JVisgaitis said:
Anyone have any info? The website for the game is ridiculously sparse.
I posted a review for it a couple of weeks ago on RPGNet, but for some reason it's not gone live yet. Waiting for an email back from the admin there to find out what's happened to it, but in the meantime, here's a brief synopsis.
The game's system uses 2D20 and a roll between mechanic. If the first die rolls less than your skill but more than the 'difficulty' then you succeed. Opposed rolls are made against a difficulty determined as half your opponent's relevant statistic rather than both players rolling. The second D20 is the special die. If this rolls a particular number, then you get a special result. This may sound cool, but it's the game's major crippling feature because each and every skill action you can take has its own list of special results, each with different numbers associated with them, so every time you make a roll you have to refer to a chart in the book to see what happens unless you ignore the special die rules altogether. There's absolutely nothing intuitive about it, and with over 100 skills, many with several different charts of possible special results, it's way too much to remember.
The rest of the rules are simple enough, nothing special but not too bad thankfully so if you drop the special die it's playable, just not particularly innovative. Combat's a touch deadly, and involves our old friend the Death Spiral, but if you like your settings grim and gritty that doesn't necessarily have to be a problem. Suffice to say though that the wise player invests in quality armour from the very beginning, or he's not likely to last long. Mind you, some of the abililties granted to playable races are nuts and extremely easy to rules-lawyer.
The book's artwork varies from good to abysmal. Pictures from the series are sparse, grainy, and all of them seem to come from the 4 minute trailer. The book itself is standard double column spread with no box-offs to break up the flow, and looks like it was laid out in Microsoft Word. Considering that this is a media tie-in, it's pretty poor fare. Even more unusual for a tie-in, there is no information on any of the property's main characters. In fact there are no sample characters at all. I don't mean just no statistics, I mean specific people aren't mentioned. There's a fair amount of info about the various alien races and a brief run-down of daily life and galactic history (all of it pretty cliched and some of it just plain ridiculous) but not once did I see an actual person referred to by name.
The one thing that is good about the book is the equipment section. There's plenty of weapons, gadgets and tons of vehicles, something that seems to get neglected in a lot of space opera. Some of it's way overpowered (there's a weapon in here that kills 100% of the time on a successful hit, regardless of armour) but it makes for a good idea mine.
Hope that helps a bit.
Ash
