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Steven Robert
United States
Altadena
California
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In recent years the FATE system has exploded onto the scene, with half a dozen games based upon it taking flight. Here on RPGG many of us are familiar with one science fiction incarnation, the excellent Diaspora. But here’s a look at the other (and first) major player in FATE-based sci-fi: Starblazer Adventures (hereafter SBA).
So who’s blazing these stars, anyway?
Alas, for those of us keen on Japanese sci-fi cartoons (“anime” to the cognoscenti) that somehow crossed over to captivate mainstream American children in the 1980’s, these adventures have little (directly) to do with Star Blazers. Instead it refers to a British sci-fi comic series that ran for several decades.
I know nothing about comics (much less lapsed British comics), so the background held no attraction to me. The nice thing is that each issue was a separate story, and the comic's far-future setting evolved to encompass nearly every corner of sci-fi, from trailblazing first steps to cosmopolitan alien cities. Thus the “setting” is very diverse and can most likely accommodate any of your GM’s evil plans. Even, I think, the Space Battleship Yamato.
The stories from the comics do come across strongly here: more than 100 pages are devoted to a library of planets, villains, monsters, heroes, gadgets, and even some plot summaries (to be used as adventure skeletons) from them. But the ideas are so diverse and disconnected that they do not quite cohere as a single campaign setting. Instead there's just a ton of elements from which one can pick and choose favorites to enhance or complement a game.
The downside is that it’s up to the GM (and/or entire group, if you’re into that sort of thing) to define the scope of the universe, worlds, and adventures. So there’s some startup in defining the stakes of the game. The upside is that any sort of “space opera” game you can imagine will fit into the system without too much work.
So what’s the big deal about FATE, anyway?
The FATE system is a generic mechanical system that powers several of today’s best games (IMHO). It has a few distinguishing characteristics, though all of the FATE games are slightly different (and some even monkey with these “core” elements):
-Tasks are resolved by rolling a relatively small number of six-sided dice, totaling the number, adding relevant bonuses, and comparing to a target.
-Characters are defined by sets of Skills, Stunts, and Aspects. Skills are general areas of expertise that provide bonuses in task resolution, Stunts are special tricks that enhance these skills or open up new options, and Aspects are narrative phrases that help define a character’s strengths, soul, and limitations.
-Aspects are really what make the game special, because they power the fate point economy. Each player gets a ration of fate points that can be spent to enhance die rolls or add new elements to the game. But players earn fate points through compels, where an Aspect gets them into trouble – either because they are role-playing well, or because the GM offers them a deal.
-What’s more, pretty much anything – from a character to an NPC to a creature to a starship to a world to an entire campaign – can have an Aspect. That provides a nice unified mechanism to identify, and mechanically manipulate, the coolest parts of every piece of the game.
-Characters take damage on “stress tracks” that build up consequences – essentially temporary negative Aspects. Most FATE games have at least two stress tracks, one for physical and one for mental harm; SBA is no exception.
In practice, FATE is a nice compromise between story-driven and traditional games as well as between rules-light and crunchy games. Combat is tactical but not complex; the system simply flows well, and it forces you to pay attention to each character (and object’s) flaws and expertise, thanks to the elegant fate point system.
How does SBA use FATE?
SBA hews pretty closely to the standard system, but it does implement one important change: most FATE games use four Fudge dice; SBA instead uses two six-sided dice, subtracting one from the other. This provides a flatter probability distribution and a slightly increased range of results, in line with the game’s billing as “the rock and roll space adventure game.” I think that makes a lot of sense for this purpose, though in general I prefer the Fudge dice.
It also has relatively forgiving stress tracks: characters in this game can take a fair amount of punishment and keep ticking. Again, that fits the genre well.
Characters are fairly standard for FATE, with a pyramid of skills (one or a couple of high skills and several lower ones) and a few stunts. The stunts are each associated with a skill (or a career, see below), with a wide menu of options for adding special abilities. I like the stunts; many are imaginative and interesting. The skill list is pretty broad (32 skills; an average character will have 10), which means that there will be a lot of things a character won’t be much good at. Some trimming probably would have been nice.
Aspects are generated through a series of phases detailing each character’s backstory – and how they intersect with the other characters. This sort of character generation puts their stories center stage and builds explicit links within the group, and it is very powerful at starting the game off with a bang.
The one major departure from the standard is the idea of a Career Aspect, which is one way of enabling just a little bit of a class/archetype system. Careers – fairly generic categories like military, miner, or civilian – unlock certain stunts that provide unique abilities (such as mining and salvage equipment for a miner). Other than that, they have no direct game effect.
Of course, this being sci-fi there’s also the matter of equipment, and SBA offers plenty of options, in the context of a fairly free-form system. I like the way equipment works, but the multi-stage skill check system for acquiring items is a little clunky. Nevertheless it's definitely better than trying to keep track of your bank account credit-by-credit.
But wait – I want some aliens!
Fear not! The book includes a chapter on creating alien (and mutant) characters. It’s an elegant approach because the system is based on choosing an Aspect that defines them as an alien, which then unlocks a set of special “skills” (or alien powers) that can be added to the character just like a normal skill. However, PCs must take “Weaknesses” – basically permanent negative aspects – to balance these more powerful skills and stunts. It’s simple, requires very little rules overhead, and opens up a lot of possibilities. Rock and roll, baby!
There are even separate rules for creating (and balancing, to the extent that is necessary in FATE) huge “star monster” threats with abilities (and size) far beyond the normal. This part really inspired me...mmm...animate Death Stars!
And spaceships! Lots and lots of spaceships?
Yes indeed! Spaceships are essentially characters in their own right, with a skill pyramid, stunts, and Aspects. Starship design is a matter of specifying the scale of the ship and then the normal FATE qualities, though of course the list of skills appropriate for starships is different from that appropriate to characters. You even choose Aspects by detailing past journeys, just as characters choose them by detailing their backgrounds. The one major gripe I have with the system is the equating of scale with skill – larger ships have more skill points to spend. That does make some sense, but many small ships should be extremely good at one thing (like fighting, or scouting), and that’s not allowed by these rules.
Starship combat is a little more complex than normal combat, with some special rules for different systems (like electronic warfare). But the same basic mechanism powers both, principally rolling skills and tagging aspects for bonuses, so players should be able to pick it up with relatively little trouble.
What else does the game offer?
You are perhaps getting the picture now – SBA is a huge sci-fi toolkit, with a ton of optional add-ons that let you add whatever of the genre’s tropes are most important to you, from starships to governments to alien monsters to robots to psionics to whatever. The beauty of the game is that all these systems work in more or less the same way: they are powered by sets of skills, stunts, and Aspects tailored to the idea. For most non-characters, there is also a “Scale” attribute that determines its size or extent as well as overall power level. Again, I’d like to decouple power from size, but that’s easy to fix.
Because of the huge number of options, any two SBA games will almost certainly differ strongly – one could pit two criminal gangs against each other, another a group of heroes against the Star Monster That Ate Venus, and another a group of blaster-wielding barbarians defending their green planet against invading aliens. That breadth is one of SBA’s major advantages.
What about stories, though?
SBA has an impressive amount of gamemastering advice, and most of it comes from a different perspective than other books I’ve read. There’s great advice on pacing, obstacles, structure and improvisation (with three different approaches: GM-imposed structure, improvisation based on Aspects, and a hybrid), the tropes of space opera, perspective, and even building mysteries.
There are even tables for randomly generating adventures (and settings, in the form of planets) and the “Adventure Funnel” framework for quick and dirty generation of a plot (I haven’t tried it, but it seems sensible – nothing too innovative but a handy rubric for approaching the problem).
Moreover, SBA takes some of FATE’s ideas and applies them even more broadly. For example, they talk about “Plot Stress,” where PC actions/inaction adds quantifiable stress, building up to Consequences (in the same way that PCs suffer damage). I quite like this as a way to think about the impact of PC actions in a “sandbox” style game.
Is it pretty?
The hardback is huge – 632 pages huge – with a good deal of black-and-white art, all stripped from the old comic series – in some cases single panels, in others entire pages. I have no connection to the comic, so this was “Eh” for me.
The fonts are nice and big, the organization is quite good (there are a huge number of chapters, so the table of contents really helps you find things, and there’s an 8-page index plus appendices with collected tables and worksheets), and there are occasional diagrams and flow-charts to help explain things. (I particularly like the hand-drawn zone diagrams, complete with eraser smudges!)
The binding is quite good, although the page stock is a bit flimsy. The editing is not perfect, but its pretty good compared to the hobby in general.
So tell me how you really feel?
Starblazer Adventures is a massive toolkit for running fast-paced, high-action science-fiction games. The game takes more-or-less stock FATE and adds all the sci-fi trappings in a reasonably elegant manner – mostly by pasting the “Skill/Stunt/Aspect” triad into a myriad of subsystems.
The book is a pleasure to read; the designers did all they could to present the rules clearly, and there are a ton of example Aspects, spacecraft, planets, monsters, villains, and even stories. It would be nearly impossible to read the book and not get inspired.
Of course, the inevitable comparison is with Diaspora. On balance, both are good games. Diaspora has a narrower focus: “hard” sci-fi within a well-defined (though user-generated) setting; SBA is more open and better-suited for space-opera style games in a “build-your-own” setting, with galaxy-hopping, planet-busting adventures. Overall, Diaspora is probably somewhat more elegant in its composition and innovative in its use of FATE, and it has a much better developed social conflict mechanism. But SBA has a much wider range of options for spacecraft, aliens, and other threats.
Both are great games: Diaspora does what it intends to do better, and it shows more innovation. But SBA does everything else better. It would be my go-to game for any sort of pulp sci-fi...if I had a group for such a game, that is.
Note: This review is my sixth in the Iron Reviewer series.
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Charles Donnell
United States
Houston
Texas
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This makes me want to run out and pick this up. And I would if I had the time to add another game to the mix to be played and my group showed any interest at all in an ongoing scifi RPG campaign.
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William Hostman
United States
Eagle River
Alaska
Gaming in Greater Anchorage area, Alaska since 1978. Looking for Indy-willing RPG players in Eagle River (or willing to drive to Eagle River). Geekmail me if interested.
Yes, this really is what I looked like when I uploaded that avatar. Not that it's quite current anymore.
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The one thing about the die-rolling in FATE (and especially Starblazer) is that the randomness on the die exceeds the allowed human range of skills.
Using the values rather than the labels, for clarity.
Skills run 0 to 5 for humans... on the elite end, at least... but the dice range from –5 to +5.
Some people won't like the chances of bombing out... It was my big complaint in SOTC, but it uses 4DF. (It might be overcome with fate, if you choose to...)
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