humor and feeling to the setting and has grown on me as one of the first things I think of when Battlelords is mentioned. A couple of my faves on this one are “All in all, you’re just another smear on the wall” followed by a blood splat and “Have a nice day!” written beside a smiling mushroom cloud.
Chapter Four: Matrix Expansion (Pages 67-91)
This chapter begins with some optional rules on finding a teacher to learn new matrices and the time it takes. These seem like quick and easy rules. After that are new matrices for empaths, energy controllers and healers. Each section not only has the new matrices but also complete matrices lists that also include the core lists. Matrices in Battlelords can be very powerful and are often open to interpretation by the BM and his players. This means that even with a first level matrix a clever player could put it to extremely good use. The empaths get over 50 more matrices, the energy controllers get over 50 more and the healers get around 20 more. After the matrices’ descriptions, is a section describing some of the more clever tricks a matrix controller can do with his abilities. Some of these include using Psychokinesis to flip an enemy’s safety on his weapon and using Warp Metal to allow the party’s Mazian to enter the enemy’s tank.
The section ends with descriptions of Artifacts of Power, or what most gamers know as magic items. Some of the items are not very powerful such as Circlets that add to sensing checks. And then some are truly powerful such as Barter’s Ring giving a 400 point regenerating defense shield. Unfortunately there does not seem to be rules for how to create your own, whether you’re a player or the BM. With as crunchy as Battlelords is with all its subsystems and charts it is very disappointing this area has been neglected.
Chapter Five: Standard of Living (Pages 93-111)
This chapter starts off with several pages of rules and charts to figure a PC’s credit scores and chance of getting loans, I kid you not. This brings back my disappointment in the lack of charts and creation rules for Artifacts. Oh well. The section keeps going even further into a PC’s possible financing in charts and rules for credit cards such as their max credit and number of cards they can have. I guess this section makes a lot of sense when you have the sheer number of items and equipment that Battlelords has. I am not sure I have ever played with players who would want to know this information, but it does fit with the Battlelords mentality.
After dealing with a player’s credit, what else could you need? Well according to this chapter you need to know about the characters home neighborhood and what type of community he lives in. It even goes into what the local people are good for skill wise and whether or not there is a crime presence.
This is the point the book really takes an abrupt turn with an article called “Cheaters Should Be Shot”. This whole chapter is geared towards BMs and the types of cheating they may come across and how they should or could handle it. At first I wanted to feel like this article is insulting my intelligence, but after recovering from the shock of the odd content change in the chapter, I realized that though this chapter may not be for me, how often do I see threads asking questions on the very things this article covers? How many times have I heard in my FLGS someone talking of the trouble they are having with a cheater or problem player? This section actually gives lots of good advice, though it’s hidden behind droves of humor. Actually I believe this section uses the humor for people like me, the ones who don’t need the advice.
And once again we have a content jump. We now have advanced rules for grenades. What in the world this and cheating at role-playing have to do with “Standard of Living” I am not sure. Anyways back to grenades. This section gives more optional rules for making grenade combat more “realistic”, and it seems it does just that. It adds rules for dodging, kicking and throwing back grenades and alters the rules for damage so that a targeted enemy is more likely to take more fragments. It also includes rules for those stupid enough to dive on a grenade.
After the grenade rules, the end of the chapter goes into several small humorous articles. To be honest had the cheaters rules been switched with the grenade rules and started a new chapter called “Humorous Bits” it would have felt right, instead I get a schizophrenic feel from this chapter instead.
One of the humorous articles that I find funny and great is the table for figuring out the outcome of a wrestling match between a Human and a Ram. The table is a percentile table and only a roll of 100 ends in the humans favor. There is also a Phentari recipe for a dish that includes Humans in the ingredients, a list of famous last words and some funny obituaries.
Post Chapter Information (Pages 112-114)
The book ends with a one page index, that I never used, and an appendix describing the rules for a Kizanti’s displacing ability. The displacement skill describes the chance for success the number of times a day they can displace and there range limits. A high level Kizanti could be very scary in combat.
Overall
Overall the Galactic Underground has some useful tidbits in it. The most useful by far are the three new races and the reprinted skill and matrix lists. Battlelords does playable races extremely well and adding more to the setting is awesome to me. The reprinted lists make it so everyone making or upgrading a PC doesn’t have to steal the core book. The rest of the material is useful if you and your players are into those features, but are not a necessity in my opinion like the new races are. The fluff fiction for the Eridani and Phentari was insightful and good reads. For the price you get a good assortment of material though and I would not feel cheated, if you are a hardcore Battlelords fan who loves the humor in the setting there is also lots of fun bits for you.
Ratings
Style is getting another 3 same as the core. The production is much better under SSDC than it was under ODS. The artwork and layout stick to the same as the core. The art has the right feel for the setting, but there is not a lot of variety so if you hate it, you’ll dislike most of it.
Substance is getting a 3. This book does not have near the amount of stuff that the core does, and with its weird flow you often feel a little lost in the direction the book is going. However everything, with the exception of some of the humor, is useful in the right situation. Battlelords is a very crunchy game with rules for everything, and this book keeps that reputation, well except for Artifacts.
Note: My next SSDC review will be for Galactic Underground 2.
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