The Hinterworlds Rambler
SOC-14 5K
They know how to market it.
M
Malenfant
Guest
In most cases though, people into hard science are quite willing to use FTL drives in their games.
While they did put some factual stuff in the book (e.g. the boxes describing realworld Stem Cell research and Nanotechnology), most of the 'hard science' stuff was fairly crappy (e.g. the aforementioned "green stars", black holes being somehow safer places to be around than neutron stars in terms of radiation, etc).
The ship combat rules are pretty dire too, exactly because they just converted it directly from character-vs-character combat. It would certainly play easier, but it's somewhat detached from how any remotely realistic space combat would take place.
Plus for some odd reason, if a ship is reduced to negative hp it is explicitly absolutely impossible to stabilise it and halt its destruction - all it's going to do is haemorrage hp til it is destroyed (and if it's a big ship, it's going to take a LONG time for that to happen if it's not helped along by repeated battering).
Plus the ship design system is also bad. There are no guidelines at all for how much space/mass/whatever the various modules that you're supposed to switch out on the existing designs take up. It seems you just swap one description for another.
I think the strongest section of the book are the new character classes. The rest varies between OK to pretty dire.
While they did put some factual stuff in the book (e.g. the boxes describing realworld Stem Cell research and Nanotechnology), most of the 'hard science' stuff was fairly crappy (e.g. the aforementioned "green stars", black holes being somehow safer places to be around than neutron stars in terms of radiation, etc).
The ship combat rules are pretty dire too, exactly because they just converted it directly from character-vs-character combat. It would certainly play easier, but it's somewhat detached from how any remotely realistic space combat would take place.
Plus for some odd reason, if a ship is reduced to negative hp it is explicitly absolutely impossible to stabilise it and halt its destruction - all it's going to do is haemorrage hp til it is destroyed (and if it's a big ship, it's going to take a LONG time for that to happen if it's not helped along by repeated battering).
Plus the ship design system is also bad. There are no guidelines at all for how much space/mass/whatever the various modules that you're supposed to switch out on the existing designs take up. It seems you just swap one description for another.
I think the strongest section of the book are the new character classes. The rest varies between OK to pretty dire.
The new classes and chargen are good. Some of the plugins are good (cybernetics, biotech) some are not (starships, system generation) and some I already have some (GeneTech, Mecha Crusade) in the more detailed form that they had in Polyhedron.
However, at least its science fiction, from the biggest rpg company around. Maybe some of those who purchase this book will pick up T20 (or 2320...) and see how it should be done.
Colin
However, at least its science fiction, from the biggest rpg company around. Maybe some of those who purchase this book will pick up T20 (or 2320...) and see how it should be done.
Colin
teinedraig
SOC-8
As another game to have a look at in this space - take a gander at the "Dead Stars Rule Book" over at RPGNow in the FREE section.
Has some interetsing approaches to things.
Has some interetsing approaches to things.
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
In the same vein, however, I found the Blood & Space book to be pretty Space Opera oriented.
