b. Planets (cont’d)
The chapter concludes with descriptions of the lists of planet types, creature types, and creature abilities. I’m a little disappointed that some of the abilities seem to do the same thing (Armour lets you ignore kills once per encounter, and Ignore Wounds costs a Threat Token to ignore all kills for an encounter). Ok, just sort of the same things. But still, with a list of 20, to have a few doubled up on concept is disappointing.
It’s worth noting that my first impression of Planets being like Towns in Dogs is almost right. There’s no real situation from the aliens except to kill and die, but the missions can be a source of escalation.
c. An Example Planet
This chapter, 4 pages, goes into the creation of a Planet. Explains everything in order, and shows what the designer had in mind. I like this chapter.
d. An Example of Play
10 pages, including 4 of filled character sheets and one of story. Has an example mission on the planet given in (c). Reasonably well-written, and mechanically focused, I found this, though, to be the dryest chapter in the entire book. It didn’t even go into some of the interesting implications of the ruleset (flashbacks used to define the world as well as the character, the range bands being abstract can represent things like “close going to near” being ducking behind a thick wall…).
e. War Gear
Here’s my favourite chapter of the book, by far. 12 pages of kit, 3 of which are guns and other killy things. The later pages are taken up by vehicles and other officer kit, including Starkiller missiles (kills star systems), Orbital Bombardment, TPK bombs (not guaranteed to cause TPK), Paradise Bombs (almost guaranteed to cause TPK), and The Device (guaranteed to cause TPK).
There’s some hilarious things in here, like the blueberry and maple syrup flavoured cancer sticks. There’s some not as hilarious things in here, too.
It seems worth noting that “basic” guns (i.e. things that don’t have any special rules attached) have 5 “steps” above 0 in each range band. By my unscientific review, if it has special rules, then it is whatever is needed to model it. (This makes it easy to build guns that fit in with the rest of the equipment chapter, by the way)
f. Play Sheets
Here we have all the play sheets. Range map (though I think I like the one linked from the website, and also from the Navy combat article in Page XX better – plan to print it out and affix to a sheet of foamcore for size and sturdiness), planet sheets, character names, and character sheet are all provided here. I really like the character sheet as provided in the book.
Index and Colophon
Index is 2 pages, on a brief glance seems to cover anything you’d want to know. Colophon is a page of design notes, and mentions the two fonts used. So I shall mention the two fonts: I rather liked Old Claude for the headers, though the plain text font (Adobe Myriad Pro) seemed just kind of basic. It was apparently designed to be more readable, but I didn’t notice at all. At least it didn’t get in the way.
I’m a little disappointed in the covers for this book. But the same could be said for many softcovers. That is, that the front and back covers are now a little bent out of shape (not creased, just not “flat” anymore) after 2 days or so. That’s life with soft-covers, however.
I found the price point to be a bit high for production and text (15$ is where I feel it probably should live), but on the other hand, it’s got a lot more playable game than others I’ve paid twice or three times as much for, so on that count it’s a win.
Like I said before, the artwork is brilliant. Mignola-style “fill in your own detail” which really fits a setting painted with such a broad brush. The layouts and page design are very well done, aiding readability with nice margins and whitespace, with no gratuitous greyscale background which seems to be the standard in RPGs today, nice font-size, and no real border to speak of. Nothing gets in the way of the text and the game.
All in all, I think I would give it 5/5 if I were going by RPGnet’s categories, although, like I said, the price point is high for the physical thing – but not so high for the sheer awesome of the game. I really hope I get to play this.
[edit]For the record, I absolutely love the cover image. It’s brilliant: evocative without being overwhelming, indicating at first glance what the game is quite possibly about, and being intriguing – drawing the onlooker into checking into the book, to find out why the image is what it is.[/edit]
Laz