Inter-dimensional travel has long been a staple of role-playing games. There are some systems like Planescape and Rifts which focus almost exclusively on the concept, and some, like the World of Darkness or Shadowrun, where the ability to jump in and out of a metaphysical realm is a fairly common ability. From a gamers perspective, this makes a lot of sense. Why limit your adventures to one world when you can jaunt back and forth between universes? Now, we have yet another game, The Nearside Project, about the possibility to travel between alternate realities. Although this isnt the freshest or most creative concept for a game that Ive seen, the designers have done a pretty good job with it.
The protagonists of this game, Nearsiders, are people with an innate talent for moving into other worlds, and 3 major methods for doing so. There is the Broken Road (my particular favorite), a method by which madmen project their minds into other realities, Dream-Walking, a special dimension-spanning state that one can go into during REM sleep, and the use of special portals called Broken Rooms. Although experiencing a violent death is also capable of sending one into another universe, this method is unreliable at best. Any Nearsider who tries to travel to new worlds by playing Russian Roulette is probably in for a very, very short career. All characters also have a CoC-esque Distance rating, which measures how much damage interdimensional travel has done to their sanity. Those who make a point of thumbing their noses at the space-time continuum can wind up in the loony bin real quick.
The system of the Nearside Project is fairly simple. Each character has a series of Stats such as Strength, IQ, Charisma, Education, etc. To do something, you add your appropriate skill rating to your Stat, add in any modifiers, and try to roll below that number on a D10. Although some of the dimension-specific rules were a little more complicated than this, any RPG veteran should be able to pick up on these rules very quickly, and novices wont find themselves out of their depth.
The core rules offer descriptions of 13 worlds, also known as variants, for your gaming pleasure. Earth1 is our own planet, only marginally affected by the presence of reality-spanning Nearsiders. Earth2 is your basic alien invasion world, Earth3 is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and so on. Some of the variations are rather uninspired. Weve all seen games where aliens are invading or where prominent public figures are being replaced by demons. However, some of them, such as the world where the weakened fabric of reality is maintained only by a series of cosmic-powered clocks or the world where a faulty biological weapon has erased humanitys conscience, were innovative and excellent. In any case, the fact that travel between the 13 worlds is possible certainly adds a whole new dimension (pardon the pun) to the game. For example, if you think that the ruthless corporate hegemony of Earth11 is boring by itself, try bringing in some superheroes from Earth12 or sorcerers from Earth5. This potential for mingling the various worlds is probably the games greatest asset.
One other interesting aspect of the Nearside Project is the time travel aspect. Two of the variances, Earth4 and Earth13, are just like the baseline world, except that they take place a year in the past and a year in the future, respectively. This is a really neat method of handling time travel, because you dont have those pesky old paradoxes like what happens if a time traveler goes back in time and kills himself? If you arent really travelling back in time but just visiting a place that is exactly like the past, that sort of thing shouldnt be a problem, right? Wrong. For some reason, the official game rules severely limit interactions with these two worlds, limiting visits to 13 minutes and preventing players from interfering with history . Personally, Id toss these rules out, or at least significantly alter them. Having a window into the past and the future presents so many gaming possibilities. Why not take advantage of them?
The Nearside Project is available for download in PDF format at http://members.tripod.co.uk/Nearside_Games/index.html. This is something of a mixed blessing. Its nice to be able to give the game a thorough examination before deciding whether or not to purchase it, but having the rules on your screen is not quite as convenient or satisfying as a professionally bound and printed book. Call me a technophobe if you will, but I dont think that computer files will ever manage to replace words printed on good ol sheets of pulped wood, bound together by glue and string. Furthermore, Nearside Games is relying on the honor system to make money from the game, asking people to send them $20 if they intend to play it. Its great to see that the company has so much faith in its fans (Metallica could learn much from these folks), but at the same time Id really hate to see them undergo financial trouble because of unscrupulous free riders. A better solution might be to put the rules onto the internet in a way that would not allow them to be downloaded, E-Mail a free password to anyone who asks for it, and then change the password every 30 days or so.
Overall, the Nearside Project is a pretty interesting game, one which fans of post-modern, reality-warping entertainment such as Mage, The Invisibles, or even The Matrix may get a big kick out of. In any case, since getting a copy of the rules is so simple, its very easy to test it out for yourself
