Old Fezziwig
this is a low-flying panic attack
Note: I received a review copy of this book. Also, this review contains spoilers.
Dawning Star: Operation Quick Launch, the main setting book for Blue Devil Games's setting of the same name, focused mainly on the planet of Eos, and was, I thought, remarkable for its intimacy and flexibility in terms of play style. It covered a specific setting in great detail and provided support for a number of different play styles and genres, from something almost western a la Joss Whedon's Serenity and Firefly to a pulp model in the vein of Indiana Jones (but in space) to military sci-fi in the Starship Troopers style and more. The creative team on that book provided an excellent template for using the setting in a variety of ways, which is nice, when you consider that a lot of settings (Fantasy Flight Games's two excellent d20 Fantasy settings, Midnight and Dawnforge, come to mind immediately) support a specific style of play. I didn't really find it covered planetary romance or science fantasy particularly well, however, given that it only described one planet. Helios Rising fills in the rest of the detail and expands the Dawning Star setting to encompass the entire Helios system and its inhabitants, while providing settings that can support a number of other genres and styles of play, such as horror and (semi-)post-apocalyptic.
Physically, Helios Rising is a monster: it's a five-hundred forty page perfect-bound softcover. And it's not a deceptive 540 pages; it feels thick and weighty. Materials-wise, it looks fairly sturdy, and the glue on the binding held up through my read. I haven't done any stress tests or anything (I've only had the book for a few weeks), though, and I have to admit that I do have a little concern about how it would hold up to table use. My experiences with softcovers this big is spotty in terms of durability — the binding usually takes a beating from me trying to keep it open, and my initial experiences with the book indicate that it's going to be a problem here, too. Trying to keep it open to an early page or a late page is kind of foolish. That said, I think Blue Devil probably found it prohibitively expensive to go with a hardback of this book in the current d20 market (the book does retail for $44.95), so their choice to print in soft-cover is understandable.
Aesthetically, the book looks just as fantastic as its predecessor. Danilo Moretti's art is uniformly beautiful, and the Dawning Star line has a really cohesive look. For a book with a lot of text, the layout's strong, although there are a few frustrating exceptions: the stylized text of the sidebars doesn't always serve the book as well as it could (the list of unavailable psionic powers in the sidebar on page 295 is somewhat awkward when it comes to lists, as some powers take up two lines, but no indication is made of this) and paragraphing for the abilities of racial classes, advanced classes, and prestige classes leaves a lot to be desired (new paragraphs in these sections are not indented and the presence of a hard return is not always obvious). Similarly, with the exception of my copy repeating pages 269 and 270, the editing was good on the whole for a game book. Missing commas, awkward constructions, and orphaned headers appear here and there but are rarely intrusive and the book on the whole was largely error free. If there were one thing that I could suggest, it would be that Helios Rising could have used a careful, exhaustive edit for style -- some of the longer sections of text (particularly in the chapters on C'thalk and Thres) probably could have been a lot shorter and read more smoothly. At times, reading the book was a real grind -- the tone tends to be rather dry, and the authors repeat information frequently, almost as if they don't expect that the reader's really paying attention. For a book that'll have to be read cover to cover in order to be used most effectively, this is unfortunate, as the material's excellent.
Each chapter after the introductory chapter and overview of the Helios system details a planet or a planets moons in a very specific fashion: setting and story information (the planet's history, factions, locations, and plot hooks) first, and then the rules material (species, talent trees, feats, classes, equipment, vehicles, and NPCs). For a reader, this organization works well -- by the time you reach the games material, you're well prepared for it, and it's easy to see how it relates to the setting material you've just read. On the other hand, I'm not sure this is the best way to present the material for actual gaming use. It's highly GM-centric, as plot and background are very close to the mechanical goodies, which limits how comfortable a GM may be with a player using it. I like the innovation in organization (it's the first setting that I've read that handles things this way), but I think that a more artificial separation between the setting material and the rules material may be more useful. As it stands, I don't think I'd want to use Helios Rising at the table, as retrieving information isn't always going to be an easy task (particularly when it comes to identifying which chapter you saw which piece of equipment in).
The setting material is consistent with the work Blue Devil and its creative team did on Dawning Star: OQL in both its quality and its flexibility. Like its predecessor, Helios Rising supports a number of play styles easily. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, the two paradigmatic cinematic representations of science fiction in modern American culture are Star Wars and Star Trek, and the material in Helios Rising can be used to model campaigns in the tone of both those entities with very little change from the default setting. For the former, I'd ramp up the vaasi threat (make the colonies on the Cronus Belt more threatening and the Ur-Kazzi Clan more aggressive), emphasize spirituality via the Red Truth and the Yaom Masters or the Shellbacks and the Blue Path, make space travel more plausible (the Star Tribe could take center stage as a key part of a new Star Confederation), and make the Helios system slightly more cosmopolitan (or, at least, accelerate the interactions between the Saurians, Wolves, Yaom, and rebel Straas). For something akin to Star Trek (at least as I see it), I'd focus on the Dawning Star Republic and its interactions with the other planets in the system, mobilize the Children of Korlan as a non-vaasi/non-Star Confederation seed power group (Borg!), and hammer home the isolation of the various peoples and the differences in their cultures, with the key interaction not being the conflict between the vaasi and the PCs, but the tension in the interactions of the nascent Dawning Star Republic and its neighbors. And this doesn't even begin to deal with campaign models that cover the rogue computer Minder 48 in the Markin Belt, the struggle between Law and Curthiyug's forces on Hephaestus with their echoes of Dick and Heinlein, or the information ghosts in Green Reach (I kept on thinking of Solaris). On top of this flexibility, each area and its factions are well developed (at 540 pages, they better be -- otherwise, why use so many pages?) with plausible motivations and thematic coherency that what could have come across as a book of ten or so mini-settings barely connected comes off as a cohesive whole.
Before I continue on to discuss the mechanical material in the book, I want to take a moment to address what I mean by thematic coherency. Basically, each section presents ideas that complement or comment on other sections in the book. For instance, the vaasi, the coqui, and the saurians are all martial, Darwinistic societies, but the nuances of their cultures and the roles presented for them by Hammock et al. suggest doubling rather than repetition. You could read the saurians and coqui as suggestions of where the vaasi could have gone had their evolution turned down another path. Another example -- the idea of abandoned A.I. comes up again and again (Children of Korlan, Minder 48, the ice miners, Law) but as variations of the same idea, rather than actually being the same idea. To some degree, all of them want to continue the missions they were assigned, but their interpretations of these missions in the absence of their programmers are wildly different. And this idea (rogue or abandoned A.I.) can be compared with the development of the seed races of the Star Confederation (the saurians, the velin, the haimedians, the yaom, and so on) and then again with the servitor races of the vaasi (creepers, brutes, attendants, etc.). Ultimately, what I'm saying is that none of the material presented in this book is serendipitous or a happy accident -- it's all intentional, and it all belongs together. It doesn't have the slap-dash feeling of, say, the current incarnation of the Forgotten Realms, to use the obvious example.
So, the setting material's excellent, but what about the mechanical material? I was less enthused by this material than I was by the setting material, which seemed to be the result of some rather conservative design choices -- I could be somewhat jaded as we seem to be, judging by trends and industry scuttlebutt, on the tail end of the d20 system, but I got the feeling that we'd just been here before. This is, of course, a double-edged sword, as it's easy for a company to reinvent the wheel with grossly inelegant, but imaginative subsystems when they create their own settings, which inevitably leads to someone much like me slamming them for being too aggressive (you don't have to hit a home run every time out -- moving the runner over's fine, too) and perhaps suggesting that more conservative, fundamentally sound game design is the way to go. Which leads to a book like this, where the setting material is superb, but the mechanics are frustratingly familiar. Sometimes this is good (species classes are always a good thing), and sometimes it's bad (anthropomorphic races are less so). That said, none of the mechanics get in the way of the setting, which'd be unforgivable, so this is good. But sometimes, this tendency towards caution gets excessive. A few examples: a huge chunk of the classes in this book get bonus feats every other level, which is fairly unexciting, even if it encourages PC customization; instead of simply creating a Craft (Organic Technology) skill, the book uses Craft, Knowledge (Earth and Life Sciences), and Treat Injury skills for it -- one of the few cases where the obvious answer to the design issue of "how do I model this new profession?" (create a new skill!) is, in my mind, the more elegant choice; and in the appearance of what I like to think of as the Overly Specific Feat, such as Caravaner, which grants a +1 bonus (what type?) to Navigate and Survival checks on Thres and a +1 bonus to Cha-based skill checks with other folks living in caravans (again, only really useful on Thres, as that's the only real place where a caravan culture exists in Helios). Are these deal-breakers? No, and the majority of the rules material is fine and useable and supports the setting very well. And I know there's a ton of new equipment and armor and vehicles in here that I haven't mentioned, and they have some great background stories, but they don't jump out at me as great design, because, after a certain point, a gun is a gun is a gun whether it does 5d6, 5d8, or 10d6 damage. (As you might have guessed, I'm completely content with systems like WHFRP 2e where most one-handed melee weapons are considered to be mechanically the same.)
This actually leads me to, perhaps, my biggest caveat about the book -- it's not going to be tremendously useful to the kitbasher necessarily, as there's a lot of material (everything that has to do with Eos and the humans, the stats for the tentaari and velin, and more) that's not here (it's in Dawning Star: OQL), and the mechanics themselves don't jump out enough to justify buying a 540-page book for a few races that could be admirably cobbled together using SRD monsters as bases and a little creativity. They wouldn't be the same as the races presented here, but they'd work well enough. Now, this might seem like a slam, but it's really not -- I wholeheartedly encourage folks looking for a sci-fi setting to run out and buy this book and its companion book; you could cover every single science fiction campaign you wanted in the context of the Helios system as presented in these two books, and you'd be hard-pressed to do better somewhere else (I can't think of anything I'd recommend before this setting). And I don't think that Blue Devil Games intended to create a toolbox setting. I'd say that the care taken to present a thematically cohesive and generically flexible setting indicates as much. Helios Rising is damn near exclusively intended as a whole-cloth setting for all your sci-fi gaming needs, and it could not really do this any better than it already does.
Score: 4.5, rounded up to 5. Setting Material is a clear 5, Mechanics an unspectacular 4. I'm bumping it up to a 5 because I think it's a coherent setting that I'd be happy to run as-is, out-of-the-box in a number of different genres.
Dawning Star: Operation Quick Launch, the main setting book for Blue Devil Games's setting of the same name, focused mainly on the planet of Eos, and was, I thought, remarkable for its intimacy and flexibility in terms of play style. It covered a specific setting in great detail and provided support for a number of different play styles and genres, from something almost western a la Joss Whedon's Serenity and Firefly to a pulp model in the vein of Indiana Jones (but in space) to military sci-fi in the Starship Troopers style and more. The creative team on that book provided an excellent template for using the setting in a variety of ways, which is nice, when you consider that a lot of settings (Fantasy Flight Games's two excellent d20 Fantasy settings, Midnight and Dawnforge, come to mind immediately) support a specific style of play. I didn't really find it covered planetary romance or science fantasy particularly well, however, given that it only described one planet. Helios Rising fills in the rest of the detail and expands the Dawning Star setting to encompass the entire Helios system and its inhabitants, while providing settings that can support a number of other genres and styles of play, such as horror and (semi-)post-apocalyptic.
Physically, Helios Rising is a monster: it's a five-hundred forty page perfect-bound softcover. And it's not a deceptive 540 pages; it feels thick and weighty. Materials-wise, it looks fairly sturdy, and the glue on the binding held up through my read. I haven't done any stress tests or anything (I've only had the book for a few weeks), though, and I have to admit that I do have a little concern about how it would hold up to table use. My experiences with softcovers this big is spotty in terms of durability — the binding usually takes a beating from me trying to keep it open, and my initial experiences with the book indicate that it's going to be a problem here, too. Trying to keep it open to an early page or a late page is kind of foolish. That said, I think Blue Devil probably found it prohibitively expensive to go with a hardback of this book in the current d20 market (the book does retail for $44.95), so their choice to print in soft-cover is understandable.
Aesthetically, the book looks just as fantastic as its predecessor. Danilo Moretti's art is uniformly beautiful, and the Dawning Star line has a really cohesive look. For a book with a lot of text, the layout's strong, although there are a few frustrating exceptions: the stylized text of the sidebars doesn't always serve the book as well as it could (the list of unavailable psionic powers in the sidebar on page 295 is somewhat awkward when it comes to lists, as some powers take up two lines, but no indication is made of this) and paragraphing for the abilities of racial classes, advanced classes, and prestige classes leaves a lot to be desired (new paragraphs in these sections are not indented and the presence of a hard return is not always obvious). Similarly, with the exception of my copy repeating pages 269 and 270, the editing was good on the whole for a game book. Missing commas, awkward constructions, and orphaned headers appear here and there but are rarely intrusive and the book on the whole was largely error free. If there were one thing that I could suggest, it would be that Helios Rising could have used a careful, exhaustive edit for style -- some of the longer sections of text (particularly in the chapters on C'thalk and Thres) probably could have been a lot shorter and read more smoothly. At times, reading the book was a real grind -- the tone tends to be rather dry, and the authors repeat information frequently, almost as if they don't expect that the reader's really paying attention. For a book that'll have to be read cover to cover in order to be used most effectively, this is unfortunate, as the material's excellent.
Each chapter after the introductory chapter and overview of the Helios system details a planet or a planets moons in a very specific fashion: setting and story information (the planet's history, factions, locations, and plot hooks) first, and then the rules material (species, talent trees, feats, classes, equipment, vehicles, and NPCs). For a reader, this organization works well -- by the time you reach the games material, you're well prepared for it, and it's easy to see how it relates to the setting material you've just read. On the other hand, I'm not sure this is the best way to present the material for actual gaming use. It's highly GM-centric, as plot and background are very close to the mechanical goodies, which limits how comfortable a GM may be with a player using it. I like the innovation in organization (it's the first setting that I've read that handles things this way), but I think that a more artificial separation between the setting material and the rules material may be more useful. As it stands, I don't think I'd want to use Helios Rising at the table, as retrieving information isn't always going to be an easy task (particularly when it comes to identifying which chapter you saw which piece of equipment in).
The setting material is consistent with the work Blue Devil and its creative team did on Dawning Star: OQL in both its quality and its flexibility. Like its predecessor, Helios Rising supports a number of play styles easily. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, the two paradigmatic cinematic representations of science fiction in modern American culture are Star Wars and Star Trek, and the material in Helios Rising can be used to model campaigns in the tone of both those entities with very little change from the default setting. For the former, I'd ramp up the vaasi threat (make the colonies on the Cronus Belt more threatening and the Ur-Kazzi Clan more aggressive), emphasize spirituality via the Red Truth and the Yaom Masters or the Shellbacks and the Blue Path, make space travel more plausible (the Star Tribe could take center stage as a key part of a new Star Confederation), and make the Helios system slightly more cosmopolitan (or, at least, accelerate the interactions between the Saurians, Wolves, Yaom, and rebel Straas). For something akin to Star Trek (at least as I see it), I'd focus on the Dawning Star Republic and its interactions with the other planets in the system, mobilize the Children of Korlan as a non-vaasi/non-Star Confederation seed power group (Borg!), and hammer home the isolation of the various peoples and the differences in their cultures, with the key interaction not being the conflict between the vaasi and the PCs, but the tension in the interactions of the nascent Dawning Star Republic and its neighbors. And this doesn't even begin to deal with campaign models that cover the rogue computer Minder 48 in the Markin Belt, the struggle between Law and Curthiyug's forces on Hephaestus with their echoes of Dick and Heinlein, or the information ghosts in Green Reach (I kept on thinking of Solaris). On top of this flexibility, each area and its factions are well developed (at 540 pages, they better be -- otherwise, why use so many pages?) with plausible motivations and thematic coherency that what could have come across as a book of ten or so mini-settings barely connected comes off as a cohesive whole.
Before I continue on to discuss the mechanical material in the book, I want to take a moment to address what I mean by thematic coherency. Basically, each section presents ideas that complement or comment on other sections in the book. For instance, the vaasi, the coqui, and the saurians are all martial, Darwinistic societies, but the nuances of their cultures and the roles presented for them by Hammock et al. suggest doubling rather than repetition. You could read the saurians and coqui as suggestions of where the vaasi could have gone had their evolution turned down another path. Another example -- the idea of abandoned A.I. comes up again and again (Children of Korlan, Minder 48, the ice miners, Law) but as variations of the same idea, rather than actually being the same idea. To some degree, all of them want to continue the missions they were assigned, but their interpretations of these missions in the absence of their programmers are wildly different. And this idea (rogue or abandoned A.I.) can be compared with the development of the seed races of the Star Confederation (the saurians, the velin, the haimedians, the yaom, and so on) and then again with the servitor races of the vaasi (creepers, brutes, attendants, etc.). Ultimately, what I'm saying is that none of the material presented in this book is serendipitous or a happy accident -- it's all intentional, and it all belongs together. It doesn't have the slap-dash feeling of, say, the current incarnation of the Forgotten Realms, to use the obvious example.
So, the setting material's excellent, but what about the mechanical material? I was less enthused by this material than I was by the setting material, which seemed to be the result of some rather conservative design choices -- I could be somewhat jaded as we seem to be, judging by trends and industry scuttlebutt, on the tail end of the d20 system, but I got the feeling that we'd just been here before. This is, of course, a double-edged sword, as it's easy for a company to reinvent the wheel with grossly inelegant, but imaginative subsystems when they create their own settings, which inevitably leads to someone much like me slamming them for being too aggressive (you don't have to hit a home run every time out -- moving the runner over's fine, too) and perhaps suggesting that more conservative, fundamentally sound game design is the way to go. Which leads to a book like this, where the setting material is superb, but the mechanics are frustratingly familiar. Sometimes this is good (species classes are always a good thing), and sometimes it's bad (anthropomorphic races are less so). That said, none of the mechanics get in the way of the setting, which'd be unforgivable, so this is good. But sometimes, this tendency towards caution gets excessive. A few examples: a huge chunk of the classes in this book get bonus feats every other level, which is fairly unexciting, even if it encourages PC customization; instead of simply creating a Craft (Organic Technology) skill, the book uses Craft, Knowledge (Earth and Life Sciences), and Treat Injury skills for it -- one of the few cases where the obvious answer to the design issue of "how do I model this new profession?" (create a new skill!) is, in my mind, the more elegant choice; and in the appearance of what I like to think of as the Overly Specific Feat, such as Caravaner, which grants a +1 bonus (what type?) to Navigate and Survival checks on Thres and a +1 bonus to Cha-based skill checks with other folks living in caravans (again, only really useful on Thres, as that's the only real place where a caravan culture exists in Helios). Are these deal-breakers? No, and the majority of the rules material is fine and useable and supports the setting very well. And I know there's a ton of new equipment and armor and vehicles in here that I haven't mentioned, and they have some great background stories, but they don't jump out at me as great design, because, after a certain point, a gun is a gun is a gun whether it does 5d6, 5d8, or 10d6 damage. (As you might have guessed, I'm completely content with systems like WHFRP 2e where most one-handed melee weapons are considered to be mechanically the same.)
This actually leads me to, perhaps, my biggest caveat about the book -- it's not going to be tremendously useful to the kitbasher necessarily, as there's a lot of material (everything that has to do with Eos and the humans, the stats for the tentaari and velin, and more) that's not here (it's in Dawning Star: OQL), and the mechanics themselves don't jump out enough to justify buying a 540-page book for a few races that could be admirably cobbled together using SRD monsters as bases and a little creativity. They wouldn't be the same as the races presented here, but they'd work well enough. Now, this might seem like a slam, but it's really not -- I wholeheartedly encourage folks looking for a sci-fi setting to run out and buy this book and its companion book; you could cover every single science fiction campaign you wanted in the context of the Helios system as presented in these two books, and you'd be hard-pressed to do better somewhere else (I can't think of anything I'd recommend before this setting). And I don't think that Blue Devil Games intended to create a toolbox setting. I'd say that the care taken to present a thematically cohesive and generically flexible setting indicates as much. Helios Rising is damn near exclusively intended as a whole-cloth setting for all your sci-fi gaming needs, and it could not really do this any better than it already does.
Score: 4.5, rounded up to 5. Setting Material is a clear 5, Mechanics an unspectacular 4. I'm bumping it up to a 5 because I think it's a coherent setting that I'd be happy to run as-is, out-of-the-box in a number of different genres.
