This is a slightly older product than Big Damn Heroes, which was already reviewed here.  It is a supplement for the Serenity RPG by Margaret Weis Games.  While it was touched up by Cam Banks, Jamie Chambers, and the usual collection of brown-coated rogues at MWG, the book was written by Lynn Blackson (who did the ship designs, and also did so on the Cortex RPG boards online), and Jason Durall.

The book, like the Adventures book, is a softcover, well bound, with black & white and grayscale printing internally.  The art is all good quality for the gaming industry by Lindsay Archer, and the ship designs presented were built with CG (I think I recall Lynn using Blender, but I could be wrong…)

The book is broken into two parts, Book 1 Guns & Gear — a general store of new and improved…well, guns and gear for the game.  Book 2 Ships and Crew provides art and stats for 26 new vessels (and crew for a few of them.)

Book 1 is probably the part I found most useful, which surprised me…I was sure it was going to be the ships.  There’s the general store with food and clothes, to religious icons, camo paint, to ships’s papers.   There’s an armory of hand weapons and guns from pistols to machineguns, specialized ammunition and weapons modifications (scopes, suppressors, etc.)  The techshop includes computers and other tech (including Niska’s torture spider!), drugs, and robots.  Most importantly, there’s a section on cybernetics.  Lastly, there’s a laundry list of services — from companions to lawyers, and the like.   Included is a section on livestock. (Not for service!  Get your mind out of the gutter…)

I think the inclusion of cybernetics is particularly useful.  Firefly never got a long enough run to give us a good look at the universe Whedon was creating, but the glimpses of the core worlds suggested that the technology in the Core was dramatically more advanced than the worlds Mal Reynolds and his crew visited.  It also allows the GM to give the ‘Verse a more science-fictiony accent to the Western ambiance.

Book 2 gives us ships.  There’s an Alliance cruiser, and their landing vehicles for tanks and troops seen in the pilot (the real one, not The Train Job.)  In addition to a few liners and freighters, there’s a special operations corvette and an industrial skyplex.  Several of the ships provided are meant to give the GM and players a ship and crew ready-made for pick up adventures or as NPCs.

Lastly in this section there are new weapons and ship traits.  They feel a bit tacked on, as if there were more they might have wanted to add, but ran long on the page count for the product.

Overall, Six-Shooters & Spaceships is a handy equipment guide for the players and GM of a Serenity game, but compared to the original core book or BDH that followed it, it’s a bit underwhelming.  There’s a lot of crunch in it, no doubt, but the softcover and grayscale make it the least appealing of the sourcebooks, thus far.

Still:  Style 3 out of 5, Substance 4 out of 5.  It’s worth it, if you’re running Serenity and this one is better in print than PDF, since they cost about the same.