d20 Future Tech
By Rodney Thompson and JD Wiker
Wizards of the Coast product number 953967400
96 pages, $19.95
Again, I feel it necessary to start this review with an explanation of my own biases. I'm pretty much a straight "D&D/d20 Fantasy" guy, and I haven't ventured into the realms of
d20 Modern or
d20 Future. I understand that much of the rules base is very similar, and if I had a mind to do so I'm sure I could pick up the system rather easily, but I prefer to spend my ever-limited gaming time sticking to what I like best: D&D. So why, you may ask, am I doing a review of
d20 Future Tech, a game supplement that tacks on new rules to the
d20 Future game? Quite simply: because I'm on the list of people that Wizards of the Coast sends review materials to, and I feel that if they're going to send me stuff the very least I can do is review the material that was given to me. So, with that out of the way, let's move on to my impressions of the game product.
The cover art is by Kalman Andrasofsky, depicting a trio of 3 armored figures: a helmeted woman in some sort of flight gear, a man holding a gun and wearing what might be some type of riot gear, and an insectoid alien (possibly a Vrusk from the old TSR
Star Frontiers game) holding a wide variety of heavy weapons. On the back cover, the same three are engaged in typical action scenes: the woman is piloting a space vessel, the man is fighting off skull-helmeted agents, and the alien is firing at some massive tick/crab/spider alien. The artwork is reminiscent of something you'd see in a comic book, and feels appropriate to the subject matter.
The interior artwork consists of 52 full-color illustrations by 10 different artists, also done in a "comic book style" for the most part. My favorites were Jeffrey Carlisle's starfighters on page 51 and destroyers on page 53 (he did one ship each from six different alien races, and made each look sufficiently different from each other and yet similar enough to the other vessel of the same race that it seems readily apparent which race made which), Francis Tsai's battleworn bomber on page 44, and the various weapons and equipment on pages 14 and 20 (Warren Mahey) and 19 and 27 (Joel Thomas), which look realistic enough that they reminded me of the old
Punisher's Armory comics from several years back.
As for the content of the book itself,
d20 Future Tech is a self-proclaimed add-on to the
d20 Future game, containing material that was "bumped" out of the base book due to lack of room as well as other material that the authors thought up after
d20 Future had already gone to print. In that respect, it's much more a companion piece to
d20 Future than the only other product I've personally seen in that line,
d20 Apocalypse.
Chapter One contains a whole slew of personal gear (categorized as weapons, ammunition, armor, equipment, computers, and psitech), with what I thought was kind of a cool idea: "gadgets" and "flaws" that can be applied to existing gear to either make it better (and more expensive) or slightly less effective (but cheaper). In effect, these are "templates" that can be added to preexisting gear, making for a much wider range of choices without having to specify a dozen different types of, say, flechette pistols. I found it somewhat amusing that much of the new equipment listed seems to have been taken directly from D&D: the midnighter grenade is a technological
darkness spell, for instance; the superadhesive grenade is a tanglefoot bag in a different form; superlube grenades are equivalent to
grease spells; the digital holster/scabbard seems pretty much like a
glove of storing. Others, like the grav-glob gun, seem to have been patterned after specific pieces of equipment from various movies and TV shows. (Remember in
The Invincibles when those expanding sticky-blobs weigh down Mr. Incredible as he tries to escape from the villain's lair? Similarly, the autoport and transmogrifier illustrated on page 27 both seem very similar to the devices on two different
Red Dwarf episodes.) The equipment is categorized in different Progress Levels (ranging from PL 6, the Fusion Age, when ranged energy weapons first become feasible, to PL 9, the Energy Age, which features a limitless power supply), so much of it will only be available in areas of the appropriate Progress Level - you wouldn't likely find a "blackhole singularity shield" (PL 9) in a campaign set on Earth in the year 2012, for example. (We're apparently at PL 5, the Information Age.) The chapter finishes off with equipment packages, a sort of "bulk order" deal for
d20 Future characters to grab-and-go, designed to be logical equipment choices for a character of that type (athlete, blue collar worker, doctor, scientist, etc.) so the player doesn't have to waste a whole lot of time going through the equipment lists during character design.
Chapter Two has advanced starship rules, with a checklist on how to design a new starship type from the ground up, and 10 new starship types: the drone, escape pod, bomber, drop ship, light freighter, blockade runner, maintenance tug, ravager, flagship, and fortress ship. At a guess, I'd say that much of this material was stuff that was chopped out of
d20 Future for lack of room, as I'd think many of these starship types were pretty basic. Likewise, I'm
very surprised that the concept of "starship shields" is being addressed here for the first time!
Chapter Three is called "Systems," and it covers things like communication, identification/security, advertising/marketing, health care, home life, and travel. In other words, it's more focused on creating the backdrop of the campaign world, so the players get a feel for the types of things that their characters should pretty much take for granted.
Chapter Four is about mecha, and like the starship chapter I get the feeling that much of this material fell into the "bumped due to space limitations" camp. There are some new base models for mecha, rules for "transforming" mecha (for those of you that want to run a Transformer or Voltron unit), and 5 new samples. I also got a kick out of the rules for throwing large objects; apparently until now there weren't rules for picking up a Greyhound bus and hurling it at your opponent!
Chapter Five is about Robotics, and features 11 new robotic feats, 10 robot accessories, and 7 new sample robots. There's also an interesting discussion at the beginning of the chapter about the ins and outs of running robot PCs, and the fine-tuning of level adjustments, something that many GMs (understandably!) are probably having a bit of trouble with.
Chapter Six is "Combat," but presumably the
d20 Future book covers that pretty thoroughly, because this short chapter (four and a half pages) is mostly about running combat between different scales - human vs. mecha, human vs. vehicle, mecha vs. starship, etc. - where there are different movement rates and "square" sizes involved. (For example, apparently the starship rules have squares that are 500 ft. instead of the standard 5-ft. squares at the PC level.)
Obviously, I'm not going to be able to do my standard assessment of the stat blocks in
d20 Future Tech; not only am I shaky on the standard rules where they deviate from the D&D rules, but there are apparently special rules for robots and mecha that deviate from the standard
d20 Modern rules (it's my understanding that
d20 Future is based on
d20 Modern) - things like certain robots getting a "sensor" bonus to Initiative and things like that. I did notice a few things that seemed "off" in a couple of the stats, but I'm not confident enough in my abilities here to try to analyze them. There aren't that many stat blocks in the book, anyway.
However, I
do feel confident enough in my abilities to render an assessment of the proofreading and editing jobs in
d20 Future Tech, and they're emphatically bad for a Wizards of the Coast book. This was particularly surprising to me since apparently a good chunk of the book was written for the
d20 Future book and just got bumped; you'd think that there would have been even
more time than normal to do a proper proofreading job on material that had been around as long as much of this was. However,
d20 Future tech is riddled with all kinds of amateur mistakes like obvious typos ("selctedxv" instead of "selected," "nanrounds" instead of "nanorounds," "slot\" instead of "slot," "arre" instead of "are," "grabd" instead of "grabs," "attemptin" instead of "attempting," "movment" instead of "movement"), incorrect word usage (ZPE stands for "Zero Point Energy," but one of the new items is a "Zero Point
Battery (ZPE) Battery"), extraneous words ("these actions are be supplemental...") or incorrect words ("can attacks" instead of "can attack," "the chemical combine" instead of "the chemicals combine") in a sentence, incorrect hyphenation between two lines ("electrowhip" should be split as "electro-whip," not "electrow-hip"), failure to stick to standard conventions (capitalize the names of abilities, like "Strength"), and spacing errors merging two words into one ("whichcan," "cutsin," "theymagnetically") or otherwise making editor Tammie Webb Ryan and editing manager Kim Mohan look somewhat foolish or at least lackadaisical (one sentence has a space
before the comma instead of after it, which looks particularly silly in a supposedly professional product). There are also some layout issues, like an extraneous tab bumping the text over too far in a chart and a couple of instances where things elsewhere in the book are referenced incorrectly (like "(see page 15)" when the information is on page 16 or sending the reader to Table 1-10 for information that's over on Table 1-9). All in all, this one of the poorer proofreading/editing jobs I've seen in recent Wizards of the Coast books, and they're usually at the high end of the scale. I notice that they've already released errata for
d20 Future Tech (available at
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20modern/article/20060404a), which provides an entire table (Table 4–5: Mecha Weapons) that was left out of the book - that certainly didn't help their credibility any. (Although to their credit, I'm glad to see that they made the table available so quickly after noticing its absence.)
All my complaints aside, though, I still feel I must recommend
d20 Future Tech to those running certain
d20 Future games, if only because of the material in this book that seems (to me at least) somewhat essential, like energy shields and escape pods for your starships. I really wish the production values were higher on
d20 Future Tech, and desperately hope that this isn't another downward slide on the part of Wizards. (They've been doing so well recently!) I give
d20 Future Tech a relatively high "3 (Average)" - it's a bit above the baseline "average," but not high enough I think to merit a full jump up into the next rating.
