Sundered Reaches

The Sundered Reaches is a 128 page black and white campaign setting from Fast Forward Entertainment. Taking place on a Mars that is both familiar and unique, Fast forward tries to capture the glory days of John Carpenter and other pulp-science fiction tales.

The material starts off with an introduction by the authors and then an introduction to the setting, including two full page maps that provide overview of the eastern and western hemispheres. This Mars was ruled by the Lumari, a race of beings without equal that were basically gods with super science who made Mars a paradise but vanished without trace one day, plunging Mars into a dark age where the planet itself seeks to kill its inhabitants through horrid weather and terrible monsters.

It quickly moves into the mechanics of the world. To start with, there are nine new races. Unlike other settings, but having much to do with basic D&D, these races are also classes, and each one fills a specific niche on this world.

One thing that may trouble some is that Fast Forward went with uneven stat bonuses, a deviation from the d20 standard where most are done in ranks of 2. Because Mars is a high powered setting, characters start off at 4th level. In a similar vein, there is a different experience point table, an easier one, that Martians follow. This allows the characters to progress quickly.

Another unusual thing is that these races have ability minimums and equivalent classes.. Now the equivalent classes are an interesting twists because if an outsider from another setting comes to Mars, they will change into their equivalent class. So many of the core classes, Wizards, Rogues, Bards, Clerics, Barbarians, Rangers and Sorcerers will change, but Fighters, Paladins, Druids and Monks will be okay.

The races range from the Asperri, the City Builders, the creature on the cover, to the more exotic Lastuki, furry ice miners, or the fur covered Ralind, forest dwellers who keep the peace there. Each one is tied into its ecology and is named such, like the Parehal, Plains Farmers. This allows each race to fill it's niche and provide broad strokes for the readers to grasp onto. Because each race is also it's own class, with advancement from 4th to 20th level, it does limit the player's ability to customize his character.

Each race includes the advancement chart and the details that go along with it. For example, looking at the Orid Nar, the Desert Riders, we see that they gain Lumari Feats (feats unique to the setting) at 6th,12th and 18th level, as well as special modifications to their own abilities like a Paralyzing Spit.

One thing that disappoints is that the section on transported characters has no root cause. It can happen just for sheer variety, through the use of gates or in higher tech series, whatever the GM desires from physical crash landings to worm holes. A little unsatisfactory in a Ravenloft type of manner, going against the method Fast Forward used for their other setting, Dungeon World, but one that works.

Skills are covered and provide new uses for players native to Mars. With Appraise, you can guess about functions on the artifacts left by the superior Lumari people. More detailed are the new feats, many of which relate to the magic system and strangeness of the setting. Bloodburn allows a spontaneous caster to add his Charisma bonus in levels to his effective casting level but takes 1d6 points of damage per level increase while Defensive Rage negates the armor class penalty of a character in a rage. Some of the feats are specific Lumari feats like Great Regenreation where you add your Constitution modifier to the hit points you regenerate or Increased Spell Resistance that grants a +2 bonus to your SR.

Because the old rulers mastered Mars with no equals, their technology isn't easy to understand. A flowchart and quick rules to cover complexity, allow the GM to quickly determine what functions, if any, a party can learn to utilize from the old Lumari ruins.

Those looking for custom equipment may want to hunt down a Crystal Blade, an edge weapon so sharp that it's +3 and counts as Keen in addition to ignoring the first 10 points of hardness in anything it strikes or strap on some Wristblades so that if they ever lose their primary weapon, they have a quick backup. The equipment section provides local costs in a silver economy but fails to illustrate the new materials. What does a Crystal Sword look like? How does the lacquered wood armor or the parehla armor appear? No illustrations.

Now the interesting thing about Sundered Reach spellcasters is that they must pick a location for their hidden eye, a mystical device used to focus their spellcasting powers. This hidden eye must be protected because if it's damage, the caster must make a concentration check to cast spells and heaven help you if that part of your body is destroyed because then you can't cast spells until you attune that hidden eye to another part of your body, a lengthy process.

One of the things that makes Mars a harsh place is that magic doesn't last. Bonuses fade with time as the environment strips away the enchantments. The good news though is that if you can find any of the old Lumari material, those artifacts will last forever. This makes having a player choose to take item creation feats a double negative as they lose experience points in the first place for crafting the item and then the item itself fades away.

Those looking for specific Lumari devices get several examples with complexity ratings and an intented and alternative use. This allows the GM to surprise the players with strange devices and allows the players to get multiple uses out of the same items. A win-win situation.

The Red Planet chapter provides details on the different areas of Mars, including the Living Crystal Cities of the Lumari but doesn't go into any real depth. For example, there are no maps of any of these cities. No starting or home point for characters to check in so to speak. One good thing about the setting is that if you've got a hankering for dungeon crawling or exploration, there are a ton of ruins to explore and take advantage of.

GMs wishing to spice up encounters for his Martian players will enjoy the new creatures. The most savage and strong of those would be the dragons of mars, creatures that don't resemble the standard D&D ones in almost any way but their power. The amphibian and arachnid dragons will add a new appreciation for the terms “Run Away” when the players encounter them, although the Dark Glider, a predator with a spiked tail that impales its victims and flies away with them or the desicant, a huge water stealing monster, won't let them get too assured of themselves when they do escape that dragon.

Those wondering what to do with the setting have several adventure nuggests, partially fleshed out ideas with suggestions on how to get a campaign started.

Interior art is a flashback to 2nd edition in many ways as the work is handled by Steve Bryant, Jim Holloway, Phil Renne and William W. Connors. Layout is standard two column with one inch borders on top and outside border. Editing is fair.

To get a four star rating, interior covers would have to be used. The black and white reproduction of the cover on the interior page, despite looking better than the actual cover in my opinion, does nothing for the book and needs to be removed. There would need to be some sort of starting base, home, or city for the characters, a common ground if you will. The licenses, OGL, would have to be reduced from three pages to one. The three pages of advertising removed. While it's good to have the brief introduction to the races and then the races themselves, this is repetitive and the races should stand on their own unless they're going to be written up in a Monster Manual format.

One of the problems Sundered Reaches faces is competition. While Oathbound by Bastion Press doesn't directly have the same elements of Pulp Science Fiction to it, there are many similarities. Each assumes the characters are powerful beings, Oathbound recommends 7th level while Sundered Reaches 4th. Oathbound has Prestige Races while Sundered Reaches has unique races that characters morph into. In such a contest, Oathbound, with it's largest size, greater detail, hardcover format, full color interior and on-line support, wins hands down. On the other end, there's Iron Lords of Jupiter in Dungeon 101, a full color mini-game, a direct competitor that adds on to d20 Modern and is very inexpensive. Not that this product is overpriced at 128 pages for $24.99, but many of these FFG products used to be hardcover for that price and this one is softcover.

Sundered Reaches is better than many Fast Forward's older products but needs more depth, detail and material to get the most out of it. Those looking for a science-fiction setting that want a campaign using the d20 fantasy rules may want to check it out.

Sundered Reaches breaks new ground in high-level fantasy gaming. This unique d20 campaign setting presents the perfect challenge for players who have been there and done that. Characters can be drawn to the Red Planet from any other d20 campaign or created anew. Sometimes newly arrived characters walk unchanged onto the Red Planet, but just as often they are reshaped into entirely new life forms. Every Martian mile presents its own new and deadly encounters! The creatures that walk the Red Planet are fierce and every corner of the planet is shrouded in mystery. GMs and players alike will have the time of their lives exploring and shaping this new world!

Sundered Reaches

"'The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one' he said. But still they come!"

In this case, something goes to Mars. The d20 system. While it's not the Mars of H.G. Wells' Martians, it is a Mars somewhat inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB) Mars, aka Barsoom. (They really could have come up with a better name than "Sundered Reaches", which is generic enough to apply to just about anything).

One of my earliest memories as a gamer was reading an article by Jim Ward in Dragon magazine about random treasure and buildings in Barsoom. That really captured my childhood imagination, though I was never a huge fan of the Barsoom books. But anyway, when I heard about this, I was intrigued. Though I never heard much, this flew under the radar, somewhat.

It's a weird product. It's d20, but it's not Dungeons and Dragons, 3rd edition (or 3.5). It's closer to the old sort of basic dungeon & dragons, in that each "race" is also a "class". But just like that product, most of the racial classes are like existing classes. Much like the "Dwarf" was simply a fighter or the Elf a "Fighter/Wizard", each Martian race is basically an existing class. There is some variation from the class they are patterned after, but not much.

Most of the variation comes from things that probably shouldn't have been changed. Like Hit Dice. Instead of the usual one dice rolled, a d6, a d4, a d12, etc, it's not uncommon to see 2d6, 3d4, 1d4+2, etc. Weird. And generally pointless.

Also weird is that all characters start at at least 4th level. All the charts for the race/classes start at 4th level, so even if you wanted to start at first, or use them in another d20 game, you really couldn't (you could reverse engineer the save and attack progressions, but you'd be out the special abilities).

It gets a bit weirder. While aliens don't have a class per se, they can somehow multiclass, like in regular d20, or at least the book says they can. Unfortunately, because all the race/class charts start at 4th level, not 1st, you cannot actually do this in practice.

Like a lot of Fast Forward products, I have to wonder, did anyone actually sit down and play this? Did anyone even sit down and read it? So while the rules aren't unplayable, they're pretty bad.

So, what about the setting aspect to it? Well, it's not much better, though this is probably more subjective.

The Martian races are all extremely alien, except for one, the "Slave" race, which is first described as being like Cro-Magnon man (which is basically, well, us), then as Neanderthal man. Though the pictures look like neither.

Besides them, there are the Asperi, the City Builders. They look like the stereotypical "Grey" alien, only they're blue, have fins on their head, and have 2 tentacles or feelers where a human male would have a mustache.

There's the Basintro, which sort of look like Yul Brynner if he were a mummy. The Falor, which also sort of look like Greys except they are short and furry and are actually plants (kind of like the Baldwins). The Lastuki, which look like one of the Gorillas from Planet of the Apes. Then there is the Nekarr, which look like really tall human mummies, sort of shriveled up a bit.

The Orid Nar kinda look like the Martians from the 1953 War of the Worlds. Triped, 3 eyes, but sort of lizard-like. There's the Parehla, a 10 legged, 3 armed, 10 foot tall race. While ideally suited to play basketball, they are in fact farmers. The Rahind are a fairly human looking race, except they are covered in feathers. (They're also hippies)

I didn't find any of the races particularly interesting, and in fact, many of them are repellent.

The setting of Mars only gets about 10 or so pages of description, a very general overview. There are about 10 new creatures, all of which seem to be some variation on a worm or arachnid. There is a section on Martian dragons, but of the many mentioned, only 2 are statted (1 of which is actually the "Arachnid Dragon" the other basically being a giant frog).

There are also some "Adventure Seeds" at the end of the book, but they are very bare bones and somewhat oddly written. So much so that I wonder if they were simply notes on what should go there, or a placeholder accidentally included in the final copy, somewhat like what happened with the old D6 rulebook.

Probably the most interesting part of the book are the artifacts of the "Star People", who are the ones who originally built up Martian civilization. There's a Gamma World-ish sort of chart on how to figure out how to use them. Except, the chart is something of a puzzle. At I failed on my roll to figure it out.

Unfortunately, while it gives an example of how it's used, the example is for the simplest possible artifact (which only uses the first row of the chart). It then says that the rest of the chart works like the first part, but it clearly doesn't.

Basically, it's 3 columns for the first row, each with a range (0-4, 7-20, 5-6) , and you roll a d20, then add the characters Int bonus. There's a good result, and two other results. After the first row, it's basically 5 columns, with lines going every where. It's impossible to tell which ranges are for what, which direction the flow chart goes (not all of the lines have arrows), and all the boxes seem to end up going to result "F", which is something bad, or "1" which is apparently the top of the chart. The directions on how to use the chart refers to "Ovals", but the chart has no ovals, only rectangles.

So, I really couldn't figure it out. The actual devices themselves are fairly interesting (my favorite is the dimensional doorknob, which is hard to explain), and could possibly be used in any setting, but there are only 8 of them.


All in all, this is a very disappointing product, being quite awful. While not the worst d20 product ever made, it's the worst product I've seen this year (2003). F

The main trouble is (besides the odd implementation of the d20 rules), other than descriptions of the races, there is very little detail about Mars itself. A planetary map of the place that is hard to read because it's blurry, and about 15 pages of description. So the GM will have to start almost completely from scratch.

Furthermore, the races themselves are not terribly appealing. Part of the appeal of going to Mars, at least in the ERB stories, was that despite the fact that they were egg bearing, some of the aliens were fairly human looking. Would John Carter have found Mars to be appealing without Dejah Thoris? Probably not. I suppose he could have found a cute Neanderthal lady if he went to this Mars, but I dunno.

Lastly, there is the price. It's a 128 page book, priced at $24.99, kind of expensive. But unlike some companies that have expensive books, the physical quality is fairly poor, and the font size is quite large. They take 3 pages to include the OGL (and bizarrely, they include the d20 STL itself, which was required in the very early versions of the d20 STL, before it was available to the public, but was changed to not needing it just after public release, something like 3 years ago), plus another 3 pages for ads, plus some more pages on a "preface" which basically tells you the life story of the guy who came up with the idea, like anyone really cares. So you don't get much value for your money. I paid $6, total ($2 + $4 S&H on ebay), so I don't feel ripped off, but I would be downright stomping mad if I paid full price.

The single best thing in the book is an illustration by Jim Holloway (of early TSR and 1st edition Paranoia fame) depicting a WW2 G.I. lighting his cigarette off of what looks like a Jedi's lightsaber. Unfortunately, that's about the only good thing in the book.

this is a great review *wipes his eyes*

heh, I don't know what to say about Fast Forward products except that I wouldn't wish them on my worst enemy.

Here's my question: How do they stay in business? The law of survival ought to be coming into effect and yet...*ack*...

From what I understand, they are on the bubble. They have lost a few partners in the last 3 or 4 months as well.