Blue Planet 2E: Players Handbook

Summary

RUN, don’t walk, to your nearest game store and pick up this book. Nearly every flaw from the first edition has been fixed. You don’t need the Moderator’s Guide to play, and the new Synergy system is a breeze to use and adapt to other (non-cinematic) settings.

Detail

I think every reviewer realizes the difficulty of reviewing the 2nd edition of a game. The game must be evaluated both on its own merit, and on the successes and failures of its predecessor. I happen to have extremely poor self-initiated recall, so this review will contain more of the former than the latter. I deliberately chose not to review V2 with the first edition open in front of me. It would have made very little sense in the end, anyway. Take it for granted that large portions of the text from first edition by Biohazard have been cut-and-pasted into Version 2, done by Fantasy Flight, exclusively licensed from Biohazard.

So let’s start with my own failing for the review of the first edition: a summary of the Blue Planet setting.

Blue Planet is set on Poseidon, a planet discovered in the Lambda Serpentis System, 35 light years from Earth in 2078. No, humanity isn’t skilled enough to have developed FTL by then, but we are skilled enough to uplift cetaceans (that’s dolphins and orcas to us non-biologist types) and perform some genetic and cybernetic manipulations, and we’re lucky enough to have discovered a wormhole just beyond the orbit of Pluto. So anyway, we send out a colonization effort on the spaceship Cousteau, which starts to settle in. Meanwhile, back on Earth, corporations get large enough to take on the status and responsibilities of national governments, we’ve colonized the moon and Mars, and miners are hard at work on asteroids. Finally, a virus takes out most of the food supply, forcing the formation of an emergency world government. Understandably, the initial Poseidon colonists don’t hear from Earth (Hey, we’ve got our own problems here!) for nearly 100 years. The Incorporate States and the Global Ecology Organization both gradually establish presences on Poseidon after an immortality drug is discovered upon Recontact. Various degrees of conflict develop between and among native and newcomer populations. Add to that a mysterious race of creatures dubbed Aborigines, the true natives of Poseidon, and you’ve got a wide range of possible complications for player characters to be thrown into.

You could easily assume that you’re paying $27.95 for less content than you got with the first edition. By page count, you’d be perfectly right. You got 352 pages in the first edition, and the Player’s Guide is 256 pages now. Add to that a sprinkling of campy, sophomoric, comic-style artwork (and that’s the best of it), and you’ve cut down content a little bit more. But focus on the game instead of the artwork, and there’s a real gem here.

The hardcover (no softcover available!) Blue Planet V2 Player’s Guide (hence BPV2P) summarizes the entire game in the first eight pages of the book -- the setting, definitions for roleplaying and gamemastering, and the new system mechanics. Talk about tight writing! I wish all RPGs did this so I could make better-informed purchasing decisions quickly.

No significant changes have been made to the setting, when compared to my memory of the first edition. However, all the content has been updated to match the new system mechanics -- and nearly flawlessly, I might add. They kept the disparity of character power levels (everyday, exceptional, elite); origin, background, and professional training packages; and the variety and effectiveness of cyberware, and genetic modifications. (Note to self: Genemodding cetaceans is not covered. Wouldn’t Hydrospan have investigated this? Great adventure fodder!)

Character generation is a quick and easy 10-step process of choosing a concept and power level, selecting a base racial type and finalizing Attribute values; applying origin, background, and professional training packages, spending custom skill points, and acquiring any desired biomods.

The method for finalizing Attribute values deserves some mention. Most games give the player a set number of points to apply to increasing attributes. If you go beyond this set number of points and get greedy on attribute values, another attribute must suffer (point balancing). In Blue Planet, this option is provided along with a way of randomly assigning degrees of advantage/disadvantage to attributes (probability balancing). It works like this: I want to increase my Strength. I decide to apply three positive probability points to Strength and roll 3d10. For every die that reads 3 or less, my Strength increases by one. Now, I have to take those three positive probability points and apply them to any other attribute(s) as negative influences. I can choose to roll 3d10 three times to obtain 1 or less for three other different attributes, or try to roll 3 or less for one other attribute. If I "succeed", the negatively influenced attribute(s) drop by one for every "successful" die roll. I can choose which attributes to advantage or disadvantage (you can't do both to a single attribute). Very clever, and can result in misfits, or truly advantaged characters.

Virtually everyone’s singular complaint about Blue Planet first edition was the system mechanics. BPV2 holds an entirely revamped game mechanic, the Synergy system, in 13 pages. So what is it that makes Synergy, so crisp, clean and elegant? Let’s take a look.

The approximately 90 Skills in BPV2P are divided into 19 categories called Aptitudes. For example, Genetics is under the Life Sciences Aptitude, Psychology is under Medicine, and Anthropology is under Human Sciences. Although skill-category assignations may seem arbitrary, there's a game balance method to the madness, and they have grouped skills together in a fairly logical manner, when holistically evaluated.

Aptitude values, rated from 1-3, determine how many ten-sided dice you roll when performing a skill classified under that Aptitude. The objective is to roll under your Skill values, which are modified by whatever Attribute (ranged -3 to +3, sans biomods) and modifiers the GM feels are appropriate to the given situation. Each d10 under the final target value is a success, and for some purposes, the highest successful difference between a rolled die and the target value is the action value. For combat initiative, the action value establishes when and how many times you can act in a round.

In my review of first edition, I gave people three pages to read. For BPV2P, there’s only one: page 116. Here’s the short version: “Any attack that can harm a character has the potential to kill the character. . . Any combatant, regardless of skill, can be dangerous in the right situation. . . There is no such thing as nonlethal damage. . . It is not where the attack lands that matters, it is what it damages. . . Wound lethality is not cumulative, but impairment and blood loss are. . . .” This is what the damage rules are based on, and damned if it doesn’t make sense.

Every attack has a damage rating. If the attack hits, subtract the victim’s Toughness and armor from this rating, and roll three d10. For every die under the damage rating, the target takes one wound level. Minor wounds simply impair you, Serious wounds impair you and can stun you (knock you out), and Critical wounds impair you and require a trauma roll to determine WHEN, not whether, you die without treatment. If you’re still standing from a Critical wound, you get to make a stun roll too. Brutally fun. Impairments are cumulative for everything except subsequent stun and trauma rolls.

Yes, the system is that neat and easy. Try not to get hurt.

I looked really hard to find things wrong with this book, putting on my editor's hat to find them. Here are the additions/changes I would implement, and remember -- I had to proofread the book to find these issues:

1. Pick a new scheme for delineating different levels of headings. The current difference between heading levels (point size variations of a single decorative font) is too subtle to be noticed easily.
2. Clarify training package allocation, as described on page 39. Everyday characters get 3 packages, and both Exceptional and Elite get 5 packages. This is implied from examples, but not explicitly stated anywhere.
3. Literally, only a handful of packages carry Sailing in their skillset. This unforgivably includes the native population, who were abandoned by Earth for nearly 100 years. What were they thinking when they put these skills together? I would have defaulted to Sailing (wind-power vehicles) over Piloting (mechanical/electronic-powered vehicles) in many of the native training packages.
4. Elaborate on the difference between Oration and Persuation. If oration is supposed to be public speaking, relying heavily on presence, and persuasion is more of a one-to-one argument, well, they should have written it so. As currently written, it appears they do exactly the same thing.
5. Provide an example for the application of single-shot, burst fire, and full-auto weapons combat. Recoil modifiers are only calculated for each trigger pull after the first. For burst fire, each burst counts as a single bullet for recoil purposes, and you can fire multiple bursts in a round. For autofire, the book specifies only that recoil modifiers are doubled, but not how to apply them. For readers who have or will purchase the game, I suggest a single roll for autofire, with recoil modifiers applied to each burst in a autofire event, as if the combatant fired multiple bursts in sequence rather than all at once. I.e., roll your dice once, then keep subtracting 4 from the target number for every burst until you lose all your successes.
6. Ai yi yi! Provide character sheet support for cetaceans! If you can run cetacean characters, with a fundamentally different makeup than human characters, why doesn’t a section of a character sheet cover these ability exceptions and additions, such as echolocation, environmental sensitivity, weather sense, etc.? Can you say oops? I knew you could. Cetaceans for Equality, make your chitters heard!
7. Do your TOC and index right, or don't do them at all. Gamers can tell when a company puts put out a lackluster effort. Fantasy Filght/Biohazard are lucky that they wrote and organized this book well enough that it doesn’ t really require well-done peripheral reference aids.

Finally, I feel compelled to repeat myself. Who are these artists? Cover to cover, the artwork is terrible (okay, some, and I mean very little, was tolerable). I much preferred the cover of the first edition. The guy on the cover of BPV2P is missing the whorls in his ear, for crying out loud (and don't give me any crap about shadows). Sure, the drawings in the first edition were sparse and mostly technical, but they were relevant to whatever was being discussed. The book was meaningful, and much more immersive in its first edition.

I've put out a fair amount of publications in my time, and if my commissioned art looked like this, I’d be embarrassed. The only good part of the art was the interior graphic design for the page framework, but even then, I couldn’t identify it’s relevance -- it just seemed to take up space. If pressed, I'd say that the artwork was a detractor to the game itself. I certainly wouldn’t have complained if they’d dropped all the extraneous art, dropped the body text font size a touch, cut the book by (at least) another 40 pages, and charged $8 less.

On the other hand, I claim that you don't really need the Moderator's Guide to play this game. Sure, It'll add flavor and adventure seeds, but there's plenty of ideas in this book, and there's enough history for gamers to fill in the blanks and run adventures without worrying about the Moderator's Guide. Think of it as spending $30 on a complete game -- Blue Planet's Synergy system and the wondrous setting of Poseidon.

You won't look back, except with fondness.