Fading Suns Player’s Guide First Impressions

Fading Suns is often described as kitchen-sink space opera, and it is something that I have always found amusing about it. As a fan of Space Opera series like Dune and Warhammer 40k, I’m perpetually amused by how Fading Suns manages to come up with a compelling setting that has several dozen nods to popular sci-fi, without falling apart in the process.

Fading Suns is classic Space Opera at it’s finest. Space empires, squabbling noble houses, the presence of a powerful space church, warring merchant guilds and strange enigmatic aliens are all in there, and every piece has a place in this grand stage. The latest book in this franchise, the Revised Edition Player’s Guide from FASA, continues this tradition.

I’ll have to admit that I’ve been looking forward to a new edition of Fading Suns for so long now, having missed the chance to collect the physical books before. That said, it’s good to remember that this is technically a revision as opposed to an entirely different edition of the book.

All of the things that made the original game great is still all here, with the various factions (Nobles, Guilds and Church) and the infighting that goes with it. The crazy space archaeology and mystery tech is also still here, along with the myriad of enemies and threats to humanity.

Fading Suns is perhaps the best Space Opera game to highlight the awesome things about science fiction that doesn’t cleave too closely to technology and science. GMs get to add their spin on things, and a Fading Suns campaign can be anything from planetary exploration to high intrigue. It’s this kind of flexibility that leaves me constantly impressed with Fading Suns, and looking forward to the rest of the books.

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Something tells me that I’ll have to get around to doing a Let’s Study of this book to get into the real meat of the matter though, but only the Pancreator knows how many entries that series will take.

Blue Planet Player’s Guide Revised, First Impressions

Stop! Or my orca will shoot!

Blue Planet is one of those games that presents a unique and intriguing setting that is a goldmine for stories. Having returned to active circulation in print and PDF format from FASA, Blue Planet is a sci-fi roleplaying game that takes place in an alien waterworld known as Posiedon.

Posiedon is a new frontier for mankind, who has long ago reduced Earth to a wasteland of pollution and urban decay. The discovery of a habitable planet of unspoiled natural resources was a siren song for many, resulting in an exodus of people seeking second chances, or corporations hoping to get the spoils first.

But aside from the frontier angle, Blue Planet’s setting also presents a transhuman society, one where being human is just one choice among many. Among the options for player characters are Modis (modified humans) Genies (Genetically modified humans), Aquaforms (Diver and Squid types), Hybrids (Cat and Silva types), Spacers, Transhumans (also known as Alphas) and two forms of uplifted cetaceans in the form of Dolphins and Orcas.

Aside from the remarkably large spread of “racial” choices, Blue Planet cleaves towards the sandbox style of play and gives a host of professional backgrounds and archetypes to choose from, ranging from Rockstar (leading to Silver Countess’ idea of playing an underwater Lin Minmei with an Orca bodyguard) to mercenaries and commandos. Blue Planet can get pretty confusing if the GM doesn’t take the reins of a campaign and specify exactly what he wants to run. Otherwise you’ll end up with a mess in character creation where everyone is playing something possibly incompatible with everyone else in the team.

Blue Planet runs on what they call the Synergy System. The basics should be familiar to old hands at the game. For those unfamiliar with it, the player rolls a number of ten-sided dice equal to the character’s rank in an Aptitude, which can range from Average (1 die) to Superior (3 dice). These dice are then compared to a Target Number set by the character’s Skill + Attribute scores. Dice which roll under the Target Number are considered successful, and the highest rolling successful die is used to determine the Action Value of the roll. Should all the dice roll above the Target Number, then the Action Value is determined using the lowest scoring die, resulting in a negative Action Value.

Combat in Blue Planet is pretty crunchy. Closer to HERO crunchy than Exalted 2nd edition crunchy, which is a good thing in my book. I’ve yet to go over it all with the same scrutiny of a Let’s Study article, but it does look pretty beefy. Combat maneuvers, initiative that takes into account the delay of performing certain actions and check this: Psychological (social) combat. So yes, fast-talking Con-Dolphin trying to get an Orca to let him through into a corporate compound, Blue Planet has rules for that.

The Blue Planet Player’s Guide Revised also sports pretty much the entire contents of the 2nd edition’s book on technology. There’s a huge chunk of the book dedicated to the wonderful toys of Poseidon, including SASER weaponry (like Lasers, but with sonics!) and mini-torpedo launchers. There’s certainly a lot of technology in this setting and I feel just a little guilty about going over the tech chapter with the enthusiasm that I did.

Overall I’m pretty impressed with what I see so far in Blue Planet. For people like me who weren’t able to snag a copy of the 2nd edition, this is a great chance to get back into this interesting setting. My only hope is that they bring out the supplements soon. I hear First Colony was a great setting book, and as is the corebook does feel like it needs a little more beefing up in terms of what a city would be like in Poseidon.

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Blue Planet Player’s Guide Revised is available from DriveThruRPG for $20.99 or roughly Php 945.00

[D&D Next] First Impressions of the August Playtest Packet

I’m sure that everyone who is actually subscribed to receiving updates from the D&D Next playtest program already knows this, but the packet is out! I’ve just downloaded mine and I have only begun to start reading through the new stuff. Of course, given the hearty discussion on my previous read on the D&D Next Fighter of the last playtest, the Dwarven Fighter pregen was the first file I opened.

The Combat Superiority mechanic is pretty neat, and I’m glad that the design team managed to reach a happy medium between my earlier improvisation-focused approach and the other preference for having hard-coded abilities in the rules. As is, the Fighter is capable of pulling off some impressive combat tricks (some of which resemble the feats of older editions) without losing the ability to use the Improvise action found in the rules to pull off some of the tricks that aren’t covered in the Combat Superiority list.

The expanded documents on the Backgrounds and Specialties make me happy, given the approach to allow characters to start customizing their builds beyond just simple class. Heck, having a Fighter with the Sharpshooter Fighting style, the Bounty Hunter Background and Archer Specialty would make for a compelling Urban Ranger dedicated to bringing unsavory types to justice. Quick, easy, relatively painless to come up with interesting characters simply by mixing and matching these three facets of a character.

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with what I’m seeing so far. I’ll update with more impressions of the new stuff once I’ve had a chance to go over everything in detail.

I’ve Got A Case of Mutant City Blues… [insert jazz music here]

As I mentioned in Monday’s post, I’ve found myself in possession of a copy of Pelgrane Press’ Mutant City Blues by Robin D. Laws.  While admittedly the GumShoe system was hovering about in the edge of my RPG knowledge, I’d never thought to pick up this game on my own.  But now that I’ve finally had a chance to flip through it, I have to admit that I’m very impressed with the thought that was put into the setting and the game in general.

Mutant City Blues is one of those games that has a high amount of specificity, wherein the player characters and their activities fall within a narrow and well-defined path.  In this case, MCB assumes that the Player Characters are all part of a the Heightened Crime Investigation Unit, a super-powered group of cops that are called in to investigate crimes committed by, or against Heightened individuals.

The game is set up as a police procedural meets the X-Men.  Powers are fairly small in scope, but some can be pretty scary when used intelligently to commit a crime.  Of course, since it does rely heavily on investigation, Mutant City Blues also has something they call the Quade Diagram, which is a diagram that details the different relationships of various powers, so one can identify what other powers a given Heightened criminal could have, or if a given crime was committed by more than a single Heightened individual.

The mechanics for the GumShoe system are remarkably simple, so much so in fact that I find myself wondering if that’s all there is to it.  It might not be the best system for the min-maxing types, but it gets the job done, and the system is good enough to handle the kind of action (super-powered or otherwise) that the game demands.

I have to admit that getting this game is a good thing.  Aside from it being a good game, I’m being forced to expand my understanding of other games, broadening my familiarity with systems that I would otherwise would not have paid attention to.  That said, I’m glad that this game ended up in my hands, and I’m looking forward to being able to run a campaign.

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For those interested in checking it out, Mutant City Blues is available from DriveThruRPG for $20.95 or roughly Php 903.00

[Fantasy Craft] Adventure Companion Review Part 5: Conclusion

In the interest of disclosure, I would like to state that this review is made possible by the generosity of Patrick Kapera of Crafty-Games, who provided Life and Times of a Philippine Gamer with a PDF review copy of the Fantasy Craft Adventure Companion, the latest product from their excellent Fantasy Craft series.

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The Fantasy Craft Adventure Companion is one of those rpg supplements that really does have something for everyone.  The three Campaign Settings included in the book are all interesting and evocative, and cover a wide range of interests, whether or not your group prefers Sword & Sorcery, backstabbing politics or high adventure.  Even if you don’t particularly like any of the three options, the fact that the book goes one step further and pops open the hood to let you see how all three of them tick using the Fantasy Craft system is still worth having.  Furthermore, fans of the Fantasy Craft system will enjoy the plethora of options offered, improving the flexibility inherent in the corebook.  Players and GMs alike will likely find something that they can use.

If I do have any sort of criticism towards this product, I’d say that I wish they could have expanded the settings a little further.  Maybe there’s a future for all three of these settings as their own stand-alone products, but as they are, they feel like they’ve been cut down to fit the pagecount.  There’s a lot of potential to these settings, and I hope that Crafty-Games decides to spin any of these off to their own setting books.

Another point would be the fact that there were no rules on making your own Specialties or Human Talents.  While I believe there are guidelines for these on the wiki of Crafty-Games, having an “official” DIY would have been great.  This probably only matters to me since I’m still fiddling with my old Jianghu campaign setting on Fantasy Craft, and I would really have wanted a means to put together my own setting-specific Specialties and Talents.

Overall, I believe that the Fantasy Craft Adventure Companion is a must-have.  It expands the Fantasy Craft core rules, gives three distinct and well-done Campaign settings that can serve as examples or be used for play, and contains nearly all the new classes from Call to Arms.  If you were to buy only one supplement for Fantasy Craft, then I would strongly encourage you pick the Adventure Companion up.

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The Fantasy Craft Adventure Companion PDF is available now at DrivethruRPG for $14.99