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Premise
Ashen Stars is a new sci-fi RPG from Pelgrane Press, focusing on space opera procedural mysteries, using the GUMSHOE system. The PCs are ‘Lasers’ - Licensed Autonomous Zone Effectuators, who are essentially freelance police in a space frontier (‘the Bleed’) after a big war that ended seven years ago. The Federation-analogue, the Combine, haven’t pulled themselves together after the War yet, and hence rely on the Lasers to keep peace in the sector and to investigate crimes and distress signals. It’s a bit like Traveller or Serenity (in that you have a PC-owned ship with a PC crew) but rather than flying from port to port trading, the focus is picking up investigation contracts and building up your precious reputation score rather than your wealth.I’m a big fan of Trail of Cthulhu (the ancestor-RPG to Ashen Stars) and wondered how on Earth you’d use the system for a space opera setting. Then, I realised as I read through Ashen Stars that every episode of Star Trek was a procedural mystery:
- Something weird is happening on the Enterprise/planet the crew has landed on.
- Kirk/Picard and crew investigate.
- Confrontation! Or plot-twist! The holodeck is broken (what a surprise!) The god-like alien is really a naughty-child.
- The mystery is resolved.
- The Enterprise flies on.
It’s also covered in the GM section of Ashen Stars, which covers on how to build these episodes, how to add a twist, and how to build in personal character arcs across the episodes, such as you’d see on Battlestar Galactica. I was surprised at how pragmatic the GM advice and the game design is; Robin D. Laws has seriously though about how people actually play genre RPGs and has made the game practical and accessible.
System Overview
The GUMSHOE system is a commendable attempt to nail out a framework for both running and playing investigative games. It's quite structured, but this structure provides a clearly defined set of parameters for how an investigation-based game can be run. The basic idea behind the GUMSHOE system is that you never roll for investigative skills. You get the information as long as you say that you’re using that skill in a particular scene. You can also spend points to get more information out of a scene. This works quite well in play, having run Trail of Cthulhu a number of times. The game flows smoothly from scene to scene and players aren’t left scrabbling around if they miss a core clue. They still have to interpret the clues and put the mystery together.
There is dice rolling involved in the General skills, such as for fighting things or driving. You spend points from your appropriate skill pool, roll 1d6 and try to beat the GM’s hidden target number. This is a drama-based abstraction; if you’re a boxer who’s run out of Scuffling points, this represents you being tired and worn out, rather than suddenly forgetting how to box. If you spend points from one of your investigative pools (without rolling) to unlock extra information or get the equivalent of a critical success, this just means you don’t get spotlight time any more with that skill, rather than forgetting everything you know about Xenoculture (at least until you rest and your pools refresh).
This framework also assists with the problem of writing SF mysteries, “And the great space detective waved his scanner, which analysed the crime scene and determined that the Senator was murdered by his butler...” Essentially, technology may become magic solution or a crutch in SF mysteries, rather than piecing together clues and procedural investigation. The skills framework of Ashen Stars prevents that – while information derived from the various clues may be highly advanced; the PCs still need to find the information and reconstruct the mystery to resolve their case. As the great Asimov once said, “Mystery writers don't commit murders and fantasy writers don't talk to rabbits, so why should a science fiction writer have to fly?”
Character Creation
PCs start off by selecting a species, human or alien, which I shall blatantly lift from my PDF for review purposes:
- The eerily beautiful, nature-loving, emotion-fearing balla.
- The cybes, former humans radically altered by cybernetic and genetic science.
- The durugh, hunched, furtive ex-enemies of the Combine who can momentarily phase through solid matter.
- The humans, adaptable, resourceful, and numerous. They comprise the majority of a typical Laser crew.
- The kch-thk, warrior locust people who migrate to new bodies when their old ones are destroyed.
- The armadillo-like tavak, followers of a serene warrior ethic.
- The vas mal, former near-omnisicent energy beings devolved by disaster into misshapen humanoid form.
I particularly liked the vas mal, being a variant of Star Trek's Qs, now stuck in mortal form until they get their stuff together again.
Next, the PCs spend points to generate their characters. The number of PCs in the group determines how many investigative points the group gets, in the interests of ‘niche protection’ – ensuring that the team is required to do different things. There’s also further niche protection involved when each PC selects both a field and ship role, which gives them minimum requirements of where to spend their skill points to cover the roles. In space, the ship roles are: Communications, Pilot, Strategic Coordinator, Systems, Weapons. On the field missions, the roles are: Cultural, Operations, Survey, Security, Technical. There’s also a medical role which is applicable to both space and field operations.
Next, PCs choose a drive, which explains why they are out adventuring, rather than at home reading a book. They then choose a ship as a group, and lastly, various gadget and cybernetic enhancements (which are done by spending points, rather than having a cost system and buying everything that way. The wealth system is rather abstract.)
PCs also specify an ‘arc’, which is the direction they want their character to go in throughout throughout the series. This is basically a goal and some subplot ideas to give the GM an idea on where to take the character throughout the series of adventures. This supports the TV, episodic space opera vibe that Ashen Stars gives off quite heavily.
Some of the species get psychic powers, which are treated the same as various investigative or general skills.
Space Combat
One caveat here - I’ve read through the space combat system but haven’t playtested it yet. The thing that stood out was that each of the ship roles gets something to do during each phase. It’s rather abstract and designed for one-on-one ship combat. The ships act in various phases, trying accumulate enough points to determine the combat’s resolution. For example, to destroy an enemy ship is 21 points, while to escape a ship is only 6.
Background
The default setting for Ashen Stars has lots of interesting things about it. It’s designed to be familiar and accessible, which means that everyone will find shades of their favourite TV episodes in there somewhere. Essentially, seven years ago the war with the Mohilar ended that devastated the Combine and obliterated entire species. The Mohilar threat has ended. Only no one can remember who or what they were. Even records are affected by this; it’s like a massive psychic or reality nuke went off. To top this off, the Vas Kra went from being Q-like aliens to being trapped in stunted bodies as the Vas Mal, desperately searching how to regain their cosmic state once more. That’s the big mystery of the setting, and the book states that it’s up to GM’s to play with it and explore. It does provide a few, short ideas to resolve this; I would have liked a more detailed write-up on this, similar to how Trail of Cthulhu provides alternate interpretation of the mythos creatures.The Bleed, the frontier space, is now a lawless front with the Combine forced to rely on Lasers (PC law enforcers) to resolve disputes and keep the peace. There’s a bunch of various religious (“nufaiths”) tied to different aspects of technology and political tensions in the wake of the Combine’s retreat from the Bleed. Ossa One, the Combine’s space station outpost, monitors for distress signals and broadcasts them out to the various Laser crews, who bid on the contracts they get. The most important part of the crew is their reputation, which assures them good contracts and less downtime between contracts. Unlike Star Trek, there’s no Federation or chain of command to worry about – the PCs represent law and order, in an anarcho-capitalist sense.
The ‘ashen stars’ of the title are a strange phenomenon, where the stars go grey and cause Strange Things to Happen, such as technology behaving inconsistently (which as the book cheekily explains, can be used to explain away how the capability of technological items on space opera shows can vary between episodes.)
Flexibility
I was also excited by how well Ashen Stars could be adapted to a variety of SF settings, from Star Trek, to Battlestar Galactica, to even Mass Effect, where the PCs could play Spectres and their crews (focusing on the investigative bits rather than the shooty bits).
Availability
At the time of writing, Ashen Stars isn’t out yet – I’ve written this review based on the pre-order package , which includes a pre-release PDF (looking like a PDF output from a Word document, although it does come with a properly layed-out character sheet), a sample of the eventual book’s layout (which is all pretty and colourful, although some of the aliens don’t look like how I imagined them from reading the art-less PDF copy). I also got a free scenario (also in Word-to-PDF format), some fiction and the promise that the actual, physical book will be mailed to me after it’s been printed.I gave the book a 4 for Style, based on the sample layout (as the current PDF copy is just a rough placeholder until the real PDF and book are available) and 4 for Substance, being a solid space opera setting that caters to investigation scenarios.
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