Spacer's Toolkit advertises itself as containing a wide variety of equipment and gear for characters in a Star Hero game. Specifically, Spacer's Toolkit uses a default assumed setting of the Terran Empire, otherwise described in the sourcebook by that name. I was expecting a sourcebook that was heavy on gear for players' characters, specifically for those who tend to jet around in spacecraft, but I expected some ground type gear as well. I was hoping for strange alien stuff. I was also expecting a few starships, particularly non-military ships (as most of the ships detailed in Terran Empire are military ships, of many races -- in fact, most races in Terran Empire don't have any civilian ships detailed).
I will start this review with my biases out in the open, as much as possible. I'm running a Star Hero game in the Terran Empire setting right now, and for it I'd like to have more cool personal equipment available for the characters in my group to play with. The group is a bunch of roving traders and semi-space-pirates skirting the borders of the Terran Empire, near contested and neutral space. So I'd like to see some non-military ships that they might encounter, and cool pirating gear. This is my bias; I want cool stuff for my game in particular. Okay, I have another bias, in that I have met and worked with Steve Long a couple of times and find him to be an upstanding and swell guy. I haven't worked for DOJ/Hero, though.
Spacer's Toolkit was not what I was looking for. The book has
* 36 pages of personal equipment (weapons, defenses, sensors and communication gear, medical technology, survival equipment, nanotech, computers, robots, androids, cyberware and bioware);
* 18 pages of vehicles (civilian and military; wheeled, hover, and tanks);
* 68 pages of starship technology and starships.
To be blunt, this isn't a "Spacer's Toolkit" book, this is a starships book with some gear thrown in.
Looking over the sections as we go: Melee weapons are interesting enough. There's nothing truly weird in this section, nothing that makes me go "ooh, I wish I'd thought of that." The laser weapons and plasma weapons give some nice insights into the Terran Empire setting in their writeups. I get a bit of cognitive dissonance about some of the weapons when I think about them too hard: A fair chunk of them are weapons that were state-of-the-art back in the day and didn't work reliably back then (Activation rolls, for you Hero nerds), yet they persist more than 100 years later. Strikes me that the only old weapons that people keep around are those that are reliable enough to keep on hand despite their relative lack of punch. But this is a minor quibble; it's nice to have some writeups for junky weapons that characters can buy cheaply. A few nice weirdo weapons at the end of this section -- gamma weapons, EMP weapons, a magnetic bola gun, a sonic stunner. I would have liked more weird stuff, crazy stuff that I wouldn't have thought of myself that I could spring on my players.
Defenses get two pages. Armor, including battle armor; and force fields. Just 7 items, only four of which have writeups. Again, nothing wacky that the average SF reader/viewer wouldn't have thought of on their own, but some nice new alternatives. And again, the writeups contribute something to the setting, particularly the Fassai armor writeup.
Sensors and Communications scores two pages -- just 9 items. The Hero system's sense powers lend themselves really easily to quick-and-dirty sensor type equipment, so it is relatively easily to extrapolate many of these items into other kinds of sensors and commo gear. But then again, I buy a gear book so that I don't have to do that work.
Medical and Survival gear get two pages each. The medical gear is again a set of decent writeups of the expected stuff. I liked the survival gear writeups; some of the items in there were amusing and could see use in my game.
The Nanotech section gets two pages, and I genuinely liked that stuff. Attack nanobots; defense nanobots; medical and enhancing treatments as well. I want more! Cyberware and bioware were also good -- I particularly liked the Environmental Awareness package (implanted computers and sensors giving Absolute Range Sense, Absolute Time Sense, Bump of Direction, and Defense Maneuver IV), the Trauma Compensator (4d6 Aid to STUN when at 10 STUN or less), and the Rapaccini Implant, which gives its bearer a deadly kiss (2d6 HKA NND -- which, quibble, isn't usually enough to kill the average guy, but it's trivial to make it 3d6, right?).
The one page of Miscellaneous Items makes me weep. Five items, and they're all really cool, and I would like ten more pages like this please. The items, half of which have no game stats, are the Engineer's Toolbox; Fex Sculpted Medallions; the Toractan Kiora Stone, Mon'Dabi Liquors, and the Power-Move Exo-Skeleton.
Ground vehicles are straightforward and useful, and include the nifty Se'ecra Centipede, which seems to be a wheeled, trackless train. The hover vehicles and other vehicles are downright neat; there is some good variety to them and interesting application of the Hero rules. But then we get two different wheeled tanks and a hovertank in the military vehicles section, which seems like overkill but might be nice if you were running a military campaign. The alien ground vehicles include the sup-r-cool looking Thorgon Warstrider, an insectoid walking tank.
Starships make up the bulk of the rest of the book -- more than half the book's contents, as mentioned earlier (but far less than half of this review, because they weren't why I bought it). We start off with some new power systems and propulsion systems -- a variety of propulsion systems fit in between the gaps in the drive types in the core Terran Empire book, which I approve of. A few pages later the same thing is done with protective systems -- filling in the spaces between the different defensive systems listed in Terran Empire. Again, I approve. MAME (Miniature Antimatter Missile, Explosive) devices are freakin' terrifying, as well they should be. I also approve of the Hyper Charge, a starship weapon which jumps into hyperspace from realspace to find its target.
Finally we have the starships themselves. I won't go one-by-one with these, not even close. An unfortunate side effect of the detail level of the Hero system is that the writeup of the Imperial Super-Dreadnaught class starship takes two and a half pages, and of that just two paragraphs is descriptive flavor text. So as you might imagine, the 68 pages of starships isn't all that many ships (it is 33 ships to be precise).
Parenthetically, for the Hero nerds out there, the Super-Dreadnaught ship is a 3,301 character point vehicle.
We've got a few civilian ships in with all the military ships, including the amusingly-named Centurion Eagle, a disk-shaped clunky freighter. Plenty of other alien warships and a few alien civilian ships round out the chapter.
We finish with a master gear table and a one-page index.
All of the gear and vehicles seem to be constructed properly according to the Hero System rules; I don't notice any obvious bugs. The art is nice; the harder-to-picture stuff is illustrated, as are most of the starships. Many if not all of the illustrations actually have a caption telling the reader precisely which item is being illustrated, which is downright friendly and something I'd like to see more of in these sorts of books. The formatting of gear writeups is greatly improved from Terran Empire, the previous book in this line -- no more space is used up, but the writeups seem much crisper and easier to find.
In the balance, the book has enough new stuff that it is probably worth picking up if you're running a Star Hero game set in the Terran Empire. I recommend it to readers in that situation, particularly those looking for lots of starship writeups. If you're not using that setting, but you are using Hero, you'll probably get some goodness out of it too. If you're not using Hero at all, there isn't a lot to mine for revolutionary ideas here and I certainly don't recommend it to you.
