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So what is the game all about? Essentially, its a modern day shoot-em-up.
Character creation takes maybe a half hour or so. You get 100 character points to distribute amongst your stats. You can also buy benefits (Night Vision, Sex appeal, Gifted Fighter), and Special Abilities (Lucky, Predator, Chi). To offset spending points, you can pick disadvantages. Here is where you can make a drug addict, a notorious criminal hunted by the police, or pretty much anything else you can think up.
The rules are fairly simple. Every character has a six primary stats; Strength, Agility, Intelligence, Perception, Willpower, and Stamina. From those six stats, you derive your secondary stats; Influence, movement, accuracy, fighting, subterfuge (sneaking around), and Counter Measures (physical manipulation). To succeed on a roll, you must roll under your current stat, minus any modifiers. So, say you're trying to break out of a pair of handcuffs, or use a lockpick set to break into a drug dealers locked closet. IF your CM is say, 17, you get a modifier, maybe -9, according to the difficulty of the task. All you have to do is roll under an 8, and you do it. Easy as pie.
Pretty much all of the action in the game follows along those lines. What with being modern day and all, most of the action tends to revolve around gunplay. Gunplay can be merciless and lethally quick. If you roll under your modifiers for the gun, the distance, and cover, then you roll a d10 to see where you hit the target (you can of course make a called shot at a penalty). Anyone can be brought down by a stray headshot or just a few shots to the chest. You cant expect to just wade into a mobsters mansion, soaking up damage; in Haven, you'll quickly die.
Hand to Hand combat (along with car combat), however, takes a completely different approach in Haven. Hand to Hand combat isnt resolved with dice rolls and random hits. It is organized through a your fighting value, and picking "moves" from a huge list of combat actions. Both you and your opponent pick defensive and offensive actions, trading off actions, moves, hits, and kicks, until both of you are done, thus beginning a new round. Hand to hand combat usually lasts much longer than gunplay, and is much more intense. Despite the random chance of having your head blown off during a shootout, you can be pretty sure of when you'll win or lose. Not so during hand to hand combat. You're not only playing with the skills of your character, you're also playing with your own skills. If anyone has played the Card game LUNCH MONEY, you'll know what I'm talking about. The fighting systems are quite similar.
Now onto the setting itself. Haven is a sprawling, east coast metropolis, composed of five burroughs. Haven City, the choked downtown area, Arcadia, the center of nightlife, Golden Heights, the playground of the rich and wealthy (and those that control the city with their money), Freeman Hill, an idyllic suburb that hides beneath its surface ultraviolent gang wars and racial strife, Armistad, a once proud industrial center, now run down and populated by Asian immigrants, and finally, Rome Island, a despotic gangland and urban hellhole.
Each of the burroughs has a unique flavor and feeling. The city is dominated by gangs, gang leaders, and corrupt officials. From the greedy, conniving mayor, to lustful church officials, to brutal police commissioners, it seems very few in Haven even desire to be innocent. The book also has profiles on most of the major gangs, very well laid out and very well illustrated. The Carlucci and Santucci mafia families, loyal and on top despite their warfare towards each other. The Sangre, secretive and protective of their brothers. The Nubian Nation, the fearsome and bloodthirsty group that controls Rome Island. The Red Wing Tong, a mysterious and extremely efficient Asian gang, looking to increase their power in the city. The Templar Knights, a group of militant white-supremacists. Even the police get a write up, indicating that they arent much more than just another gang, albeit one with "the right" to shoot whomever they please.
So there you have it. Truly, there is no better way to run a Grand Theft Auto type game. If you're just looking to run a botched bank robbery or a high speed rush hour car chase, this game has the rules to run it smoothly, whether the players are the criminals, the police, or both! IF you want to jump into a campaign involving working up the criminal foodchain, investigating wrongdoings at city hall, or being one good cop in a city full of bad ones, Haven has enough emphasis on combat, intrigue, and character interplay (roughly a third of the benefits revolve around social action, rather than physical action, such as Authority Figure or Soothing Voice) to make your game range from Way of the Gun-esque shootouts and criminal actions, to nuanced, careful, Sopranos and The Shield type beuracracy and discussion.
Above all Haven truly lends itself to many types of gameplay. Its an incredibly distinctive game, and delivers on the thrills that it promises.
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