Summary:The Blue Planet RPG is obviously a labor of love, a stunning backdrop of fact-founded, logically constructed, futuristic cyberpunk shaken up with the fictional American West and a dash of noir mystery, marred only by a twist of shallow, tacked-on game mechanics. My advice: treat this like the sourcebook it was meant to be, and splice in the pseudo-realistic simulation or cinematic system of your choice, depending on what type of game you want to play.
Detail: In the beginning, games told you what the winning conditions were, and then the rules of play. Then roleplaying games came along and told you that there really were no winning conditions except what you envisioned, and gave you the rules of play, along with a setting in which to implement them. Then White Wolf came along and gave us the setting where there were no winners, introduced the rules of play, and then continued to give us even more detailed and fractured setting information.
Biohazard Games turns the modern RPG outline completely on its head. I daresay they should have gone the Mayfair (Role-Aids) or pre-M:tG Wizards of the Coast (Primal Order) route, and created a well-fleshed-out setting “suitable for use with your preferred gaming system.” Why? Because, of 352 pages, the first 250 define and develop the gaming world, and the next 50 discuss character creation. Only the last 50 pages actually deal with the game mechanics–and those last 50 pages are sufficient, annoying, and completely superfluous all at once.
Where do you start with a book like this?
The middle, naturally.
If you happen to come across this book in a store, and want to make an educated decision on whether to purchase it, turn to pages 198-200. Those three pages (2.5 pages of text) contain the total attitude of the game, why it was created, and how to approach the game world both as players and as characters.
With only three pages on the typical concerns of beginning games (how to roll percentile dice, what RPGs are, how to create adventures, etc.), Blue Planet is definitely not intended for the beginning gamer. This book, is, without a doubt, a technical manual on the historical (social, political, economic, technological), meteorological, geographic, botanical, zoological and otherwise scientific data on a future alternate Earth of 2199 and Poseidon, a “waterlogged” planet found on the other side of a wormhole.
Be prepared for some hefty reading. Thankfully, Blue Planet is eminently readable, with a clarity born of a crystallized, single-minded vision. Unlike most of the gaming publications available today, artwork is extremely sparse in this manual. For the most part, there’s simply no room for anything that’s pretty simply for the sake of being pretty or for splitting up text. The two-column layout is set in (I’m guessing) 9-point text. While not broken up by art, it is populated with the occasional tabular data, technical illustration, or detail map, which are all so apparently genuine, that you’ll be wishing you could live long enough to take the shuttle to the wormhole yourself. Fictional pieces, as well as “Access Denied” (adventure seed) sections also break apart the technical text of the book.
Just to emphasize the technical nature of this book: there are 15 solid pages of historical timeline, stretching from 1957 to 2199. And let’s not forget the section on “Oceanography for Gamers,” which, in three solid pages, explains how Hollywood and many fictional works have misled us regarding the niceties of water pressure, breathing underwater, light underwater, sound underwater, temperature, salinity, tides, currents, and waves. For example, simple logic dictates that a person will not explode if they move from a normal atmosphere (1G) airlock into space, but this reviewer confesses that Hollywood and science fiction had fooled him until Blue Planet pointed out the error of his ways.
So really, when it comes down to it, what can you really do with Blue Planet? Well, the bottom line is that you’re supposed to play the game on Poseidon. Other than to establish the basic economic foundation for cyberpunk, material on Earth is a little bit sparse, so it might be difficult to run an Earth-bound game. A Luna-, Mars-, or Belt-based campaign might be possible, as long as you avoided space travel–there are no specs or guidelines for spacefaring ships. However, there is considerable information devoted to supplies, technology, creatures and vehicles resident on the planet Poseidon itself. So let’s go with the flow and travel to Poseidon.
Player character options include three flavors of human: pure strain (aka chimp, darwin, monkey), cyber-modified (aka modi, bug), and genetically redesigned (aka genie). You also have two choices of genetically “uplifted” nonhuman characters: dolphins (aka fin or flipper) and killer whales (aka orca). Your basic player character “race” defines your baseline abilities, which are augmented by your place of origin, background, and education. Selection of a goal, motivation and governing attitude follows, along with additional character traits that add flavor without significant impact to the character’s essence–gender, age, height, weight, etc. Lastly, you choose one of nearly 40 professions to live by, and you can create your own professions if you want to. Curiously, no attempt is made to “balance” character worth, and the designer is completely up front about this. A native Poseidon warrior is severely disadvantaged with respect to a GEO Shock Trooper. No excuses, no regrets. That’s REAL life.
The system contradicts itself, being overly complex and simple in the same breath. Half the system is the skill checks, which are based on a simple percentile roll, with most adjustments (labeled “task level modifiers”) being made in 10 percentile point increments. The other half of the system is a truncated version of Killer Crosshairs. For those not in the know, Biohazard Games currently owns the rights to Killer Crosshairs, a simple-to-use, versatile and detailed narrative and quantitative to-hit and damage system. The combat system sketched out in the final pages of the book coughs up a masticated version of this game accessory. Finally, the coordination of actions–tracking player declarations and character action resolution–seems to slow play to a crawl.
Do yourself a favor and pick this game up with the preconception that it’s simply a sourcebook, and not a self-contained game. Even if you ignore the last 50 pages, the rest of the book is more than worth the cover price. As far as a coherent, self-contained game setting, I haven’t seen a better product on the gaming scene.
