Jannica Thales
First Post
I’ll give WotC this, their books are pretty!
D20 Future is an expansion to d20 Modern and is not a stand-alone book. That would be just perfect, except that d20 Future doesn’t even stand by itself. What do I mean? Read on, read on...
Weighing in at 223 pages and 13 chapters, d20 Future attempts to tackle ALL sci-fi genres. That is completely impossible. It’s a fool’s errand. The writers do a good job of trying to tackle the subject, but it’s too much.
The book starts out promisingly enough. The Progress Levels are defined, which essentially chunk technology up into different eras. Modern Earth is PL 5 and the scale goes up to 8, with 9 essentially being insanely advanced and simply not covered. Chapter one kicks in with new character starting occupations, which I liked. New feats, which I didn’t like. New uses for skills, again good. And new prestige classes … more about those later.
The feats step on territory covered by the d20 Modern base classes. So instead of advancing a rank in Tough Hero, you could take a feat and get two picks from the Tough Hero talent tree. So, what little reason there once was to stick to the base classes is now completely removed in d20 Future.
This is a nice segue into the new advanced classes. They are fairly generic. The Ambassador, Explorer, Swindler, and Engineer could all pretty much fit into any sci-fi game. I’m not so sure about the Dogfighter, Space Monkey, Helix Warrior, or Xenophile. The classes themselves seem fairly balanced and there’s a total of twelve of them. 12 new advanced classes. Hold that thought.
Chapter Two introduces us to eight possible future campaigns. The big sci-fi tropes are covered, but not in the detail I’d like them if they were going to tackle so many genres at once. Bughunters (think Starship Troopers) and Dimension X (think Sliders) are nicely set up with a possible campaign progression. The rest of them essentially amount to some background and a new advanced class. Six new advanced classes are added on to the bunch and I have to say, they’re not that strong. Do we really need a Bughunter advanced class? What happened to Tough Hero? Oh yeah, we just bough all the Tough Hero talent tree picks with the new feats. It’s not that any of these possible campaigns are bad. It’s just that you have things like the Wasteland (think Mad Max) which is presented as a post-apocalyptic future with an advanced class called the nuclear nomad. The Wasteland’s entry for “campaign in brief” is longer than “campaign traits” or “power groups”, if that tells you anything.
So, now we’re up to page 58 and it’s time for Chapter 3, Gear. I’m going to give d20 Future a pass here. The chapter is a little uninspired, but they have four of their Progress Levels to cover (5-8) and it would have been easy to get bogged down. They hit weapons, armor, and some doo-dads. Then the book moves on. I wasn’t jazzed by this chapter (though the gadget mechanic is nice), but it was obviously a case of either keeping the section short or letting it dominate the book.
Chapter Four is environments and covers what happens when your character unexpectedly runs out of atmosphere. It isn’t that long and the text is sound.
Chapter Five and Six cover various sci-fi technical topics and space travel. The book touches on “real” science and stretches out into what is clearly impossible but fun to have in a game. They’re solid chapters and good additions.
And then we have chapter seven which is about the game mechanics for starships and the book gets bogged down. Space combat is essentially handled like “regular” combat only with spaceships. There’s more to it than that, but not much. The problem is that the authors, for whatever reason provide us with over 30 starships, some templates, and then go into the kinds of armor, weapons, communication systems, and other such things. Remember how I said early that too much equipment could have dominated the book? The starships dominate the book. But wait, we’re not done.
Chapters eight and nine cover vehicles and mecha (giant robots). Between starships, vechicles, and mecha, we’re at 70 pages of little space cars. Remember how many pages the different campaigns took up? About 20. Oh, but don’t worry, the mecha chapter gets broken up a bit with … a new advanced class! Why the Mecha Jockey isn’t back on page 46 with the Mecha Crusade campaign setting is a bit of a mystery, but here it is.
Chapter ten is robotics and it’s a perfectly fine chapter that covers robotics and robot characters. Nothing wrong with it. It’s grand. The problem is that building a robot works a lot like building a starship, vehicle, or mecha and by now my brain is getting a little fried.
Chapter eleven is cybernetics and it’s a welcome change. The pros and cons of cyberware are detailed and nothing jumped out at me as being bad or weird. It’s a small self-contained equipment chapter basically.
Chapter twelve is mutations. The more mutations you get the more drawbacks you receive so you don’t want to be hanging out at the old nuclear power plant waiting for your super abilities. It’s a solid chapter with the artwork reflecting the cons as well as the pros of being a mutant.
Chapter thirteen is basically a monster chapter. It starts out by giving suggestions on how to work in D&D monsters into a d20 Future game and then goes into the aliens. I was pleased to see some old favorites from Star Frontiers! All the aliens have a small write up and the artwork is, I would say, the most evocative in the book. Then – WOAH! The book ended!
No index, no credits, no nothing. I read another review of d20 Future and I have to agree – if I hadn’t seen the advertisement at the back of the book, I’d have thought I bought a misprint.
Conclusion
If I could give one suggestion to the d20 Future team it would be to pick one of the bulkier topics and drop it. In this case the mecha. D20 Mecha is a perfectly fine topic for a separate book and the space was desperately needed in just about every other section.
D20 Future was a good and well meaning attempt at covering all sci-fi topics. However, the format of the book was simply too small. The authors did not have room to develop their ideas and frankly I would have rather seen some material cut (did we need all those spaceships and mecha?) and have the campaigns rounded out. The book is visually excellent and brings what would be a 3/5 book up to a 4/5.
D20 Future is an expansion to d20 Modern and is not a stand-alone book. That would be just perfect, except that d20 Future doesn’t even stand by itself. What do I mean? Read on, read on...
Weighing in at 223 pages and 13 chapters, d20 Future attempts to tackle ALL sci-fi genres. That is completely impossible. It’s a fool’s errand. The writers do a good job of trying to tackle the subject, but it’s too much.
The book starts out promisingly enough. The Progress Levels are defined, which essentially chunk technology up into different eras. Modern Earth is PL 5 and the scale goes up to 8, with 9 essentially being insanely advanced and simply not covered. Chapter one kicks in with new character starting occupations, which I liked. New feats, which I didn’t like. New uses for skills, again good. And new prestige classes … more about those later.
The feats step on territory covered by the d20 Modern base classes. So instead of advancing a rank in Tough Hero, you could take a feat and get two picks from the Tough Hero talent tree. So, what little reason there once was to stick to the base classes is now completely removed in d20 Future.
This is a nice segue into the new advanced classes. They are fairly generic. The Ambassador, Explorer, Swindler, and Engineer could all pretty much fit into any sci-fi game. I’m not so sure about the Dogfighter, Space Monkey, Helix Warrior, or Xenophile. The classes themselves seem fairly balanced and there’s a total of twelve of them. 12 new advanced classes. Hold that thought.
Chapter Two introduces us to eight possible future campaigns. The big sci-fi tropes are covered, but not in the detail I’d like them if they were going to tackle so many genres at once. Bughunters (think Starship Troopers) and Dimension X (think Sliders) are nicely set up with a possible campaign progression. The rest of them essentially amount to some background and a new advanced class. Six new advanced classes are added on to the bunch and I have to say, they’re not that strong. Do we really need a Bughunter advanced class? What happened to Tough Hero? Oh yeah, we just bough all the Tough Hero talent tree picks with the new feats. It’s not that any of these possible campaigns are bad. It’s just that you have things like the Wasteland (think Mad Max) which is presented as a post-apocalyptic future with an advanced class called the nuclear nomad. The Wasteland’s entry for “campaign in brief” is longer than “campaign traits” or “power groups”, if that tells you anything.
So, now we’re up to page 58 and it’s time for Chapter 3, Gear. I’m going to give d20 Future a pass here. The chapter is a little uninspired, but they have four of their Progress Levels to cover (5-8) and it would have been easy to get bogged down. They hit weapons, armor, and some doo-dads. Then the book moves on. I wasn’t jazzed by this chapter (though the gadget mechanic is nice), but it was obviously a case of either keeping the section short or letting it dominate the book.
Chapter Four is environments and covers what happens when your character unexpectedly runs out of atmosphere. It isn’t that long and the text is sound.
Chapter Five and Six cover various sci-fi technical topics and space travel. The book touches on “real” science and stretches out into what is clearly impossible but fun to have in a game. They’re solid chapters and good additions.
And then we have chapter seven which is about the game mechanics for starships and the book gets bogged down. Space combat is essentially handled like “regular” combat only with spaceships. There’s more to it than that, but not much. The problem is that the authors, for whatever reason provide us with over 30 starships, some templates, and then go into the kinds of armor, weapons, communication systems, and other such things. Remember how I said early that too much equipment could have dominated the book? The starships dominate the book. But wait, we’re not done.
Chapters eight and nine cover vehicles and mecha (giant robots). Between starships, vechicles, and mecha, we’re at 70 pages of little space cars. Remember how many pages the different campaigns took up? About 20. Oh, but don’t worry, the mecha chapter gets broken up a bit with … a new advanced class! Why the Mecha Jockey isn’t back on page 46 with the Mecha Crusade campaign setting is a bit of a mystery, but here it is.
Chapter ten is robotics and it’s a perfectly fine chapter that covers robotics and robot characters. Nothing wrong with it. It’s grand. The problem is that building a robot works a lot like building a starship, vehicle, or mecha and by now my brain is getting a little fried.
Chapter eleven is cybernetics and it’s a welcome change. The pros and cons of cyberware are detailed and nothing jumped out at me as being bad or weird. It’s a small self-contained equipment chapter basically.
Chapter twelve is mutations. The more mutations you get the more drawbacks you receive so you don’t want to be hanging out at the old nuclear power plant waiting for your super abilities. It’s a solid chapter with the artwork reflecting the cons as well as the pros of being a mutant.
Chapter thirteen is basically a monster chapter. It starts out by giving suggestions on how to work in D&D monsters into a d20 Future game and then goes into the aliens. I was pleased to see some old favorites from Star Frontiers! All the aliens have a small write up and the artwork is, I would say, the most evocative in the book. Then – WOAH! The book ended!
No index, no credits, no nothing. I read another review of d20 Future and I have to agree – if I hadn’t seen the advertisement at the back of the book, I’d have thought I bought a misprint.
Conclusion
If I could give one suggestion to the d20 Future team it would be to pick one of the bulkier topics and drop it. In this case the mecha. D20 Mecha is a perfectly fine topic for a separate book and the space was desperately needed in just about every other section.
D20 Future was a good and well meaning attempt at covering all sci-fi topics. However, the format of the book was simply too small. The authors did not have room to develop their ideas and frankly I would have rather seen some material cut (did we need all those spaceships and mecha?) and have the campaigns rounded out. The book is visually excellent and brings what would be a 3/5 book up to a 4/5.
