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IMPORTANT: This review assumes you are familiar with the terms and concepts introduced at http://www.sorcerer-rpg.com, in the essays "System Does Matter" and "The Nuked Apple-cart." Also: my ratings are highly subjective and have nothing to do with anyone else's priorities. I only include them because they are required.

Jeff Diamond knows his grass-roots RPG business. This guy wrote Orbit himself (originally "Heavy Orbit" until his wife told him that sounded dated), drew all the pictures, typeset and printed up the copies, and he sells’em, and the first supplement, Rei 1.0, off his website. He contacted Uncle Jed’s Game Shed and now the Shed sells’em too, at last report re-ordering after being cleaned out. Diamond doesn’t want to go quite as far into the book publishing and retail-distributor scene as Jim Dietz or Michael Desing have, yet he still wants to sell an RPG as hard copy, not a computer file. If this sounds like you, you must get all the advice you can from this man.

Orbit itself may exemplify an important type among indie games: it could operate as the crucial learning experience for munchkins who are totally immersed in the commercialism and content of the big-corporate games. Orbit is perfect for showing such players that indie games have something to offer without weirding them out. With that in mind, the following fact may be reported and reviewed without putting the game down. Basically, it offers very little innovation, at least not in the sense used by players of Ghost Light, Deus Ex, The Window, Zero, FUDGE, Puppetland, or Over the Edge. Orbit is fast, fun, AD&D-lite in a colorful and playful SF future.

It’s built for AD&D players who have very straightforward role-playing priorities. Advancement is the whole point, and that entails a lot of killing things and taking their stuff. "Levelling-up" costs 10,000 points, which not only means a painstaking total to keep adding up but also (about) 200 dead opponents plus assorted loot. It is unabashedly Gamist using terms and play-standards familiar to nearly anyone, as shown by the following. · labyrinth worlds infested by ratmen and strewn with coin-like credits and mysterious techno-artifacts … · terms like "leveling up" and "dweomer" … · no armor permitted for spell-casters … · combat based on whittling down one another’s pool of Life Points, with few or no effects until one combatant falls over dead … · experience points numbering in the 1000s, outright killing and looting as the source of advancement … · a long leading lag for early character advancement, followed by a massive exponential surge in effectiveness; i.e., power-gaming … The AD&D-only background is also apparent in the announced "innovations": no saving throws, no level restrictions, no alignment, open skill list, a single book to be used by both player and GM, attribute scores with functions … In other words, Orbit proudly recapitulates nearly all the "second-generation" design considerations of the 1980s.

The system design is also pure 1980s: point costs, skill lists, long spells and powers lists, and a percent-based resolution system. It’s about as easy to read and play as, say, Champions or Cyberpunk – less cumbersome than RoleMaster or GURPS, more cumbersome than (say) Castle Falkenstein or Over the Edge. Many of the "sub-systems" operate essentially by their own unique rules, with evidence of lots of jury-rigging. One has to be careful during play to flip right to the right pages in order to make sure you’re not missing crucial fine points. The flip-flipping is compounded by a certain degree of innumeracy, too, such as very small increments for a d100 resolution system. It’s hard to get excited about a 10% skill or a 2% increase in armor value.

Since nearly all RPG design over the last decade has moved away from these system features and themes, the above news may not be enticing at all. But now for the news that’s positive for anyone. This game scores way high on its zesty, irreverent attitude and atmosphere. There’s a wonderful attitude in the text and art that inspires players: lots of babes of various races, jokes, a sense of sprightly fun, and it’s all totally unpretentious. A flip through Diamond’s excellent art that fills the book immediately orients you to the mood.

You play one of many funky races (the cat-people, the dog-people, the two-colored people, the stalk-eyed people, etc, or a mutt of any combination), choosing from various professions (i.e. classes) for starting skills, and it’s hard to decide which options are cuter or funnier. A group of PCs looks like an underground comics parade on acid, packing rayguns. My female players are especially enjoying the chance to play hot cartoon broads, for example the lizard-babe nudist private-eye.

During play, I could not bring myself to toss the player-characters into a "labyrinth world" and have them fight their way through mazes of ratmen, sligs, and tricky traps. Instead, we played a mystery-adventure with lots of wacky NPCs and only a few, usually non-lethal encounters. Experience-wise, the characters didn’t get much out of it, but we had a good time with the setting and role-playing.

So I mainly recommend Orbit to solve one of the first, most difficult steps in indie-playing: overcoming players’ label-loyalty and consumer-investment inertia. That’s not easy. The whole pill – stepping away from advertising-legitimized brand names, buying or acquiring something from a private individual rather than a company, the unusually intense commitment to Narrativism, the free-form design mechanics, blurring GM-player definitions – is pretty hard to swallow for someone who never played anything but a grumpy dwarf. You show these guys something like The Window, and most will head for the hills. You try something like Sorcerer on them, and you’ll get sued for inducing post-traumatic stress syndrome.

But Orbit would loosen’em up – they’d comfortably play their dwarf, the events and actions would be familiar yet somehow more fun than usual, and perhaps those new-fangled rules might not seem so weird. The friendly, funny style of the game-book and setting are extremely effective, and all those lawyer-like, stern rules from the brand-name games might begin to look unnecessary by comparison. "Hey," the players might say. "Orbit’s kind of cool. What are those other independent games like?"

And if someone like me wants people to play and enjoy Sorcerer, for example, I ought to be grateful Orbit’s out there to get that question asked.