Review of FAITH Decks: The Universe Player Deck, The One Percent Gear & NPC Deck, The Zero-G Culture Gear & NPC Deck, The Tools Of The Trade II Gear Deck, The Alien Superpowers NPC Deck

Blurb from the publisher: 'You can play FAITH with a poker deck. If you want to truly immerse in the universe though, you will find the following decks to be welcome additions to the roster. The Player Decks are custom pokers decks with beautiful illustrations of the universe of FAITH. The NPC, Gear and Mixed Decks will help you create fascinating encounters for your players using the NPCs found in these decks, or equip your character with the powerful gear pieces. All the information you need to use each NPC or piece of gear is contained within its card and the illustration will provide a nice visual reference for you and your group.

The Alien Superpowers NPC Deck is a deck of cards for FAITH: The Sci-Fi RPG that contains 54 cards designed to expand the experience of the game with a great variety of enemies ranging frommutants to fanatic followers of gods, law officers, criminals, and everyone in-between. Theis deck is designed to work with the FAITH: Core Book, including the Corvo and the Iz'kal NPCs included in the book and quite a few welcome additions.'

What you get: Your EUR 11,95 will buy you any of the existing decks for the FAITH: The Sci-Fi RPG. These can be purchased only as physical editions, not as pdf ones. The present review examines five of them:

The Universe - Player Deck

The One Percent - Gear & NPC Deck

The Zero-G Culture - Gear & NPC Deck

Tools Of The Trade II - Gear Deck

Alien Superpowers - NPC Deck

Each deck is sold separately. One can buy a single deck... or all of them in one go.

Contents: All cards come at a size of 63 x 88 mm (the common M:tG size) with rounded corers, the same size and shape included in the Starter Set. They are sold in transparent plastic containers that have to be destroyed in order to be opened, and are thus not reusable. All decks contain the same number of cards. They are not collectible; once you have one you don't need to purchase it again. All cards are multi-coloured. The orientation is in the vast majority of cases in portrait mode. Only the Tools Of The Trade II - Gear Deck has a relatively high number in landscape mode.

The Universe Deck is the specialised FAITH deck that can, in extreme circumstances, be substituted by a standard card deck. Each card is dominated by an all-encompassing image, with only a small-font number and suit on the upper left and lower right corners. Its back is identical in all cards.

Every other deck shares a similar format and layout. At the front comes the imagery (and stats, if applicable) of the subject under discussion. This can be for example Ma Ng, the Calivan prophet, or an Ergonaut Mark. In the case of the former we learn his five stats, his Grapple and his Hit, along with his physical and mental. In the case of the latter, we just get the imagery. The back side contains additional information, like height, weight, and special characteristics, along with a quote in the lines of 'There's old and then there's Ma Ng'. Most importantly however, it contains instructions on how that item can be used or what abilities that character has.

There is some duplication in the decks. As an example, when it comes to NPCs there might be two Criminals in the same deck, yet their stats wouldn't be identical (even though their abilities would be). When it comes to gear, the cards are mostly identical. Both Tools of the Trade II (a Gear Deck) as well as Alien Superpowers (an NPC Deck) have contain twenty seven cards twice. On the other hand, there are both duplicates and uniques in the Zero-G Culture (a Gear and NPC Deck), while every single card in The One Percent (again a Gear and NPC Deck) is unique.

The strong points: Faith is by now renowned for its formidable art. These decks confirm why that is so. The imagery on the Universe Deck is totally different to the one found in A Garden In Hell Starter Set; there is not a single image repeated. For those opting for more than one deck in their table, or go as far as one deck per player, this is excellent news. The game keeps on being visually visceral, with imagery out of peoples' wildest dreams. The art used here is not custom made for the cards, of course; it has been seen in its entirety in previous rulebooks. That is normal; actually, it is even desirable, to confirm the game's strong visual aesthetics.

The decks add a lot of value to the game. It is not just the visuals; it's the info, the pace of the game, the facilitation, the fluidity. I have had sessions in other games where players forgot the properties of the items they were carrying, or even the existence of the items themselves, with obvious detrimental consequences. This can't happen here. Not every single piece of gear or NPC is listed, of course; that would have been impossible. Yet the selection is very good. If one is looking for more generic opponents, Aliens Superpowers is the deck you need. If unique NPCs is what you are after, The One Percent nails it, including both memorable characters as well as their impossible-to-purchase equipment. To be totally honest, one might as well take a deep plunge and go for the whole shebang from the get-go. The cards really make a difference during your sessions.

The weak points: Even though I understand the logic behind it, I am not convinced that repeating the same cards twice is a good idea. Gear is particularly offending, by having identical pieces without the slightest of distinctions (not even the colour). As for NPCs, it doesn't make sense at all to have even one of them twice. I would have preferred each NPC card to state two, three or five lines of stats, in case the NPC is not a unique one. In that case the GM could easily use more than one at the same time, and would have had the option of choosing any stat-line he wanted through a single card. This would also clear space for new, different NPCs, be them archetypal or unique. Taking the vastness of the universe into account, they are sorely needed. The way things stand, one pays the same price for double the paper and half the material in two out of the four decks; only The One Percent stands out, by being fully unique. Zero G Culture is somewhere in-between, with some items and people being unique while others aren't. The approach overall is not satisfactory, because one isn't aware that some decks duplicate their cards while others don't.

I am extremely unhappy about the boxes these decks are sold in. Where is one supposed to keep the cards afterwards? I would have enjoyed them being sold in resealable boxes like any standard set of cards, which is a bit bigger than the cards themselves, in order for the cards to fit after they are sleeved. Here one doesn't even get to have a box he can keep. I stored mine in the box of the A Garden in Hell Starter Set, yet I am not happy with that solution. That box is flimsy.

With the exception of the Universe Deck which follows a different format and fulfills a different function, the cards are neither numbered, nor do not state on them which deck they belong to. If you mix them, you can't separate them again, unless you really remember where they came from. Fantastic... not. In the grand scheme of things the provenance of a card doesn't really make a difference. Still, some of us like to keep things tidy, not to mention that in The One Percent some items are linked to particular individuals, yet in some cases only one card references the other; not both. D'oh! In an even more glaring omission, the NPCs and Gear which are mentioned in previous rulebooks (namely, Faith: The Sci-Fi RPG Core Book 2.0 and Tiantiang), are not referenced by page on the cards. I don't understand this. There I am, browsing through my cards before a session, trying to create the blueprint of an adventure, and I find something I can use. Do I really need to start searching frantically in two rulebooks to find out more about the person or piece of gear that caught my eye? In fact, in an idea world with just a bit of foresight, both the cards and the rulebooks would reference one another. They were published at around the same time after all.

In the Universe Deck the numbers keep on being very small and the four suits keep having two colours only. I have said it before: they should have been two to three sizes bigger, utilizing four different colours; there is no other way around it. The titles on the cards of the other four decks are equally problematic. In their effort to have a 'kewl' and futuristic font, they use too many shades and a very small size. The end result is that the titles are very hard to read. Thankfully, that is not the case with the text on the cards.

Conclusion: I am a big fan of well-crafted accessories for RPGs, and the FAITH Decks bring quite the oomph to the table during the game, both in the way of cool visuals as well as pertinent information at a moment's notice. Unfortunately, the repetition of material within the same decks brings the value of some of those decks down. The cards should have also helped the GM by referencing the pages where the initial source material can be found, not to mention providing their own box for storage.

For more info on the FAITH Decks: The Universe Player Deck, The One Percent Gear & NPC Deck, The Zero-G Culture Gear & NPC Deck, The Tools Of The Trade II Gear Deck, The Alien Superpowers NPC Deck, as well as Faith 2.0, and Burning Games, visit its website at https://burning-games.com/en.

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