|
First Impressions This is a packed book with everything you need to play right off the bat. So complete it could easily be used as a more generic science-fiction game with no difficulty whatsoever. The writing quality and the completeness of the rules are thoroughly professional. With all that going on it deserves to be in print and it also deserves a better cover. Art throughout the book is to a pretty high standard for PDF, although a lot of it looks as though it could do with a bit more of spit and polish. The cover itself isn't as good as some of the interior art though, much of it derived from photomanipulation, perhaps of friends of the authors which does give the game a nice feel, not being full - so much - of supermodels.
The layout is fairly plain and single column, which is somewhat unusual, but it is well spaced out and easy to read with the pages at full-screen resolution, which is nice to see.
The game comes across as a fusion of Blue Planet and Traveller with a pinch of Warhammer Fantasy Role Play in the career path system, none of these are bad things and, indeed it seems to synthesize the best of each of them, producing a unique game with an interesting setting, as well as utility for just about any other type of science fiction game someone might want to run.
Design/Content: Long ago, over a thousand years ago, there was a mass exodus from earth, prompted by a stellar disaster about to afflict the sun. Slow colony ships departed from all over the planet for distant star systems that should harbor earth-like planets. Most of these aimed at the cluster. A group of stars arrayed close enough together that an interstellar society could be maintained by slow running fusion drives, if it was needed. With so much time passing on the colony ships different cultures and ways developed and as each planet was settled old earth cultures and new societies were formed, spreading out over the planets, now with the discovery (or purchase) of a limited jump drive the cluster is drawn together even more tightly than was envisioned.
Unlike many SF games, Starcluster employs a relatively hard SF theme without killing off all opportunities for adventure or reducing the setting to a boring set of statistics. The diversity of human cultures is enough to provide for an eternity of adventures and even then there are aliens out there though they are relatively undetailed compared to the human society and cultures.
Spaceships, vehicles, weapons and equipment are all covered in a fairly generic way as befits the setting, with plenty of room for modification and customization to meet the needs of any particular planet, culture or Player Character. There are also many cultures at different levels of technological development as well as several genetic offshoots of humanity, engineered for various reasons to fit their circumstances better.
The book has not fallen into the trap of many games in describing their setting, it neither gives you too much information or too little. The planets of the cluster are detailed, minimally, giving enough information for you to extrapolate while only a couple of the planets are fully detailed showing you what the writers intended and giving a good guideline onto the sort of information you should put together for your own planetary guides as a starting point.
Lastly the book has a comprehensive and hyperlinked index. Indices make me happy.
Rules: Character creation is interesting and helps you construct a proper background for your character, commencing with the end of childhood at ten years old and guiding them through their development in education and careers. Thinking about what career path your character has taken and which skills they have picked up allows a background to come together almost naturally, flowing as you make mechanical decisions on what skills you want or need.
There are two options for character creation, statistics can be determined randomly or the character can be constructed with points. Either template then undergoes the career path system, emerging as a fully realized character and there are rules for aging (and aging retardation) to stop people, necessarily, emerging with fifty year old combat experts for the game. The geriatric ninja need not, necessarily, be a problem.
There are various racial choices to be made as well as the possibility of playing Uplift style animals or robots, though these are not really covered in the main book. Another level of character determination and customization is the level of the culture that they come from. Things are slightly different for those from mid level, high tech, primitive or backward cultures and these are reflected in skills available and skill emphasis. While there isn't a name table, and the names given in the play examples are quite, quite awful, there are tables for determining a few, descriptive things about a character's face and personality, which is a real boon for those who have trouble coming up with personalities for their character or for a Games Master looking to make an NPC or two a bit more involving and described.
The skills system covers all the bases more than adequately and also introduces a secondary layer of skills called 'metaskills'. These expand the capacity of certain skills to accomplish things or affect their resolution. This might be the difference between understanding how an engine works and actually being able to repair it, for example.
Combat is interesting and quite effective using a novel initiative system where each turn last a full minute allowing multiple actions within that time as well as the ability to swap points between to hit, damage and initiative. This allows you to make many inaccurate attacks or to take your time, be patient and land a crippling blow on an opponent. The base rules are not that deadly, tending to knock people out of a fight rather than kill them outright but this suits a more heroic genre and prevents players dying needlessly all the time. There are options to make things more deadly, should you feel the need to do so, which can make the system grittier and more suited to even harder settings. There is a fair amount of book-keeping but the system rapidly becomes intuitive and fairly quick to resolve.
There is an excellent NPC generating section which removes a major niggle of mine about there not being enough sample NPCs in a lot of games, leaving the Games Master much more preparation than they strictly need. This sort of thing should appear in more games and Starcluster gets full marks for including it.
Conclusions/Capsule Review: Excellent science fiction game powered by a very good system engine. With a bit more spit and polish and a higher standard of presentation this could be a brilliant, professional, print book. It's also great as a budget solution to a generic science fiction game and would suit running campaigns set in many of the newer SF author's worlds. |
|
First Impressions: I'd heard good things about Starcluster so my expectations were reasonably high for Blood Games. The interior art is simple but effective and in keeping with the rest of the book. I was somewhat concerned by the sheer amount of empty space in the layout which, while it makes the game readable wastes a lot of space and, consequently, a lot of printer paper. On first look it doesn't appear to be anything innovative or dynamic but does seem to be suitable for what it sets out to do.
Design/Content: The game draws on all the usual familiar types that have been done to death by White Wolf -- Vampires, Werewolves, hidden conspiracies and technology and magick necessarily being in opposition, technology somehow acting as a control and antithesis to wonder. All of this will be very familiar sounding though there are a few added or slightly different elements in that the conspiracies such as they are small scale and there are no real world-spanning control freak organizations to get in the way of the inevitable rampages of the player group.
A useful section missing from many games is included on how to put together a party and what elements make up a successful party that arrays itself against the forces of darkness, for this is a game about Light vs Dark, Good vs Evil with less grey areas than many other modern horror/occult games of the last decade or so.
The game draws on several different sources for its material but most of these conform to standard and known western magickal beliefs and ritualism, the exception being the hunter which is, essentially, a more credible and 'hard occult' version of Buffy, a strong fighter with reserves of luck and access to precocious martial arts and acrobatic skills.
The jarring element for me is the unnecessary inclusion of vampires as a player option. To me it would have felt better to have left the Vampire-as-PC to the likes of Nightlife and Vampire and to have concentrated purely on the hunter element with Vampires as adversaries. That said their spin on Vampires as more traditional solitary, aging, inhuman monsters is like a breath of fresh air against the monster-apologism that has been rife in occult horror games. These are vampires as you will remember from Dracula and similar movies.
The layout might be annoying but it does make the denser sections, such as combat, much easier to read and assimilate, albeit at the cost of half a ream of butchered forest. This works well for the rules sections but in the setting sections it just makes the page appear a little too empty.
There is a reasonable list of creatures and opponents contained in the game which only lacks proper illustration to bring it to life and there is a reasonably useful Games Master section though much of what is in that section is already spelled out or implied elsewhere in the book.
The final sections are a useful character creation worksheet and set of sheets as well as a segment of optional rules, most of which make for an even grittier and nastier game.
Rules: Characters can be created either randomly or constructed from a pool of points with a typical range of statistics determined on a 2-12 scale with only psionic potential, IQ and cash differing, being determined by a percentile roll. The rest of creation helps build your character's background through school and college and out into the world of employment. I like these types of character creation as they encourage thought into the PCs' background and how they got to the position that they are in today, rather than just springing whole cloth into the game with no hooks and no forethought.
One thing that is a real boon is that the magick systems are simple and easy to understand from the angelic summonings of the esoteric scholar type to the totemic imbuements of the shaman to the ritualized magick of the witches.
The overall system is that of Starcluster 2 which I have not had the fortune of playing yet, the heart of the system is percentile with the chance of success depending on skill level, statistics and rerolls provided by levels of mastery which effectively simulate the reduced likelihood of particularly experienced individuals to screw up purely by chance. Percentile systems tend to give a game a gritty, graspable, plausible feel and this works well with the rest of the game.
Combat is full of useful little tricks and lessons learned from various modern games with too many details to go into here but one interesting trick is that points can be traded between initiative, the to-hit roll and damage, allowing a character to take time to prepare and swing a heavy blow if they seek to do more harm. All the rules are simple, straightforward and easy enough to grasp though the use of hit points felt a bit abstracted from the feel of the rest of the system.
Conclusion/Capsule Review: Very professionally written this game would be worth publishing on paper with a little more spit and polish and if the ground hadn't already been staked out by White Wolf's line and the Witchcraft game. It is full of ideas with a decent and understandable system and a powerful basis around which to build a group. Their take on vampires is refreshingly 'old skool' and the rules required for the creation of these supernaturals is linked into the rest of the game, making it more useful than it would otherwise be. A well executed occult horror game with much to commend it.
|
