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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 2997283" data-attributes="member: 14159">The Babylon Project.It was the original Babylon 5 RPG, I bought a copy in February 1998.  It was just as I was getting into gaming, and being a big B5 fan I thought it would be really cool to have a Babylon 5 RPG, especially since the first RPG I ever played was the old d6 Star Wars RPG and I had high expectations for a licensed RPG.I was extremely disappointed.  The $24.95 price tag is still on the book, taunting me.  As an actual reference about the setting, it had very little you wouldn't know if you watched he show regularly (it didn't reveal much new about the setting at all), the only really new thing it introduced was a very limited jump-route map of systems in Earth Alliance space (a tiny fraction of the route map later published by Mongoose's B5 RPG).  The system was an utter disaster, I never was able to figure out exactly how it worked, as some odd blend of roleplaying-encouraged character traits and really complicated hit location tables and 13 ability scores and no system for starship combat at all, not to mention very limited support for telepaths (most of the telepaths actually portrayed on the show couldn't be duplicated in the game, the telepathy system was far weaker than telepaths on the show), and the book said in no uncertain terms the game could not and should not be used to play anything during the run of the show, it should only be set before the construction of Babylon 5 (the sample adventure was about investigating the destructiobn of Babylon Station, aka Babylon 1).The illustrations were all color drawings that looked like good fan art, not a single still from the show or anything else I'd expect from a licensed product.  In fact, it didn't even have any stats for the characters from the show as examples, instead it had some prefab starting PC's for the sample adventure and some sketchy half-writeups of NPC's for the adventure as the only example characters.  There was a curious little disclaimer in the book that said that "Original illustrations in this book are not intended to represent specific characters from Babylon 5", which combined with everything else made me wonder what kind of crippled license it was made under.I quickly realized that I could have made a more playable B5 RPG, by just quickly cobbling something together with the d6 system I knew and using what I knew of the setting already in my head, with maybe that jumproute map as the only thing to keep, and that map wasn't worth $25.</blockquote>

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