Proving Grounds of a Million Mad Overlords

A bit over a year ago (Friday, July 17, to be exact) I complained about the lack of outreach to potentially new gamers. Apparently, I should also start complaining about not having a million bucks because oh what a difference a year makes. Old conventional wisdom: box sets are impractical and led TSR to financial ruin. New conventional wisdom: box sets are teh awesome! It's like everybody and their grandmother has a box set coming out now. Troll Lord Games has something like a dozen of the things now, including rules, campaign settings, and adventure construction sets. The two biggies right now are, of course, the D&D Essentials starter set and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying. Both of these are ostensibly aimed at new players. This is undercut somewhat in Flame Princess by the cost of the box and the game-store and online-order focus of Raggi’s distribution model, which seems more aimed at existing gamers, and the nostalgia-based design of Essentials. In spite of these issues, both boxes have contents clearly designed to get the neophyte up to speed. They both have a choose-your-own-adventure style introductory adventure (Flame Princess actually has two), they both sport simplified rules, and they both include an additional DM-run adventure as an example of how these games can be played.

Of course, I'm going to give the advantage to the OSR. Granted, it's a very slim advantage; the Essentials box is inexpensive, designed to grab the attention of lapsed gamers more likely to introduce the game to their children, and it'll show up in places where non- and lapsed gamers are likely to stumble across it. It's an exceptional piece of marketing, and is likely to sell 100 times more units than Flame Princess. And I, for one, hope this is a pessimistic prediction.

Still, I think the OSR has an inherent advantage in the simplicity and flexibility of its games. For instance, check out this character sheet that Robert gave out at the Old School game he ran at GenCon. In spite of the fact that over half the table didn't play these games regularly, we had no problem generating characters, even though there wasn't a single rulebook at the table. That's right, we did it all based on the character sheet and these other handouts. Now it is true, all of us were familiar with gaming. We were, after all, all attendees at GenCon. Still, making characters was a snap.

You can see this in Flame Princess as well. The last two pages of the rules book is an annotated copy of the character sheet, making it easy to understand what goes where and what rules apply to which parts. Even better, like with Roger’s character sheets, everything you really need is right there on it: skill rolls, to-hit numbers, even a quick and elegant way to figure encumbrance. If nothing else, the OSR is all about quick and easy.

It's going to be interesting to see where these developments take us. The starter set is, to the best of my knowledge, the only box set in WotC's Essentials line. Raggi still isn't sure if the next printing of his weird fantasy role-playing game is going to be in a box (which he prefers) or in strictly book form. 2011 should prove to be another very interesting year for RPGs in general, and the OSR in particular. And that's not even considering what Frog God Games might get up to.

Review of Starsiege: Event Horizon

ConDFW was a lot of fun, in spite of some last-minute cancellations due to the “Snowpocalypse” of ’10. (Yeah, Oddysey, I can hear you snickering all the way across the Appalachians. ;p ) One of the highlights for me was the presence of Troll Lord Games. The con is primarily a literary event, and gaming, while usually represented, was a bit anemic this year. I took advantage of that to sit in on some impromptu Castles & Crusades gaming. The game is fun; take out skills and relegate feats to class-based special abilities and you go pretty far to returning a lot of the 1e flavor back into the game. Throwing together some 10th level characters was a snap, and the brief combat we played went fairly quickly. It’s not enough to drag me away from Labyrinth Lord, but it would certainly be contender if I wanted that 1e experience and despaired of acquiring enough of the original books for my gaming group.

They were also selling Starsiege box sets. Yep, before everyone else was jumping on the boxed set bandwagon, Troll Lord was already there. The box itself is attractive, with a very blue, Babylon 5 space-scape and orange lettering. I’m not crazy about the art. It certainly doesn’t make me go, “Ooo! I wanna be on that starship!” But it makes it pretty clear what you can expect to find inside.

What you will find inside is a copy of the GM booklet, called an Operations Manual, four copies of the player booklet, called a Field Manual, a setting booklet (“Victory: 2442”), two nice little d20s, a double-sided character sheet on card stock (clearly for taking to your neighborhood copy shop for reproduction), and some card-stock reference sheets (vehicle record, planet record, and a “trappings cheat sheet”). In short, everything an entire group needs to play the game, short of pencils and paper. I love the fact that they’ve included multiple copies of the player’s booklet for the game, and it seems a great way to load a boxed set.

The booklets themselves are SHORT! The GM book is 44 pages long and the players’ book is 28 pages long, making them even shorter than my beloved Moldvay/Cook D&D books. This is due in part, I’m certain, to the dearth of art. There is some art, but not a lot, and entire pages have nothing but the three columns of text with a few drop boxes. Starsiege isn’t about to win any beauty contests in terms of layout and design. The books work, but that’s about it.

Of slightly greater importance is the complete lack of a table-of-contents or index in any of the books. I can understand the impulse; the books are so short and the rules so simple that referencing them in the middle of play is unlikely and simple to do. Still, I’m gratified to see that the author, Josh Chewning, has posted tables-of-contents on his website.

Before I decided to buy the game, I went online to find some reviews, and one of the first that came up was naturally Dr. Rotwang’s rather glowing description, and I have to echo just about everything he said. Starsiege really is a sci-fi construction set. There are even suggestions for making the game more or less deadly, more or less gritty, more or less wahoo-out-there-superhero-comics. The rules for radiation, for example, are vague enough that they can be tied to pretty much any atmospheric pollutant, and can either result in simple, long-term damage to your character, or wacky, old-school Gamma World mutations, with a built-in mechanism to give you a broad spectrum of results.

My reflex here is to compare it to GURPS, but that’s not really fair to either game. Starsiege is simple, light, broad, and vague. If you’re all about modeling the differences between the Barrett .50, the Sharps Big 50, and the Spencer Carbine (yes, Savage Worlds, I’m looking at you), Starsiege is not your game.

Maybe.

And the caveat is there because of the awesome little trappings system the game includes. It basically gives you quick-and-dirty points-buy system to create just about any little tool, mutant power, gun, starship, ringworld, multi-dimensional planet-eating monster or what-have-you. (Can you say, “Apocalypse Box?”) While the default is to paint with broad strokes, there’s no reason you couldn’t drill down to more detail, though I’m not quite sure yet how much granularity the game will support. But what you can do with it is basically recreate whatever you need to emulate the genre you’re after, whether it’s Death Stars and lightsabers or Klingons and tricorders or datajacks and wired reflexes. The system doesn’t care if your ship is powered by dilithium crystals and has a warp drive or relies on a steam boiler power plant and is propelled by aether screws. It’s a completely effects-based system: how far can it go, how fast can it get there, how many people can it transport, and can it blow things up once it gets there.

And if that’s not enough, it’s got a rather sweet little planetary conflict system, where you can stat out your planets (or interstellar empires or megacorps or spy agencies or war fleets or…) and then have them duke it out for domination of the galaxy.

As a toolkit, it’s shockingly complete for such a little game. It’s not the easiest thing to use (in part thanks to the painfully obvious lack of an editor) and I suspect if you poke it hard enough, it’ll break in lots of places. Likewise, its obsequious genuflections to BALANCE are a bit over-the-top; do I really need to break down every piece of gear to its component abilities and chart out its stats? Certainly not, but it does give me a good place to start, helps me answer questions like “how much should this cost” and will be a great boon to setting-builders who suffer fits of stark terror when confronted with a blank page. There are so many little options, tweaks, and suggestions for other ways to handle things that it’s incredibly flexible. While I was reading it, I couldn’t help but imagine the sorts of campaigns I could create with this, which is a huge improvement over my reaction to Savage Worlds, where I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d build my own rules.

But it is a toolkit. It’s not everything you need to play in one box. The example setting provided is only 24 pages long and includes no maps. It does have a nice collection of weapons, starships, and alien races to play with, but not much more than that. Before you can start rolling dice in earnest, you (or you and your players) will need to sit down and build your campaign. Frankly, that sounds like a heck of a lot of fun to me. I think I’ve found my go-to game for space opera sci-fi.