The Black Campbell

Been a couple of days since I’ve done any serious posting due to a particularly nasty little flu bug I picked up over a week ago.  Without further ado:  Big Damn Heroes by Margaret Weis Games for the Serenity RPG line.

I was a bit too broke to buy the book, itself, so this is a review of the .pdf version of the book, purchased at DriveThruRPG.com .  It is my understanding the new sourcebook is hardback, as was the core book, and for me, that is a welcome change from the paperback bound Adventures and Six shooters and Spaceships, which I might review tomorrow.

First, it’s a good Acrobat file, complete with page previews and bookmarks at the chapter headings and table of contents.  (It’s also a hefty file at 42ish mb.)  The artwork is comprised of screencaps at the chapter headings or a places in the text, or middling quality artwork you would expect from role playing game books.  (The bar got lifted for me by Eclipse Phase which is simple gorgeous to look at…)

Chapter 1 is concerned with character creation and is a rehash of the original Serenity rules (Cortex 1.0), but adds ideas for creating the crew of your ship collectively by including built in relationships, and rules to cover these.  Over the years, I’ve found it’s a good idea to build the characters for a campaign at the same time and to give them some ready-made hooks for why they’re together — similar motivations, romantic or filial relationships, similar duty postings, what have you…  This chapter details rules to try and aid the GM and players in establishing solid characters with relationship webs similar to what we see onscreen in Firefly and Serenity.  For some gaming groups, this won’t be necessary.  For others, it will be a big help.

Chapter 2 brings in new Character Traits, as well as a means to use the Cortex 2.0 (Galactica and the new Cortex core rules) trait mechanism of a die, rather than die steps based on whether the trait is a minor or major trait.  Also, there are guidelines for transferring your game from the old step-based triats to the die based ones. (One of the first things I did for my campaign with the BSG rules came out.)

The new traits are setting-specific in their name to aid in the flavor of the game, and will help give players interesting role playing hooks for their characters.  The new die-based traits give them more impact, macheanically, through the use of a third die (rather than modifying either the attribute or skill die.)  This give the player at least an extra one to a test roll.  If you’ve had a chance to use Cortex, this can matter a great deal, as the difficulty ratings for Easy to Hard tasks ranges from 3 to 11; an extra +1 or more almost always assures you hit an average and guarantees an easy result.

Skills and attributes are also better explained than in the core book, and modified rules for how to use skills are included.  In many ways, you can think of these chapters as a new, improved “Player’s Guide” for Serenity with enhanced rules to bring it in line with Cortex 2.0, but also to make it more house-rules friendly.

Chapter 3 is more of the “GM Guide” for the system, with a great deal of material on dealing with failures, botches, and degrees of success in tests.  There’s suggestions for how to use plot points, which are supposed to be given freely in the Cortex system, and used heavily not just for modifying your rolls, getting out of death, but also for tweaking the storyline itself.

It adds new material on aerial and space combat — something that was missing in Serenity, but in many ways that oversight fit with the setting.  In Firefly, there was almost no space combat, and the sense was that the weaponry of the Alliance, coupled with the enviroment (space) made combat a monumentally bad idea.  Serenity brought us big space battles, and Big Damn Heroes tries to build on this with some success.

There are rules for mass combat (the main reason I wanted the book), but they are a bit disappointing and feel like an afterthought.  Despite this, I could see some of the lines of thinking the authors had, and a few messed with house rules I had established for large-scale combat in our Galactica campaign.  A more elaborate set of rules could be cobbled together and still have the loose, story-driven feeling they are going for.  (It would make for an excellent .pdf extra on the website, Mr. Chambers & co!)

The chapter includes rules for modifying your spacecraft, equipment, and even building the same from scratch.  There’s more on combat, healing, etc. that brings Serenity in line with Cortex 2.0.  Essentially, this is the Cortex 2.0 version of the corebook to this point.

Chapter 4 is a delight (for me.)  It is a massive collection of pre-generated NPC archetypes that you could meet, including heroes and villains from both the movie and the original Firefly series!  Finally, we get to see numbers of Badger, Saffron, Niska, Jubal Early, etc.

Chapter 5 is another GM-oriented chapter going into tips for storytelling int he ‘Verse, including allowing players to gain Traits and Complications (or buy them off.)  There are suggestions for using, giving, and interpreting use of plot points, as well as suggestions for types of campaigns, and adventure seeds.  There’s about 6 pages of charts to help randomly create moons and planets of the ‘Verse and their communities, how they will react to the characters, and the like.  This could be very handy in pick-up games, or on weeks where you just didn’t have the time to cobble together more than a basic idea of what the players were going to get to do that session.

Chapter 6 goes into the Chinese culture, legal and governmental ideas, and includes some guidelines on how players might get into government.   There are some ideas on how Chinese culture might manifest on some of the worlds of the ‘Verse, and of course, there is information on the Tongs, including some of the gangs and their primary figures.  Lastly, there are a few more pages of Chinese slang and terms for the players to use.

This is a useful sourcebook, even if one chooses to stick with Cortex 1.0.  The new traits are set up for either iteration of the system, and for GMs it’s worth it just for Chapter 3 and 4.  This product doesn’t feel as rushed and unpolished as previous books for the Serenity line, and for this I give the style a 3.5 out of 5.  It’s only due to the average art quality that it doesn’t get a higher mark from me.  The substance is tops, however: 4 out of 5.

If you’re playing Serenity, the .pdf is definitely worth the $25.  The hardcover would be a bit pricey for what you get at $40, but if paper and binding quality are on par with the original corebook, I would suggest “buy it.”

In the links list is Victoriana, by Cubicle 7 Entertainment.  I worked on most of the books for this line, from the core rulebook (I did the obligatory short story to set the mood…), the entirety of The Smoke, and quite a bit of the Faulkner’s Guide.

Also, two of the fan-made sourcebooks for Decipher’s Star Trek RPG can be found on Patrck Goodman’s site .  Just scroll to the bottom of the page.  Both are character generation books, one with aliens from the first few movies, and the second deals with artificial lifeforms.

My thanks to Daniel Potter, who laid them out and made them look all nicey-nice.

Thanks to friends, I was able to score one of the first 100 copies of Eclipse Phase in the country.  This is a new “transhuman” science fiction role playing game produced by Catalyst.

First off, the production value of the book is incredible.  It is a 400-page hardcover with glossy heavy paper.  The entire book is in color, with top-notch artwork by Stephen Martiniere.  The book is broken out into setting, the mechanics of the system, and a large portion on the technology and ideas of the singularity and transhuman science.  It’s a beautiful book and well worth the money.

The book begins with the obligatory short story, Lack, to give you a feel for the setting.  It is well written and paced, but the language a bit “blue” for younger readers that I put down to the author trying too hard to be edgy.

Under the heading “A Time of Eclipse”, there is a history of the world from today to the setting period — ten years after the Fall, when the Titans (powerful AIs) either went mad/malfunctioned/or rebelled and destroyed much of the life on Earth.  Following the Fall, transhumanity has spread out throughout the solar system.  The cultural trends of setting are covered, from the fear of potent artificial intelligences, to the new notions of privacy, to the gender and sexual mores.   There is a section on the new economies, where a person’s reputation is more important to gaining materials, rather than money, thanks to nano-scale production which has made most items so cheap to produce that wealth is of little importance.  Political blocks and hypercorporations are detailed.

The setting is rich and novel, compared to most sci-fi game settings.  The universe allows for nearly any kind of storytelling, including space exploration through the “Pandora Gates” — wormholes discovered on several worlsds that allow for instantaneous travel to other solar systems. (Think Stargate, but creepier…)

However, there is a kludged quality to it, that makes me suspect Eclipse Phase started life as a Shadowrun campaign.  The hypercorps provide a vestigial cyberpunk quality, and the mechanics are designed to incorporate elements of Lovecraft horror.  The technology of EP is powerful and frightening, but I find the combination a bit forced.  Regardless, there’s a lot to like about EP.

The mechanics of the system are fairly simple:  tests are rolled with d100, and to succeed the player must get lower than their score in a skill.  The modifiers to rolls are in increments of 10, up to plus/minus 30.  Doubles give a critical success or failure, if you scored under or over your skill score respectively.  This is apparently the same system as the new edition Shadowrun.  Combat is a bit more complex.

Character creation is a bear; no way around it.  The player has to come up with a background (for instances “original space settler” or “uplifted animal”), and a faction (hypercorp, Venusian, or what have you) to represent your political bent.  You then crawl through a long series of tables and bust out a calculator to put together the attributes and skills of your character, before choosing a “morph” — the physical form of your character.

On of the main ideas of EP, and one of the most alluring, is the idea that you can change your form on the fly.  Traveling from Luna to one ofthe Jupiter colones?  It’s too expensive and time-consuming to go by spacecraft.  Just shoot your “ego” to the destination and drop it in a rental body.  The problem with the EP character design is that you build a baseline “you”, which is modified by whatever body you are in. So if you are in a combat android body, you have modifiers to your original stats…if you’re a 90 pound weakling and clumsy, that will still hamper your use of the new body.

More effective would have been to build your mental abilities and skill sets separate from the physical form, entirely.

There is an extensive chunk of the book given to the “mesh” (their version of cyberspace), and the nature of AI, infolife, hacking (including hacking people’s cyberbrains.)  This is easily the strongest part of the book, and could be ripped and modified to be used in just about any cyberpunk/modern/sci-fi settings.

As if this ability to mess with people’s minds wasn’t enough, the authors have included a section on Psi — my least favorite trope of science fiction.  Psi can be acquired through a certain disease, the Exsurgent virus, left behind by the Titans.  I think the setting is stronger without it.

Overall, the style of the book is phenomenal, easily a 5 out of 5, and the setting is stylistically complex and solid (4 out of 5.)  The system is simple enough until one gets to combat, and character creation is a nightmare of GURPS/Hero system levels.  For those that like to pop out a character and get on with playing in a night…tough luck.  Generation took almost two hours for the first character, and about an hour for the second.  System earns a 2.5 out of 5, from me.

For the last two years or so, I’ve been running a couple of campaigns using the Margaret Weis (soon to be Signal Fire) Cortex system.  the first campaign was in the Firefly/Serenity universe, and used the original Cortex rules set (Cortex 1.0, if you will…)  The other is a Battlestar Galactica campaign in the newer (and I think, improved) version of the rules.

The Cortex general rules set came out last year, and is a setting-free presentation of the rules set.  The design of the book itself is minimalist and neither lends nor detracts from the material itself.  The cover is a simple, abstract design that looks like neural ganglia in blue on black (green on black if you got a GenCon pre-release like mine.)

The rules are simple and the system is one of the few that, like Storyteller by White Wolf, are designed to enhance story and character, rather than as a tactical minis game with character elements bolted to it (D&D, any version…)  Character creation is quick and easy, and my group has been able to whip up a decently fleshed out idea in under 20 minutes.  The basic mechanic is an attribute die+skill die vs. a difficulty number (usually between 3 and 11, but sometimes going much higher.)  Added can be a die from a trait or a complication (the complications add to your difficulty.)

Like D&D, Cortex gives you multiple dice to roll, which is both fun and provides an interesting set of probability curves.  (I personally hate the flat curve of a single d20.)  The dice are d2-d12 (no d20, but you could bolt those on, quite easily, if you had to have them.)

Combat can be very quick and brutal, and Cortex makes heavy use of plot points — with which you can cut damage, improve rolls, or directly influence the story.  They are meant to be given freely if the players are hitting character points, aiding in the direction of the story, bring food to the game, what have you.  I even give ’em out for good one-liners.

Vehicle and creature design are done as per characters, and originally lend a nice “ship as character” quality in the Serenity version of the system.  In science-fiction series, often the ship is character in and of itself ( Enterprise might not be sentient in Star Trek, but she is very much a character of her own, often providing motivation to Captain Kirk, just as Serenity is Mal Reynold’s love interest in Firefly.)  With scaling rules, there are personal/character scale, a vehicle scale, and a capital ship scale, but the stats are the same for person, your specialized Trans Am or beloved fighter, and your big-@ss starship.  There are rules for kludging together intermediate scales for superhero and fantasy campaigns, as well.

The main rulebook provides a few campaign ideas, but no sample adventure for the reader.  I did not find this a problem, as I rarely if ever run modules or adventures, but for first timers or other players, this might seem an oversight.

Overall, the system pulls a 4 out of 5 clan badges from me, with the style of the book pulling 2.5.  It’s not pretty, per se, but Cortex is well worth the money for someone looking to use a simple set of mechanics designed to enhance role playing.