Review of Nether-World

Imagine, if you will, a band of outlaw wasteland dwellers racing across a desert salt-flat in converted junk autos. They are fleeing from a single giant mecha that is pursues them with ground shaking thuds of its giant feet. The robot's blaster cannons blaze forth, and one of the cars explodes. The driver narrowly escapes death by leaping free and activating telekinetic flight abilities.

The passenger in the lead car is dressed in elaborate red robes. He directs his driver, a green-skinned alien with a cybernetic hand, to swerve right while he releases a magic fireball at the pursuing mecha. The driver does so, but the fireball misses and explodes harmlessly in the sand. The mage starts summoning a demon to bear him away. Unfortunately, all the ruckus has attracted a sand-worm, which rises from the depths and swallows everyone. The end.

This, my friends, is what it's like in the Nether-World, the premiere RPG from Darkforce Games.

The Basics
Characters are generated using a point-based system similar to the HERO system. The GM decides how "deadly" the campaign is going to be, and assigns character point levels accordingly. Combat uses d20 to determine success/failure (high good, low bad), and damage is recorded in terms of hit points per body location.

The Good
The game system seems to handle combat heavy role-playing quite well. The game setting, while far from perfect, does have some memorable qualities. In particular, the idea of playing a denizen of a damned world is really quite interesting. Nether-World is a sad, decaying planet, cut off from a larger and happier interstellar community by the ambitions of an immortal overlord. The setting suggests a number of possible campaigns - breaking the slave trade, attempting to communicate off-world, or even playing from the opposite side as a tyrannical servant of The Master.

The Bad
Sweet lord all mighty, the setting! Mecha, road warriors, super heroes, ancient gods, sand-worms, magicians, robots, fey folk, demons from beyond the pale, dragons, aliens, space explorers, giant corporations… The game world is utterly indescribable, but as dedicated and professional newspaper man, it behooves me to try. Let me see if I can encapsulate the history of the Nether-World.

A long time ago, elves and dwarves lived in a happy land of rainbows and unicorns. Humans were there as well, but they were uncouth savage creatures who lived in caves. Unbeknownst to the happy fey folk, a race of technologically advanced thingamajigs was regarding them from the Great Beyond. It's not clear what these guys are, but they have become known as the Old Ones. (Ia Cthulhu!)

The Old Ones fooled around with humanity's genes and made them smarter, so they could procreate with them. Then the Old Ones started going loony and decided to enslave everyone. However, one Old One stayed sane - he was Arthur. (King of the Britons!) Arthur was a good egg, and he founded a circle of knights called "The Knights of Silver." These chaps rode around doing good. Also, Arthur had a twin brother known only as "The Master." (Die, Doctor! Die!)

The elves and dwarves decided to war with the Old Ones. Technology warred magic for the control of the Realm for 99 years. After a while, it seemed as though the magic folk were going to win. At this point the Master summoned up a power called "The Darkforce" and laid waste to the Realm. Earthquakes, tidal waves, mutating radiation, etc. The elves and dwarves were almost wiped out, and the humans were changed into perverted shadows of what they once were. Arthur disappears, all hope is lost, etc.

Time passes, the Old Ones reign supreme over a wasted world. They develop more technology and build giant factories everywhere, most of which look a lot like the Battersea power generation station in England. The Old Ones get jealous of each other and start a civil war.

Okay so far?

About this time another race of pure-hearted folk decide to ditch the Realm. No, I don't know where they came from, or what they were doing when the elves and dwarves were fighting on their behalf. They are called the "The Watchers" and they get around in flying saucers. (The truth is out there!) Yes, flying saucers. They figure the Nether-World is getting too hot for them, and they strike out across space and the multiverse. In an another dimension, they discover a small blue planet inhabited by ape-men. The Watchers land and fiddle with the evolution of the ape-men (My God! It's full of stars!)

Unfortunately, the Watchers also made the fabric of reality into Swiss cheese, and folks keep dropping through to the Nether-World from all of Earth's ages. Hence the super heroes and knights in armor and 1955 Studebakers that periodically show up to trouble the Old Ones.

While the Watchers were planting monoliths and paying merry hell with space/time, all but one of the Old Ones have died. The last one, the Master builds a giant factory city called Eden and lords it over the mutated humans - the Maggots. He continues to develop his technology, and soon discovers space-travel. His scout ships run into a crew of law-abiding Boy Scout type humans from a interstellar government known as… The United Consortium of Planets, UCOP. (To boldly go…) The UCOP places the Nether-World under interdiction, and unsavory aliens from other cultures drop by to use the planet as a cheap slave labor market. And that brings us to the present.

More is not always better. This is one of the causes where that maxim applies. The setting has good points, but the history is a confusing mare's nest of SF/fantasy detritus. If someone pointed to one of my bookshelves, and said "Take one idea from each book and make it into a unified whole," I imagine the end result would resemble the Nether-World. United Consortium of Planets? Couldn't we at least change TWO words in the title? United Consortium of Races, or something? In all honesty, the game world reminds me of the SF cheese-fest film, "Space Hunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone," with some magic thrown in. Of course, I really liked that movie…

Any other beefs are secondary. Character generation is time consuming and complicated. There are 150 pages of skills, powers, advantages, flaws, and spells. Players must BUILD any weapons and armor they have with their points. I tried to make a sample character, just a bog-standard "guy with a gun," and found I spent more time figuring out the stats for an automatic pistol than I did on the character. The character you get is quite serviceable, but the process is one that will definitely need the watchful eye of a GM who has studied the process thoroughly.

There are also certain problems that inevitably arise from a small-print game. Typos appear on most pages, and run-on sentences crop up just about everywhere. There are entire paragraphs that, quite frankly, make no sense whatsoever. Paul Maylott is the only writer, and I suspect he edited his own work.

The artwork ranges from quite good to amateurish. In particular, the recurring mecha drawings seem out of place and have an unfinished quality to them. However, the overall look and feel of the book is good.

Darkforce Games maintains a website at http://www.darkforcegames.com. On it, we can learn a little about the designer, Paul Maylott, "… the undisputed bossman, cool guy and author/designer of the book and rpg Nether-world. Without his brain no Darkforce Games would exist. The background and history of this character is as horrific and wondrous as your imagination." Well, not quite THAT horrific. He comes from Caledonia, a rural community just south of Hamilton, Ontario. He got into RPGs by playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when he was a kid. I know this because I interviewed him for a local newspaper. He's nice fellow, and I only wish I had nicer things to say about his obvious labor of love.

The Last Word
The system is serviceable, and with a great deal of pruning the setting has promise. By no means is this the best game in the bin, but players looking for a combat and angst heavy world might find Nether-World fits them to a "T."