Matter transmitters bug me.  In short, I find them incredible in the most basic meaning of that word:  I don’t believe them.

  If by some chance you’ve avoided all science fiction, let me explain the matter transmission concept.  A material object, possibly even a living object, is deconstructed particle by particle, and a complete record of the position, motion, and energy of each particle is recorded and transmitted to another location where an exact copy of the original is constructed particle by particle, having the same energy levels and motions and relative positions.  It’s the teleporter of Star Trek, the transmat encountered on Doctor Who.  Larry Niven envisioned such matter transmission booths replacing telephones.  And there’s something about it all that I just don’t believe.

  It actually is not the science.  It is pseudo-science, certainly; someone is going to have to find a way around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle if it’s going to work.  But there’s a logic to it that suggests to me it will one day be accomplished.  I don’t know that I will live long enough to have my molecules disintegrated and reintegrated, but I would be surprised if no one ever manages it.

  What bothers me is the way in which this technology doesn’t matter in the worlds in which it is prevalent.  To have done this is to have accomplished much more, but generally those aspects are not considered or even worse are discounted for insensible reasons.  So bear with me while I take another look at transmat technology.

  In order to build a matter transmitter, you have to be able to disintegrate a target.  This may seem obvious; yet in how many settings do they include matter transmitters and don’t include a simple disintegrating weapon?  If I can find and disintegrate a dozen men on the surface of a planet far beneath me, why doesn’t it work as a weapon?  Since I don’t have to worry about reproducing the object disintegrated, I should be able to destroy buildings, structures, perhaps entire cities.

  But that’s just the beginning of my interest in disintegration.  After all, I’m quite aware that if you disassemble a molecule, you convert it to an enormous amount of energy.  The problems inherent in containing and controlling such levels of energy are another question; but why can’t this technology be used to generate power?  Given the amount of energy in a mass the size of a human body, the energy required to initiate the disintegration reaction must be a tiny fraction.  When the dilithium crystals are failing, why don’t we just throw furniture into the transporters and convert it to reserve power?

  And the weapon use of such power is staggering.  A moment ago I was talking about a disintegrator; but if you start to take apart the molecules of an object, you initiate nuclear decay on a massive scale.  Every building, every person, every rock is a potential nuclear bomb whose massive energy can be explosively released with a bit of prodding from our disintegration technology.  As it says in Multiverser, “a device which disintegrates without containment is a remote nuclear fission reaction stimulator.”

  And that leads me to think about the containment.  If I’ve built a transmat, I’ve found a way to contain the energy of complete nuclear collapse.  I don’t know what those force fields will be like, but somehow I think they’ll be able to deflect or absorb unimaginable amounts of power.  We are casually assuming the presence of a shield that could have easily contained the impact of Hiroshima.  We are tossing those shields around as an everyday tool, without any consideration of their real power.

  It’s probably not impossible to design a matter transmitter which reintegrates directly from the disintegration pattern; but it makes more sense to include a memory circuit.  And most of the matter transmitters in most fiction at least imply the existence of such memory banks.  That means that whenever you transfer an object from one point to another you also make a data copy of it; and as long as you have that data copy, all you need to do is add energy to it and you can make another–and another, and another, as many as you need.  You can make a hundred dinners, a thousand starships, a million soldiers.  But this is a largely untapped resource, and the excuses used are complete nonsense.  Not enough energy?  Easily rectified:  throw a few rocks into the disintegrator.  Pattern loss?  This is as foolish as those badly-written spy shows where they are passing around the “only copy” of a computer program.  If making a copy of a program deleted the original, it would make sense–but anyone who understands even a little about computer memory knows that even deleted data is still there until something replaces it.  Keeping the file in memory is easier than losing it.  But is the available memory too small?  The memory circuit really only makes sense if it’s large enough for the entire file.

  But writers go to great lengths to make it impossible to copy things, especially people.  We are told that complex DNA molecules are imperfectly replicated such that life forms can’t be copied.  But we know that life forms can be copied, because that’s what happens when we teleport them.  Really, we’ve completely destroyed one body and built another identical to it.  Besides, those “tiny molecular changes” are inconsistent with most of the other replication applications we can conceive.  How many water molecules have to accidentally be mis-linked as hydrogen peroxide before the liquid is not merely bitter but deadly?  How many mistakes can you make in the atomic structure of a metal object before the levels of radioactive decay are measurable?  No, molecular copying has to be perfect for it to be useful at all; it doesn’t have to work substantially better to copy life forms than anything else.

  Not only can we copy things, we can modify them.  The applications of this have never been adequately explored.  In fact, the medical applications alone are mind boggling.  Did you break a bone?  We disintegrate you, make an adjustment to the program, and reintegrate you with the bone corrected and fully strengthened.  You can do the same thing with a ruptured spleen, or a hernia, or a defective heart valve.  With a filtering program, you can completely remove every trace of a targeted virus or a chemical poison.  If there’s chemical imbalance, whether insulin or hormones or neurotransmitters, you can adjust to correct levels.  Body temperature can be corrected.  With our growing knowledge of the human genome, we would be able not merely to instantly undo the effects of such genetic disorders as sickle-cell anemia or Chrone’s Disease but to reconfigure the genome itself to remove the cause.  And when it comes to cosmetic surgery, well, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”  You want to be taller?  We’ll re-craft your long bones and vertebrae.  Overweight?  We’ll filter out a hundred pounds of fat on one shot.  We can add muscle mass in all the right places, turning a ninety-eight pound weakling to The Incredible Hulk in minutes.  Forget hair dye; we can change the color of your eyes, the pigments in your skin, the length of your fingernails.  Your facial structure can be completely rebuilt.  If we want we can provide you with entirely alien features, or make you look like someone else.  Giving you short blond hair in the morning and long dark hair by dinner is no problem at all.

  Let’s consider cooking.  Insert the roast of your choice and enter the program.  We can increase the temperature such that it is fully cooked in seconds.  At the same time, we can screen out gristle and bone while dispersing the ideal amount of fat and moisture for the most tender servings.  And spices can be added not merely to the surface but throughout the meat.  It’s as easy to chill as to heat.  Water can be turned to ice, cream and sugar to ice cream–we can even make Baked Alaska, with the hot cake and meringue surrounding the frozen center.  Spoiled food is no longer a problem, as we can screen toxins from our meat and dairy product far more easily than we could from our bodies and serve them fresh and delicious.

  Your wardrobe is as flexible as your imagination.  Oh, there will still be designers; but instead of selling clothes they’ll sell computer files.  And getting dressed won’t take long.  Stumble out of bed in the morning into your transmat and execute the preprogrammed routine.  A few seconds later you arrive at work dressed in a new suit cleaned and pressed, with your hair combed and your teeth clean.  If you like you can even program a shot of caffeine already in your blood, or go one step better and clear those endorphins from your brain.  After work, you enter another program into the transmat and go directly from work to the club; you arrive in a completely different outfit with your makeup redone and even a new hairstyle.

  But we don’t have to stop there.  Do you like being thirty-five?  No reason for you to get any older–we’ll just save the pattern of your thirty-five-year-old body and restore you to that physical form with each trip.  Or if you’d prefer being younger, we can probably do that too–maybe not the body you had then, but something very like it.

  And of course everything that isn’t true of cloning is true of transmat copies:  they have your personality, your memories, even your fingerprints, and they’re your age.  Today there are people who are highly skilled to the point of indispensable; tomorrow we’ll be able to copy these people so that they can be in several places at once, and if something should happen to one he’s not entirely irreplaceable.

  And we could go beyond that:  we could design our own people.  Once we know the basics of the human genome, we can modify it to suit our preferences; and unlike with genetic splicing, we don’t have to wait to see the results of our changes:  we can birth the new person fully grown.  And we don’t have to be limited to people.  We could design and build a faster race horse, a smarter ape.  We could design bodies completely different from anything we’ve seen.  And if we like we can give them human levels of intelligence.

  That, of course, leads to a much deeper question.  Why is it that we don’t let our science fiction stories make copies of people?  At least, whenever we do it’s usually an accident, and usually with serious complications.  For television, it may be in part because of the technical problems of having multiple roles played by the same actor.  But there are also moral and theological challenges raised.

  As already said, everything that isn’t true about clones is true about transmat duplicates.  At the moment of their creation, they match the pattern exactly.  They will diverge from each other thereafter, as each acquires distinct experiences and memories, but depending on how established their characters are at the time the pattern is made they will always be similar.  Which is the original?  In truth, neither–both are copies, the original having been destroyed in the creation of the pattern.  Neither has any more claim to being that person than the other; each has the same continuity of consciousness up to the moment the original was disintegrated.  And you might argue that it is illegal, immoral, or unethical to make copies of people–but is that going to prevent it from happening, or force it underground?

  But there’s a deeper problem, a theological problem which you have to answer before you can use a matter transmitter:  is man merely the sum of his material parts?  Is there nothing more, nothing intangible, what might be called spiritual?  If there is, then when the body is disintegrated it would presumably leave a disembodied spirit; and when it is again reintegrated, some spirit would have to occupy it.  It’s easy to hypothesize some sort of spiritual dimension such that the spirit of the man can travel any distance instantly and so be immediately reunited with the body; but it’s just as easy to imagine that some other disembodied spirit would fight him for that body–one of the dead, perhaps, or something worse.  Also, if a man has one spirit, and you duplicate him, what spirit occupies the other body?

  The presence of matter transmission technology in a game world has so many other implications it should be carefully considered before inclusion.  If you’ve got it, you have the basis for uncounted changes to the world from its weapons of warfare to its basic social structure.  You also have some very challenging story ideas from which to build adventures that can be as intellectually compelling as they are exciting.

  Technology always changes the world in unanticipated ways.  When you consider the effects it has in your world, make sure you don’t stop with the obvious.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience.

The many universes of the varied role playing games have led to
proliferation of detailed supplements to provide the gamer with background
information on the lands traversed by the player characters. This need for
source material quickly found an audience in the miniature figure wargames
with each new rule set being published with supplemental material. For a
fantasy or science fiction wargame rules set centered in a world (or worlds)
different from our own, these source books provide a means of enhancing the
game by giving a colorful background and purpose for the battles fought on
the table top.

I have had little or no experience with the Warzone system prior to
receiving several items for review. Now, I’m seriously rubbing my chin and
contemplating making an investment in the system, as my wife despairs. In
truth, I have little patience with BSMSs (Big Shoulderpad Miniature
Systems), but there’s a depth to the Warzone milieu that I find jaunty and
stylish.

Venus: Bauhaus Forces of War is the first supplement to the Warzone second
edition rules. As the title states, this supplement provides the details on
the planet Venus in the Warzone universe and of the Corporation of Bauhaus,
one of the five major corporations. Venus is a terraformed, jungle planet
cursed with a day of rotation longer than its yearly orbit around the Sun
leading to a Venus day that is 117 Earth days long. Bauhaus, whose roots
harken to an imperial Germany, is the dominant corporation of Venus.
Through this supplement, players will find a rich new world to fight over
and detailed information on the armed forces of Bauhaus.

Okay, so what do you get for your hard-earned shekels? The book contains
nearly 100 pages of information. After a brief introduction, the book gives
30 pages of maps and short graphic vignettes, which introduce the six
campaigns covered in the book. These vignettes provide campaign maps and
visual glimpses into the continual fighting on the jungle world. Next come
detailed sections on Venus, the Bauhaus Corporation, and the four ruling
Duke Electors. The six Venusian campaigns are outlined, allowing for combat
between Bauhaus and any of the other four Corporations or the forces of the
Dark Legion. Several new rules for Warzone follow. Among these are rules
for night fighting, including concealment, tracer rounds and flares, and for
the hazardous jungle, which can be as deadly as the enemy. The final third
of the book deals with the Bauhaus Armed forces, giving information on
various troop types, special units, heroes, weapons, vehicles, and a
thousand point army list for each of the four Duke Electors. The book also
includes two pages of punch out templates and counters for use with the new
rules. My only gripe with the book is the total lack of a table of contents
or index, making it hard to quickly locate specific information.

The supplement is visually striking with illustrations or photographs of
Warzone miniatures on every page. The graphics portray the terrain of Venus
and spark the imagination. Photo vignettes of miniatures offer inspiration
and ideas for jungle terrain for the game table. The visuals distinctly
evoke the Target Games style. In the army section, each troop type is
illustrated at least once and those types with miniatures available have
photos of the figures. The different uniforms and camouflage patterns along
with the differences in helmet types are clearly shown.

The Verdict

My overall impression is that Target has a winner. The background material
is rich and allows the reader to easily imagine the savage fighting in the
dark jungles of Venus. The Bauhaus troop types and army lists provide a
variety of units, which can be tailored for fighting on any part of the
planet and will forma basis for Bauhaus forces elsewhere in the solar
system. The supplement covers the subject and I await reading the next one
on Mars and the forces of the Capitol Corporation.

First things first: Kevin Nunn dropped me a line to point out Robocop
as an excellent source of the trade-off between power and personal freedom
(see last month’s column). Given that Robocop is one of my favorite
movies, I was a little embarrassed to have forgotten to point out such an
excellent source for GMs. Thanks for the heads up, Kevin. Now, on with this
month’s column.

Apocalyptic gaming has remained the red-headed stepchild of gaming genres:
it’s been there since the beginning, but it has never had a successful title
as has fantasy, SF, or cyberpunk. The key is that the apocalypse in and of
itself really isn’t enough to support a quality game world. There’s a couple
of things most every apocalyptic game world has in common:

• Society is fragmented and unable to protect its members.
  
• Supplies are scarce and basic survival is not a given.
  
• The modern civilization has left behind a series of ruins full of danger
  and powerful artifacts.
  
• Weird mutations have introduced a host of bizarre new creatures.
  

Those four points can pretty much be found in almost ANY game setting.
There’s nothing there that’s unique to post-apocalyptic gaming. Most every
fantasy setting has some sort of lost ancient civilization. If society was
able to protect the characters, then they wouldn’t have much danger to deal
with. And just about every game uses magic, weird science, or some other
gizmo to give the players funny looking beasties to blow holes in. When you
come right down to it, post-apocalyptic gaming boils down to a different
background than other games: before your character was born a lot of stuff
went ka-blooie. That’s about it. That doesn’t mean that post-apocalyptic
gaming has to stay dull, however. This scenario has been used in quite a few
SF novels. By looking at one of the most effective ones, we can learn a lot
about how to construct a refreshing end of the world game.

There’s two different ways that you can end the world: with a bang, and with
a whimper. Almost every game goes for the bang scenario. Let the nukes fly
so we can get on with the five headed mutants that gamers love to gun down!
Well, I honestly don’t see much difference between most apocalyptic mutants
and fantasy beasties. Both look weird and both want to threaten humanity’s
fragile existence. There’s not enough of a difference there to really make a
compelling game. So, why not go the opposite way? Let’s end the world with a
whimper.

In Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, society is crumbling. The
divide between rich and poor has become a gaping chasm. Cities (not just the
inner city, but any urban area) are now overrun with homeless drug addicts
and ultraviolent criminals. Those few who can eke out a somewhat civilized
existence huddle together within walled communities, living off of
subsistence farming and venturing outside of the walls only under the most
pressing circumstances. Most communities are little more than fragile
islands in a sea of chaos. Police and fire departments charge exorbitant
fees for their services, leaving only the rich able to afford services that
were once considered essential. Society has collapsed for all but the upper
class. For everyone else, civilization is rapidly becoming a distant, fondly
remembered bit of nostalgia.

Into this uncertain world steps Lauren Olamina, a young woman who possesses
maturity and foresight far beyond her years. Parable of the Sower
follows Lauren as she is forced out of her walled community and propelled
into a quest for survival. But Lauren’s quest isn’t simply one of survival.
Convinced that society is fundamentally sick, Lauren conceives of a new
religion called Earthseed. Earthseed is a product of its environment. Lauren
preaches that hard work and foresight rather than prayer and blind faith are
needed now. Lauren hopes to find a safe spot to build a tiny community where
Earthseed can take root and flourish.

What makes Parable of the Sower so effective is that the remnants of
society as we know it are still visible. The police are still there, but you
have to have cash in order to get any help out of them. You can still go to
the local market and buy food, toilet paper, and soap, but you had better be
ready to pay ultrainflated prices. Even if you have the money to buy
anything, there’s no guarantee that you can hold on to what you have. This
intersection of barbarism with our modern culture yields an effective
setting. One minute, you’re buying a sleeping bag at Sears. The next, you’re
fighting a running gun battle with a mob of drug addled psychopaths. This
should be a key point in your game. Take pains to relate the slow spiral of
decay to your players. Relate events to their everyday lives, frame items
and locations in a context that speaks to their knowledge of modern America.
A burnt out ruin shouldn’t be anonymous wreckage. Describe it as the remains
of a McDonald’s franchise. Use what you see in everyday life to fill in the
details and ram home the point that the players are adventuring in a
familiar setting gone horribly wrong. Think of the typical RPG setting and
turn it on its head. Often, games are set in an era that sees ignorance and
the unknown pushed back as civilization expands. In Parable of the
Sower, civilization is wiped away to reveal the barbarism and anarchy
that always lurked beneath it, ready to break out.

Any modern era game can use such a setting for a campaign, from Unknown
Armies to Werewolf: The Apocalypse. The advantage here is that
with the collapse of society there’s no central authority to get in the way
of any campaign plans your may have. The downside is that there’s no central
authority to get in the way of any campaign plans you may have. Yup, you
read that correctly. You now have a lot of freedom to come up with stories,
but on the flip side you also lose one of the most important story tools to
keep characters in line: the social repercussions of destructive behavior.
In a world gone mad, barbarism and brutality are the norm. If everyone else
is doing it, what’s to stop your characters from joining in? This is where
story goals come into play. In Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina
has her dream of a successful Earthseed colony. Obviously, dead men can’t
join religions, so violence isn’t the best way to gain recruits. Similarly,
you’ll need a story arc that gives focus to your game beyond blowing up
people, places, and things. The first place you can look for info is the
first Idea Mine. That article deals with gaming in a world overrun by hordes
of zombies. The basic ideas presented there work in a setting inspired by
Butler’s work, just without the zombies.

A more interesting story line to follow, though, is one that mirrors
Lauren’s struggle to form a new community. Rather than create a physical
challenge for the players, give them a social and spiritual one. There’s a
lot of roleplaying potential here. Can the characters recruit people to join
them? Can they convince the residents of the small town that they’re
journeying through that they are simple travelers and not psychotic drug
addicts? One of the major hurdles facing Lauren is that no one can afford to
trust her. On the other hand, allies and friends are worth their weight in
gold in a world gone mad. By giving others reasons to trust her, Lauren
quickly gains allies on her journey. A gun may be nice in a hostile world,
but a trusted companion or two is much more likely to help you survive. This
should be a major theme of your post-apocalypse game and can help
differentiate it from other gaming genres. Instead of busting heads and
racking up combat skill points, your characters would be much better served
by talking things out and gaining allies.

There’s another major point in Butler’s setting that deserves mention: what
little authority remains is hostile at best and dangerous at worst. With
civilization falling apart, there’s no one around to police the policemen.
Civil rights are a distant memory, and cops are often no better than
legitimized thugs and bandits. This corruption of authority also spreads to
corporations. In Parable of the Sower, slavery has started to make a
comeback in the US. Workers are often forced to pay exorbitant prices for
food and shelter at company run stores. When they eventually slide into
debt, employees are forced by law to work off their ever increasing debt to
their employer. As anarchy rises, the remaining bastions of order view any
freedom as a threat. The collapse of society has created a fascist backlash
amongst those who still wield any power. This can quickly become a major
complicating factor in your characters’ lives and gives you a ready made
source for antagonists.

Finally, you should add a twist to character creation in order to create
fully fleshed out characters. Have each player create a normal, modern day
person. Then, add the skills and stat modifiers that you feel reflect the
character’s experiences as society collapsed. This helps to define
characters along an important divide: all of them were different people
before society collapsed. It also helps create believable characters. Most
people will not have survival or combat skills. These only become important
with the collapse of society. By limiting your players’ skill selection, you
can highlight the theme of everyday people trying to survive in a suddenly
hostile world.

Post-apocalyptic gaming does not have to mean funny looking mutants and
death rays. Societies collapsed in the past without the aid of nuclear
weapons. A non-nuclear, slow decay of society scenario can be far more
challenging than the typical nukes and mutants game. Call of Cthulhu
is so effective because the characters in that game are ordinary people
facing extraordinary circumstances. The same thing is true in a game set
during society’s dying whimper. Put down Ethelred the 10th level warrior and
try playing Myron Smith, a lowly accountant now trying desperately to pull
his friends through the death of civilization. The change may do you good.

Get ready for some screaming space battles in Mag*Blast, a card game for two to six players. In it, you’ll find yourself blasting opponents’ ships in an attempt to reach the heart of their fleet–the Flagship.

There are three types of cards in Mag*Blast: the Flagship cards, the Ship cards (they have “Shipyard” on the back), and the Action cards (they have “Mag*Blast” on the back).

The Flagship card represents one of the six interstellar empires, and each one has a special ability, like being able to draw an extra card. If the Flagship is destroyed, you’re out of the game!

All Flagships have four “Zones” (Green, Blue, Red, and Yellow)–this is where you place the ships that comprise of your fleet. The Flagship is always in the center of the Zones. The Zones are important in that enemy ships can only attack other enemy ships that are in the same zone, and if a Zone is berift of ships, it can be targeted by enemy ships who occupy the corresponding Zone. All Flagships have the same defense (called Hull Value), and can’t attack, so always keep your Zones occupied with friendly forces.

Ship cards represent the various vessels that will fight for their Flagship. They range from the massive Dreadnought to the fast moving Scout Ships.

All Ships use a particular Action card called BLASTS, which are shots from your ships to your opponents. Certain ships use certain BLAST cards, and some can use more than one BLAST, so you never know what to expect from those Ships. The three BLAST cards are the LASER, the BEAM CANNON, and the powerful MAG-CANNON BLAST.

Other action cards include the GAME cards, which represent ship maneuvers like “Direct Hit” or events like “Temporal Anomaly.” Some Action cards include a Resource Symbol, which can be used to get more ships, or “reinforcements.”

The turn sequence of Mag*Blast works like so: Discard, Draw up to 5 cards, Play Reinforcements, Movement, and Play Action Cards. You can discard as many cards as you want–even if it means getting rid of your entire hand. Drawing up to five cards is self-explanatory, so it won’t be discussed. Playing reinforcements can be done by either playing a “Reinforcements” card, or by discarding cards with the “Resource” symbol (there are three different types of Resource Symbols. You can discard three of the same symbols, or all three types of symbols). Movement consists of moving from one of your Flagship’s Zones to another (the Dreadnought is the only Ship that can’t move)–a good thing if you have a undefended Zone–and finally you play Action cards that can rangefrom blasting your opponents to space dust or hiding in an Asteroid Field to protect your Fleet from harm.

The Verdict

At $16.95, Mag*Blast had better be fun to play, right? Well, it is! Most of the night was spent pummelling the enemy ships into space dust.

But the best thing about Mag*Blast (besides it’s fun to play) is the reason it’s referred to as “Screaming Space Battles”–you actually have to make the sound effects as you blast your opponents’ ships, or the attacks fails! It was fun powering up the Mag-Cannon and unleashing hot plasma death on those poor, unsuspecting ships. KA-BLAM!

Mag*Blast is just what it advertises to be–screaming space battles!You’ll be hooked the first time you unleash a Mag-Cannon blast at your opponent. Just don’t forget to make the sound effect…

Power doesn’t come cheap. If it did, we’d all be living in mansions, spending
our weekends sucking down margaritas on some isolated tropical beach. That
isn’t the way the world works, and that isn’t how games should work. Now every
game has different definitions of power. In fantasy games, magic is usually a
good route to power. Hardware and techno-gizmos are often the surest way to
power in an SF game. In this article, I’m going to draw on Orson Scott Card’s
Hart’s Hope and Stephen Donaldson’s Gap Saga for examples of how to
extract the price of power from your characters.

Blood Magic

Hart’s Hope, one of Orson Scott Card’s earliest works, tells the tale
of a young man named Orem who must overthrow the cruel Queen Beauty and
restore the just and rightful king to power. I won’t go into too much detail
about the plot, since I’m not a big fan of Card, but he does describe the
basics of a ghastly, if compelling, magic system.

In the world of Hart’s Hope, magic is divided into two parts: magic for
men and magic for women. Women’s magic gets only passing description in
Hart’s Hope. It is men’s magic that I am going to focus on. In order to
cast a spell, you must draw blood from a living creature. So, for a simple
spell, you can give yourself a small cut and gain the magical power needed for
the spell. A more powerful spell may require the blood of a wild animal. The
most potent magical power comes from the blood of loved ones. A wizard willing
to kill his wife or his child stands to acquire massive amounts of power. Of
course, only a truly heartless or diabolical fiend would do something like
that. Which means that only the heartless or diabolical will have access to
the most powerful magics.

I’m not going to try to boil this idea down into a game mechanic. That would
dodge the basic point of this article: too many games water power down into
some neat little game mechanism. A new spell or increased skill simply means
that the character can now beat up bigger and badder beasties.

BOOOORING!

Imagine if your players had to sacrifice something, a stat, a magic item,
their nifty new starcruiser, in order to nab that little piece of personal
power. It is often said that people will value something that they have to
work for. RPGs have that angle covered rather well. Most experience systems
require a character to clobber x number of baddies before he can get a new
skill. Well, what if we turn that system on its head? Give your characters the
power they want, and then hit them with the price of that power. If they want
to pull a cool stunt, its going to cost them. To get back to Hart’s
Hope, how attractive would magic be in your game if your players knew that
they’d have to injure themselves or hurt the ones they love to use it? Such a
situation breeds a respect for power and a clear understanding that if the
characters want to hoist out their big guns, its going to cost them. This can
generate a lot of sticky moral situations and tension between the thirst for
power and the reluctance to pay its price. Instant compelling role-play fodder
right there, folks!

There are a few things to keep in mind when creating a magic system like this.
First, you have to make the price worth the reward. In an AD&D game, it is a
little ridiculous to expect a mage to kill his first born child just to cast a
magic missile! Simple spells in Hart’s Hope require that the mage only
draw a small amount of his own blood. The key is to keep the cost of magic on
a mage’s mind, no matter how simple the spell. But don’t over do it.

A related guideline is to keep your magic system usable. If truly powerful
magics require a mage to jump into a volcano or something, you won’t find many
mages using such magic often, if ever. Magic should demand a stiff price, but
it should be something that a heartless or at least a dedicated character can pay.

The price of magic should also have reverberations throughout your campaign.
NPCs should know what a mage has to do to gain power and react to spellcasters
appropriately. If you decide that mages have to sacrifice puppies and kittens
to cast spells, you can bet that most NPCs won’t be too keen on mages in
general. Such social isolation and stigma can lead to some great role-playing
opportunities. The ideal magic system should give your game a unique flavor
and added depth. It shouldn’t be just a laundry list of stuff needed to cast spells.

Finally, be sure to follow through on whatever sacrifices a character makes.
You should ensure that a character’s decisions do not take place in a vacuum.
If the player is role-playing this out, he may need some not so subtle reminders.

Cybernetics and Freewill

So far, I’ve talked about extracting a material cost from your characters. In
most games, it will be enough to require characters to sacrifice trusted items
and their personal health. If your group is up to role playing challenge,
there is a very cool concept that you can steal from Stephen Donaldson’s Gap saga.

In his five volume series, Donaldson tells a sprawling (and a bit long winded;
I skimmed the last book and a half) tale of an interstellar struggle for
power. I could write a few months’ worth of columns just on this series alone,
but instead I’ll focus on one very cool character: Angus Thermopyle.

Angus was a space pirate, one of the most brutal and heartless men in all of
space. I say “was” because at one point in the saga, Angus is captured by the
authorities and turned into a cyborg, complete with laser beams in his
fingers, a sophisticated suite of ECM tools, and increased strength and
agility. Basically, he gets all the cool stuff out of Shadowrun.

But that’s not all. Since Angus is just a bit on the murderous side, the
government implants a computer in his head, a computer that controls his
actions. Angus isn’t reduced to a simple automaton. He still has most of his
freewill. The computer kicks on in certain situations and forces him to obey
the commands of selected individuals. It also controls his violent compulsions
and sometimes gives him access to new data or skills (a la the Matrix).

I think that this is one of the niftiest ideas you can add to a science
fiction game. Mind control like this is a natural outgrowth of cybernetic
implants. If we can modify the body, why not modify the mind?

There are a lot of pitfalls to this idea. One of the most common mantras in
any RPG that includes a seduction or fast-talk skill is that NPCs can’t use
skills like that to make PCs do things. PC freewill is inviolate. Often, I’d
agree with that. A game isn’t much fun if the GM is always telling you what
your character is doing. But with the right players and the right plan, you
can make this work in a game.

My first suggestion is that you check with your players before trying
something like this out. Most gamers, I imagine, wouldn’t be too keen on
hearing halfway through a campaign that those implants that took at character
creation have turned them into corporate lapdogs.

On the other hand, it is a good idea to keep the limits of the implants’
control secret. Part of the fun of this idea is that it gives a game a hint of
the unexpected. It can also worry your players to no end. You want to give
your players a basic idea of what’s up, but save a full explanation for an
appropriately climactic scene.

Don’t over do it. It is a little easy to shackle everyone with mind control
devices, but it makes it a little less unique and may be problematic if not
everyone is keen on losing some of their character’s free will. A character
coping with something like this should be the exception, not the norm.

Finally, keep the level of control over a character reasonable. Any mind
control implants a character has should be there for a reason. This can be a
great tool for advancing your plot and provides a lot of cool role-playing
opportunities. Don’t just use it as a method to browbeat or abuse characters senselessly.

“You need money to play.”

Starbase Jeff is a card game. It’s not a collectible card game, because
everybody has exactly the same deck, just shuffled differently. It’s not a
playing-card game, because, well, they’re not playing cards. However, Jim
Geldmacher and James Ernest do an admirable job of meshing the two.

You see, Jeff Tuttle was turned from a humble shareware programmer into the
manager of a deep-space construction firm. He’s interested in making money
- big money. He wants to create starbases as large as major cities. And
he wants you to build them.

Starbase Jeff is a game for two to four players. Each player takes a deck
of cards - twenty cards to a deck, each deck a different color - and
shuffles it thoroughly. Each player also starts out with some
money. (This can be represented with poker chips, board game money,
tallies on paper, or what have you. The designers “strongly recommend that
you don’t play for real money. Furthermore, we strongly don’t suggest a
ratio of a nickel for every credit.”) The object of the game is to make
the most money, you see.

Players draw hands of five cards from their decks. Then, each turn, each
player plays a card from his or her hand. Cards are played according to
rank, and each card has a different rank. There’s also a building cost
associated with each card, which the player must pay when playing the card;
additionally, pieces of the starbase have different numbers of directions
to which they can connect to other pieces, and if the player can’t connect
his piece of the station to another of his pieces directly, he must pay
each of the players in-between one credit for each piece of theirs he has
to pass through to build his piece.

Oh, and you get bombs, too. These take precedence over any other card, and
blow up a piece of your choice.

The game ends when someone runs out of money, at which point the person who
has the most money wins; or, when someone closes off the station (i.e. no
more pieces can be connected), at which point the player who closed it off
takes the pot (into which building fees are paid), and then the
person with the most money wins.

The Verdict

Starbase Jeff is a lot of fun, and due to its small size it’s immensely
portable - you can play while you’re waiting for your food at a restaurant,
or in the backseat of a car (assuming the seat is large enough). It’s a
lot like poker - you have to know what to play and when to play it - and a
lot like chess - in that you have to think through several moves at a time.

Plus, it’s a Cheapass Game, and that’s just fun to say.

If you want in-depth characterization and massive storylines in every game
you play, this game isn’t for you. If you don’t - then it probably is.

On the other side of the spectrum from Maximum Tech is The Clans:
Warriors of Kerensky, which has enough flavor text to choke a camel.
This, too, is intended to add detail and a touch of realism to your
Battletech games, but The Clans focuses less on the rules aspect and
more on the background aspect, providing a rich and definitive look at the
Clans, their history, their society, and their customs.

The Good Stuff

The Clans is fun to read. That’s the first thing I have to say
about it. Even if you don’t play Battletech - even if you don’t roleplay
at all, and are just a science fiction fan - The Clans is a good
book to pick up. The entire book contains no more than three pages of
rules, leaving 125 for history, customs, and society.

It fills them well, too. Chris Hartford spends 25 of those pages telling
us just how the Clans got to be where they are in the current era; then, he
gives us another 35 telling us about society and government. The remaining
pages go into detail about the individual Clans - politics,
distinctiveness, and origins - and the systems which the Clans control.
Only the last three pages before the index contain rules - and those rules
mainly cover honor systems within the Clans.

The Bad Stuff

On the other hand, The Clans is a highly specific piece of work;
you’re not going to learn much about the Inner Circle by picking it up, and
if you’re looking for new rules for your game you’ll be quite disappointed.
Also, it is the kind of book that you’ll want to read again and again to
make sure you got everything; it’s comprehensive, but some of the
information is fairly buried in anecdotes.

The Verdict

I recommend The Clans to pretty much everyone who enjoys science
fiction - gamer or not. Even if you’re not interested in Battletech it’s
good reading material, and if you are, and you’re a Clan fan, this is
possibly one of the best buys you could make.

“Before the dawn of time, they rose to rule the world.

“Sixty-five million years ago, they fought a war so devastating that it
nearly destroyed that world and everything on it. Those who survived
fled into the vast night of space, looking for a new home

“Today they are here, among us.

“Those who know them call them Saurians, viscous looking lizard
creatures with technology centuries beyond our own. For the moment, they
walk among us, hidden within false flesh, barely recognized as their own.

“Soon more will arrive - many, many more.

“Then, the true battle will begin.”

That is a quote from the back of the Exodus Sourcebook, a supplement
dealing with the aliens known as the Saurians for Conspiracy X.

Everything you know about Saurians is correct, but you don’t know
everything about them. There are more species of Saurians that those who
work with the Black Book - would you believe there’s eight types of them?
That they are originally from Earth? And, in less than a century,
humankind will be fighting for their very lives?

Read on, friends - this may be for your own survival!

Chapter 1 gives you an introduction to Exodus, including the obligatory
“How to use this book.” A neat short story begins your venture into the
Saurian Culture.

Chapter 2 begins the descent into the mystery of Saurians, including the
“Lizardmen of Vietnam.”

Chapter 3 introduces us to the Dreamspeakers, a rogue group of Saurians
who wish to learn from humankind on how to be human. They can be used as
a potential ally, or as possible new recruits for Aegis.

BTW, Chapter 3 also gives us what really happened in 1938, when a news
reporter broadcasted an alien invasion.

New equipment, character generation, and a new ability called Hypnomancy
for the Dreamspeakers round out Chapter 3.

Chapter 4 gives us the history of the Saurian Race - their life on Earth,
the Great War between the Saurian Races that forced their escape into
space, and finally their secret return to Earth, with the rest of the
Saurian races to return in less than one hundred years.

Chaper 5 gives us the biology, motivations, activites, and game stats
for the four clans currently on Earth, as well as motivations and goals
for the Saurians.

Chapter 6 describes Saurian Technology, with items common to all clans,
and also those specific to a certain clan.

Round it out with an adventure dealing with Saurians, and you have the
making of an excellent sourcebook. The art is wonderful, with the
pictures of the Saurians a we bit too lifelike. Creepy.

My only complaint is the werid lizard-like art on the bottom of the
pages. It makes the type difficult to read whenever it is on that
“skin,” but it still didn’t detract from the enjoyment of the sourcebook.

Finally, one of the most chilling sentences which foreshadows trouble
for Humanity is:

“Some humans have stumbled across them (remains of Saurian’s history)
from time to time, but the evidence was misunderstood or concealed. In
the next hundred years, no amount of disinformation will contain the
secret.”

Extinction is on the way, folks…

Time travel is one of those tasty subjects for science fiction games that never seems quite to ferment. Between Grandfather Paradoxes, missing time, meeting yourself and endless causality problems, it seems like the only way to make a consistent, playable game is to institute rules ala Doctor Who:

GM: “If you meet yourself, you die.”

Player: “Why?”

GM: “Because the time streams are laced with positive flux, that inverts the subquantum matrix. Your Schoenhauer coefficient can’t take the invasive signal loss…and I don’t know what would happen, it would be messy and the rules say no.”

Player: “Oh.”

And so a bunch of very juicy, though complicated, plot ideas go tumbling out the window.

Not any more. The fine folks at Aetherco have developed Continuum, an RPG that centers around logical, playable time travel. They have attempted a remarkable feat of plate balancing, because in a slim 68 page tome they have developed a time traveling system, addressed all manner of paradoxes, used a great deal of very sharp art, created rules and guidelines for the Spanner (time traveler) society, a full sample adventure, enemies, tricks, combat, character creation and somebody’s kitchen sink. As you might imagine, it’s congested.

The authors know their topic, and the writing on the ins and outs of handling paradoxes in time travel is by far the most useful and concise part of the book. But the weight of topics they are attempting to cover chokes the life out of their setting. Rather than full descriptions of Fraternities and the dangerous Narcissists, we are given fits and dribbles of description–it’s as though the rules are written by writers who travel as quickly as the Spanners the game is about. And for every clever idea (the Yet, a record of future events you discover you are fated to perform) there are seven more frustratingly incoherent ones. Who are the movers and shakers? How do the different fraternities interreact? What do they see as the point of their stewardship of time? Continuum has no answers.

The system is extremely complicated, and I will be the first to admit that I simply do not understand it. As math, it makes sense–but the six page example of time combat makes it abundantly clear that unless one has a strong fetish for time travel mechanics, it is simply over engineered and very nonintuitive. It took me 2 hours to work through a sample combat, which I did only for the purposes of this review–so I doubt anyone else would really care to.

Don’t despair over Continuum yet…they are releasing Version 1.0 at GenCon this summer, and with more breathing room they may fill out the missing information from this playtest version. I’d recommend Continuum to anyone looking for some excellent ideas about how to manage time travel in their games. And this book is still a fresh, innovative take on the old shoe of time travel–it just isn’t working as a game on its own merits.

When I first heard about Fading Suns, I had no idea whether this was to be a fantasy game - “Isn’t that a D&D world?” asked one of my playtest group - or a science fiction game. All I knew was the name, and the name lends itself to either genre. Now that I’ve got the book, and have played around with it for a while, I can honestly say that it’s both.

Fading Suns takes place three thousand years in the future, after humans have expanded their sphere of influence to a few dozen “known worlds” and quite a few “lost worlds,” planets which were cut off - intentionally or otherwise - when the Church began to crack down on technology. Now, though, technology and the technological Guilds are making a comeback, and the Lost Worlds are slowly starting to rejoin the fold - and the stars have begun to die. There’s a lot of philosophical debate about this, but it’s not necessarily what the games are going to be about.

There are four major factions in the world of Fading Suns: the noble houses - five major and innumerable minor, the Church - several branches, the Guilds, and the aliens - who can also belong to the Church or one of the Guilds and whose worlds are often governed by the nobles. The universe is similar to that of Star Wars, kind of; one of my players likened it to the Mos Eisley Cantina. The introductory story gives the impression of a dustball out on the edges of the known worlds, sort of run-down but great for scum, villainry, and the poor schmuck of a noble who’s there to try and keep an eye on things.

Character creation is fairly simple; attributes are divided into three sections, and skills into two. Body Characteristics include, well, physical stats; Mind Characteristics deal with mental tasks, and include the character’s technical aptitude; and Spirit Characteristics are opposed: they deal with the character’s psyche and personality, and are paired; no pair may ever exceed a total of ten points. Imbalance in a pair means that the character leans one way or the other in that particular area. (Yes, it’s confusing; I can’t think of a better way to put it, though, without plagiarizing.)

There are, as I said earlier, two types of skills: Natural Skills and Learned Skills. Natural skills are those which everybody has in the Fading Suns universe - they include fighting, dodging, and observing. Learned skills are “tricks of the trade,” as it were, and can be pretty much anything not already covered.

Next come Benefits and Curses, and Benefices and Afflictions. The former generally deal with the character as a person - psychological quirks, physical stature, that sort of thing - while the latter involves things that the person has - church vestments, travel passes, money, et cetera.

Die-rolling in Fading Suns is extremely interesting; the player rolls 1d20, aiming to roll under the target number - usually a Characteristic plus a Skill - but, if he manages to roll under that target number, the closer he gets to it, the better he does, and the more victory points or extra effect dice he gets on the roll. On a target number of 13, therefore, rolling 12 would be better than rolling 11 - and a 13 would be a critical success, doubling the number of victory points or effect dice. 19 always fails, though, and 20 always critically fails, visiting disaster upon the character. A 1, on the other hand, always succeeds, no matter what the target number.

The neat thing is, though, that’s all you ever roll. Only the target number changes - so you need exactly one die for the entire group. Even damage requires only that you roll the same die several times. (I find it unfortunate, however - and this is something I dislike about a great many games - that you can critically succeed on a combat roll and do absolutely no damage, even before the other person dodges and counts armor/parrying in.)

My verdict? I love the world. I like the system. My players are bugging me to run it again, though, so I ought to be off…