Starcluster 2
Starcluster 2 (PDF)
By Albert Bailey and Clash Bowley
Published by Flying Mice LLC
Pages: 287
Disclaimers: This is not a playtest review. I did not buy Starcluster 2, it was sent to me for review.
Starcluster 2 is quite clearly a labour of love. The authors have crafted a new game system with which to take their audience into a future where humankind has fled calamity on Earth for the promise of salvation in a distant cluster of stars.
First, let me get this off my chest: I have no idea how to judge this product, so take the star rating at the top of the page with a cow-lick sized block of salt. My experience with RPGs has been limited largely to D&D in its various incarnations. At one point in my distant past, my small gaming group decided to try its hand at Paranoia, but that didn’t last long. (The group was too small for a good in-fighting dynamic that Paranoia tries so hard to foster, and to be honest, we had more than enough in-fighting in between classes in high school.) Then somebody picked up a copy of the Megatraveller boxed set. We gathered around, oooh-ed and aaah-ed appropriately while flipping through booklets, and then utterly failed to figure out how to play the game. Luckily for us, at about that time I discovered Shadowrun, which we played pretty much until D&D 3e showed up, fresh and new from Wizards of the Coast’s casting of reincarnate on the franchise.
So, to reiterate. Dragons and elves? Check. Trust the Computer? Check. Orks hefting heavy assault weapons on gyroscopic mounts? Check. Flying around the galaxy in space ships? Errr… It is especially ironic given my group’s collective love for science fiction games, novels, and movies.
I have no idea how to play Starcluster 2.
It starts off well. The first thing you see when you fire up the PDF is the logo and a very well done piece of art featuring a woman taking a relaxing ride through the jungle on a device that looks like a cross between a motorcycle and a jet engine. With wings. The abstract quality of the brush strokes gives the piece a wonderful sense of motion and energy. Next come the credits, followed by a page-long poem to set the tone and give you an idea of richness of the product into which you’re peeking.
This is followed by the fourteen-page Table of Contents. Bam! That flying motorcycle on the cover just hit a brick wall. For a new prospective player, the intimidation knob just jacked itself up to eleven.
OK, calm down, take deep breaths. Focus.
The Table of Contents looks… well… comprehensive. By lucky happenstance I accidentally discovered that it is also fully hyperlinked. Clicking on an item in the TOC takes you there. Incidentally, there is also an Index at the back, five pages long, and also hyperlinked. I’m not absolutely certain, but I believe you need Acrobat 6 or later to use this particular feature. Go technology! And go Flying Mice LLC for using it well!
Being still stunned by the TOC, I instinctively revert to my tried-and-true tactic of flipping through the document to check out the full-colour artwork, which I am happy to divulge, is absolutely top-notch. After a few pieces, I start to pick up on a theme. At first I think the theme is “women”, but before too long that changes to “people”, or maybe even “person”. And in a universe which purportedly contains a number of alien races, I use that term loosely. Most, if not all, of the art focuses on one character. The character is usually obvious, but it is sometimes implied, such as the pilot of some flying craft, hidden by the tinted cockpit window. Very rarely there is a second, or third character, and it gives the impression that people are rare, and groups of them are rarer still. I urge you to take a look at the art up on their
web site for a preview.
Having been sufficiently soothed by the artwork, I return to the task at hand, namely, trying to figure out this shiny new RPG and describe it to you. Using the hyperlinked TOC, I jump to the Introduction and began reading. There are some minor grammar and editing gaffes, but nothing terribly noteworthy. The preface tells of events leading up to the Diaspora and the exodus of mankind from its garden of Eden, that is, Earth. At some point in the not-so-terribly distant future, after the solar system has largely been colonized, somebody discovers that the Sun will vaporize, taking out everything within 60 light-years. The details are iffy, but it isn’t supposed to happen right away, which gives humanity enough time to build ark-ships with which to seed the stars. The destination of choice turns out to be the cluster of stars around which this game revolves. Beneath the preface is an interesting and complicated timeline, which both simultaneously completely baffles me and piques my interest. The next page which shows a very cool piece of art featuring a petite woman pointing a pistol at someone or something behind the viewer. The caption beneath the picture says “Character Generation”. Oh wait, a new chapter.
OK, time out. By my document reader’s count, I am eighteen pages into Starcluster 2 and I still have no idea what this game is about! And maybe this harkens back to my Megatraveller days and the problems I encountered back then. As a potential new customer, I really need to know what the game is about before I can start playing it. For instance, D&D can be boiled down to “There are monsters out there. Kill them, take their stuff, and gain in power.” Paranoia can be summed up as “The Computer wants you to find traitorous mutant commie scum villainously hiding in our midst and vaporize them.” Shadowrun is about “using stealth and/or overwhelming firepower to accomplish illegal and quasi-legal jobs for shady power-brokers.” What is it that distinctly separates Starcluster 2 the game from Starcluster 2 the simulation? What exactly am I being encouraged to do in this setting? And just as importantly, why can’t I find it anywhere within the first twenty pages?
After the two-page introduction to the setting, the next ninety or so odd pages are taken up by character generation. There are two basic methods, planned and organic. The planned method is essentially a point-buy system, where the organic method has you rolling dice. Once you’ve rolled or assigned numbers to Strength, Coordination, Agility, Endurance, IQ, Psionics, Rank (think class or social standing), and Charisma, rest assured that you’re not even remotely done yet. These are your character’s abilities at age ten. He or she still has some growing to do! Depending on IQ and Rank, your character has the option of taking part in available schooling to learn one or more professions, as well as pick up some needed skills. I should probably point out that Starcluster 2 uses a classless system. You are what you do. The bulk of the Character Generation chapter is taken up by tables and charts listing available schooling options and their effects on the skills your character learns. At first glance it is intimidatingly complex.
Starcluster 2 uses a percentile roll to determine task resolution, where success is registered if you roll under the target number. For every rank in a skill, you add 5% to the target number. Also, the characteristic that the skill is tied to, Agility for the Climbing skill, for instance, also comes into play to modify the target number. Skills are described very succinctly. Whereas in the D&D Player’s Handbook you might have close to a full page describing the rules regarding the Climb skill, here it takes up only one line. The GM is then left to determine when, where and how the skill comes into play. As far as I can tell, you only need a pair of 10-sided dice to play, and some 6-siders for character generation.
There are a number of different humanoid races available to play. Sastras are monkey-like, and can use their feet and prehensile tail as additional hands. Vantors are adapted for life in the water. Tagris characters are larger, stronger, and more bestial. Interestingly, it is possible to crossbreed any of the various races with a human, producing a mixed race with characteristics randomly selected between the two parent races. So a Sastra and a human would result in something called a SaHu, which could look entirely human but for the tail. That said, I don’t think it’s possible to crossbreed one of the non-human races with another, and wonder why that wasn’t included.
The next twenty-five pages are dedicated to briefly describing and statting up sundry items, weapons and personal equipment, depending on where your character was born and what he, she or it can afford. Equipment is ranked by Technology level, so if a character has spent the majority of their lives on a low-tech world, they likely won’t be packing a light sword. There are quite a number of tables describing not only weapon stats and ammunition costs, but things like the effects of differing composition of weapon blades and heads, or the cost modifier of decorating your pistol with a mother-of-pearl handgrip. Unfortunately, what are not included are full descriptions for many of these items. What makes a “mag rifle” different from a “sonic rifle”, other than stats? Or a “cutlass” and a “sword”? And just what exactly is a “hand cogar”? Most personal equipment has at least something to indicate what it does, even if it’s just something like “portable illumination device” for “flashlight”. Why not weapons?
After this, I suppose character generation is finally complete, and we come to a chapter promisingly entitled “Playing the Game.” And finally, after 155 pages, we are told that the “object of a game of Starclusters is to survive.” Interestingly, it seems the game tries to focus primarily on character growth over time. Where most games I’ve played in, time was more or less contiguous, where adventures took place one after another, Starclusters suggests you have only one adventure per year. Which is to say, the game focuses on only one important “event” per year. Once the year is over, the character’s stats and skills are changed accordingly, sort of like leveling up in D&D, but without any kind of “experience point” mechanic. Because this process happens in a predictable fashion, you can actually skip around a bit, missing several years here or there, or even going back in time and doing something back when the character was twelve. A relatively lengthy description of combat follows, thankfully including examples. If you’re curious as to how exactly combat works in Starclusters 2, Flying Mice LLC have thoughtfully included on their website a
description. After this comes a smaller section detailing how to use skills in the game. Much of it boils down to “use your common sense”.
Next comes a small section entitled “Spaceships and Vehicles”. I am unsure why this wasn’t included in the preceding equipment section. There are a pair of cheap (in terms of both quality and price) spaceships detailed, as well as one sample aircraft and three ground vehicles. Some of the prices seem a little odd. For instance, a Gravmaster Mark 6 ground vehicle costs 66 credits. That’s the same price as only 66 flashlights! Not bad for what looks like a hovering version of a 60’s-era convertible. From a quick glance at the publisher’s website, it appears that there are several more vehicle supplements, so I would presume that this section is just to get the game started, or maybe to give the GM ideas for their own designs.
This is followed by a section on “Non-Player Characters and Character Options”. Basically, this gives the GM an idea of how to handle NPCs, including sample stats for a variety of antagonists, as well as a variety of tables for quickly rolling up the opposition. The sample stats can also be used for quick character generation, effectively giving a templated character and allowing the players to swiftly jump into a game without too much fuss.
The next section details space travel and combat, describing a half-dozen different methods of propulsion for getting around in space. There is also (finally!) a short description of the various Tech levels and what technologies are used to define them. Spaceship combat itself looks complicated. I can’t imagine running a ship-to-ship fight without a lot of page flipping and rolling on various tables. I suspect that as a GM I would basically have to run through the chapter for each combat until I was very familiar with it. And even then, I would still have to return to random things like the ship damage table. This haphazard section isn’t helped by the fact that some of the nomenclature that is introduced isn’t explained until well after you first see it. Add in some (presumably) typos and it gets worse. For instance, some of the examples use “DM” as a short form for damage multipliers, but later on a table lists them as “DF”, or damage factor. The only way I could be reasonably comfortable equating the two is that the numbers match up inside the various examples, but even then I’m not 100% sure I’m not missing something.
Finally, we get some setting information, in the chapter titled “Guide to Cluster Politics and Societies”. But again, like the above issue with nomenclature, portions of the chapter are very specific and only make sense if you’re already familiar with the material. The basic premise is that at some point in humankind’s very distant past, a race took samples of the local flora and fauna (not to mention a number of Homo Erectus) and inexplicably seeded a handful of worlds in the Cluster with them. Over the next million years, a variety of differing natural selection pressures evolved several different kinds of humans, which is to say, the aforementioned humanoid races. And by the time the human Diaspora reaches the Cluster, the natives seem to already have a loose alliance of worlds and a simple form of overarching United Nations-like government. The arrival of the Diaspora shakes things up a bit, but not so much that initial conflicts lead to a protracted struggle. Once the various races’ common heritage is discovered, the groups start to get along reasonably well, and form a new alliance including the newcomers.
Much of the remainder of the document is used to briefly describe systems and worlds within the setting. For purposes of sanity, presumably, this is done as a massive (40+ page) table listing a small number of vital statistics for the various planets, followed by a smaller (20+ page) table listing inhabited settlements by world. A more in-depth description of one system in particular, the Aztec system, includes plenty of background material with numerous system features and gives GMs a good idea for what to include while fleshing out their own systems. The Aztec system also includes some very cool looking maps.
Before finishing with the Index, included also are Cluster maps, design notes (I wish I had known to read these first, as they explain quite a bit of the rationale behind the various mechanics used), character sheets, and appendices listing a number of optional rules, mostly adding options to combat.
Whew! Still with me?
Starcluster 2 looks to be an incredibly complex, interesting, and reasonably comprehensive, simulation of mankind’s possible future. The presentation is somewhat haphazard, topic matter tends to jump around from idea to idea, and things aren’t always explained as well as they could be. On the flip side, it does feature excellent artwork, seems to be very well supported by the publisher, and contains a multitude of creative ideas, if you’re willing to invest some time and effort into polishing them. Is it a good game? Unfortunately, I still have no idea.
Reviewed by Scott Benoit
