It shouldn't be much of a shock to people that I am more of a fan of science fiction than fantasy. And probably because of the fact that my tastes have always been more defined by my reading comics than the classics of the genre, I don't sweat about the science in my science fiction. Laser swords. Explosions in space. Kidnapped space royalty. Robots. Space battles. I can't get enough of that stuff. My ideals for science fiction tend towards Metal Hurlant (I like the original French name of the magazine better because it causes less confusion with the music genre), The Incal, Valerian and Laureline and Judge Dredd than Asimov and Clarke. In this vein, I decided to talk about the Bulldogs! science fiction role-playing game from Galileo Games, and using the Fate Core rules, today.
Today I ordered my ticket for the summer movie that I've been looking forward to for a while, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. In case you don't know, this is the new science fiction movie from director Luc Besson and based on the French comic Valerian et Laureline by writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mezieres. Mexieres previously worked with Besson as a production designer on the movie The Fifth Element with fellow French comic artist Jean Giraud. At the time, Besson wanted to direct an adaptation of Valerian, but didn't feel that movie effects were ready for what he wanted.
All of this is a warm up for why I am interested in a game like Bulldogs. The game takes place in frontier space, that part of any science fiction setting where the various (usually oppressive) governments have less power, and the people work out for themselves how things run. Since role-playing games tend to be about packs of rugged individualists, this sort of setting works well in gaming. If you want to start your game with "The characters meet in a tavern…" you can do that as easily in the seedy part of space as you can in the bad part of a fantasy city.
There are a few large groups at play in the game's default setting. This means that there's plenty of opportunity for conflicts to be going on in the background, which gives a lot of moving parts for players to latch their characters onto in a campaign. The first step when interacting with any game is always "What do I do in this game?" Bulldogs! answers with "a lot of things." The default assumption is that characters will be employees of the Pangalactic Corporations, an interstellar conglomerations of a legal (and semi-legal) variety. They will be agents and operatives of the company, and the campaign can revolve around the missions that their bosses will assign to them. This can make it easy on the game master when it comes to campaign design.
The default idea is that the characters are the crew of a starship, which isn't unusual for a science fiction role-playing game, but the Fate Core character creation rules are customized with an eye towards this. There are also a variety of alien races available in the core rules, so there are plenty of starting options for characters. One thing that is interesting about Bulldogs! is that there isn't a generic human example among the 10 starting alien types. This makes sense with Fate Core, because character creation in the game doesn't assume a baseline like many other games do. This also means that you can create aliens that are more than just humans with a skin color change.
If there is a fault, it is that I would have liked to have seen some sample stunts that were built to help customize the alien races and personalize their final implementations into the player characters.
One way that the Fate Core rules are customized for Bulldogs! is that the four basic actions are split into five. The Create Advantage action from Fate Core is split into a Create Advantage action and a Discover action. I think this is a good idea because packing both of these ideas into the Create Advantage action does sometimes trip people up in play. The "discover" part of the Create Advantage action can get forgotten during play. By giving Discover its own action you open up the option of giving investigation some mechanical weight during a campaign, and that means more things that you can do during play. For those not familiar with Fate Core, the idea of the Create Advantage action is that it allows you to create new aspects on a scene, or discover ones that are already there. This gives more options of aspects to compel or invoke during play, mechanically, and in play it helps to better describe a scene to characters. The trouble is that players sometimes stop at the "create" part, because it is there on the tin, and neglect the discovery part. That means that parts of scenes can go undiscovered by characters, or players. Splitting them into two is a good design choice that I will explore more deeply in my own games.
If you know Fate Core you can pick up Bulldogs! and play it with ease. If you are interested in a science fiction game, but haven't yet played a Fate game, this is a good place to start. The rules are well explained and don't assume that you already have a system mastery of Fate Core. The pulp science fiction of the setting mixes well with Fate, because the system is one of the best available for doing pulpy action. A Fate game assumes that characters will be larger than life and competent, and that is a good fit with the setting of Bulldogs!. Bulldogs! is also a slim volume that avoids the "add an abundance of mechanical options" that can plague a lot of games. I think this contributes to the new user friendliness of the game. Bulldogs! is a 6x9 page size book with just a little over two hundred pages. It won't be scary to a new user.
The game isn't brand new, this is the third version of Bulldogs! to be released. The game had previously been released as a D20 game, and then revised for the 3rd edition Fate rules (built off of the popular Spirit of the Century game). This is the strongest version of the game. With each version the authors have refined their vision of the setting, and learned how to bring out the setting with a game's mechanics. Everything that you need to play is contained in this book. If you're looking for a role-playing game to scratch that The Fifth Element/Metal Hurlant/Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets mode, you should really check out Bulldogs! because it really nails that aesthetic. I know that it will be the engine for a lot of my science fiction games going forward from here.
