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Disclaimers
This is my first review.
Shock:Human Contact is sold as a print and PDF bundle. My print copy of the game has not yet arrived, so this review is based upon the PDF version.
I have only read Shock:Human Contact, I have not yet played the game.
I purchased the game from the glyphpress web site; I was not part of the Kickstarter project that funded the creation of Shock:Human Contact.
Review
Shock:Human Contact is a science fiction RPG set in the near future of earth. As the title of the game implies, this story game is about first contact with humans in other star systems. The game uses hard science fiction conventions in the setting, while making an exception for FTL travel that makes this sort of game feasible. While the background material is hard science fiction, the RPG elements are focused on social science fiction or the many possible interactions of the 'crew' and the 'aliens'.
The product is made up of 154 pages of material with a fair amount of white space, but little wasted. I say that because the author cleverly uses the page count to give you a sense of scale of the solar system. Illustrations also frequently spillover into this white space. While not explicitly stated, I get the impression that the author intended that some of the white space be used by book owners to make notes in the margins.
The major chapters in the book are: Opal; Introduction to the Academy; Building a Contactor; The Lives of Academics; Creating *Tagonists; Application of Academic Law, Aggressive Techniques, and Technologies to Conflict; Playing a Scene; The Structure and Population of a Solar System; Populating a Colony; Techniques for Making First Contact; First Contact: Chapter 3; Getting Ready for the Next Chapter; Departing Kotaht; How to End a Story; Procedure Recap; Kefo-Rn, the Language of the Academy; Tools for Language Creation; Mediography; Thanks; Differences from Shock:SSF, and Sheets.
The takeaway from this chapter list is that there is quite a bit of setting material in the book, the game rules and setting material is interspersed, and there is a play example provided. The chapter names should also give you a feel for the setting – earth is sending out groups of 100 scholars to explore the universe (dare I quip and say a 'community college'). The society in the target system is a 'colony', which references another setting assumption about a prior wave of human colonization taking place in some forgotten past.
This RPG revolves around several 'shocks' or themes that the player characters (called *Tagonists) react to and care about. The shocks are played out in a sequence that generate a logical story arc for your play group. The first shock is dealing with the life in the contact ship since it takes five years to arrive at the colony. The second activity is to design the colony that is the target of the contact; the planet itself, its human inhabitants, the society of the inhabitants, and their language. The third activity is to deal with first contact, whether that be cautiously using a three person envoy team or arriving with the entire 100 person contactor. These later two phases are really exploring how the society of the contactor and the colony will be impacted by this contact. The contactor is expected to report back to Earth every ten years, so there is also a built-in mechanism for sending a follow-up rescue mission or starting off your game as a follow-up to first contact.
Mechanically, the game uses a pool of d4/d10 as a resolution mechanism. The system uses the highest and lowest values rolled for comparisons to determine outcomes. Using a contactor (entire ship) vote as an example, the highest d4 is subtracted from the highest d10 to determine the result. While the contactor vote was clear to me, the interactions between *Tagonists was not. The explanation of the mechanics is the weakest part of this game and I would have liked to see more examples. The first thing I did when I finished reading the book was to go to the web site and look for some actual play examples and discussions on the mechanics, unfortunately some of this seems to be in locked areas that were open to the Kickstarter patrons when the game was being designed.
For those of you who are familiar with the original Shock game, Shock:Human Contact uses a similar mechanism where your antagonist is played by someone sitting adjacent to your seat position at the table, with the rest of the table playing supplemental characters or acting as 'the audience'. While it is not explicitly stated in the rules, in actual play I would expect this to result in some shifting of seats; after all the person who happens to be sitting next to me might not be all that interested in addressing the shock I'm taking up or interacting with the protagonist that I've created. The audience does have a part to play even if they don't have one of the characters, as they can contribute dice to the resolution pool. I also suspect that the audience should be throwing out suggestions on fun ways that the *Tagonists can interact to reach their terminating conditions or goals.
As a final note, the PDF also came with an overview pamphlet that can be printed and freely distributed within your play group. This is an eight page introduction to the setting; one of those pages is dedicated to building *Tagonists. Pre-printed multi-packs of this overview will be available for sale at the glyphpress web site.
Nitpick: Inter-system distances in the book are presented in Mm (megameters). When I first encountered this in the text, I went to Wikipedia to confirm that I was remembering the SI prefix correctly. Other web references suggested that using kilometers would have been more appropriate. I also think that the use of Astronomical Units (AU) would have been appropriate in some places in the text.
