The Void takes a path that I haven’t seen to often from an RPG, in that they have a creative community thing going on. The core rule book is free on DriveThru, with the option of paying for it at the amount you feel is appropriate for the work. Fans of the game are also encouraged to build on what’s in the core book and provide additional material for the game, and if it’s good enough be published by WildFire.

But lets talk about the game. The game is survival horror in space. So if you love Lovecraft you’re likely to like this game. But it also borrows from such classics as Event Horizon. But you could do a Resident Evil in space type thing with it. Or even a looming Mass Effect style Reaper threat. It’s really up to you. I think there is a lot of potential with Saturn revolution themed game.

Storyline wise the Earth has expanded to the stars. There is some kind of human presence on every planet in the solar system, and a bit beyond as well. Well not Pluto. Humanities exploration of the solar system has drawn the attention of an ancient being. A star is on a course towards Earth called the Cthonian Star. Strange and ancient creatures are awakening or in some cases arriving to prepare the solar system for it’s new masters.

All of this is being kept away from the greater populace of course. And that job falls to the PC’s. You play as Wardens, agents of the UWC, tasked with investigating strange things and then … killing them. Oh also covering that shit up. So it’s kinda like being a Man in Black, only in space.

The mechanics are fairly straight forward. If you’ve played the New World of Darkness or Shadowrun then you’re already familiar with how the dice are going to work. You create a dice pool from your attribute and skill and score success on a 5 or 6. Depending on how hard the task is will determine how many success you need to succeed. You also have advantages and talents that could affect the outcome of your roll.

Combat is fairly straight forward. You roll your attack dice pool and the defender rolls a defense dice pool. Bonus success adds to your damage roll. In regards to damage you also have armor that can subtract from the amount of damage you take. Though the more damage you take the less effective it will become overall. And of course you will start to incur dice penalties when you take to much damage.

There are no character classes in this game. Instead you are given 3 templates. You have the Enforcer, which is your typical front line solider type. You have the Investigator which does all the snooping around. Then you have the Researcher who is the science techie guy/medic. Instead of having money characters have wealth, a personal wealth and then your sponsors wealth. You also gain bonuses based on where you come from, getting the chance to choose from a list of planets or colonies throughout the solar system

There are also two pools which can affect the outcome of the game. You have a Fate dice, which allows you to avoid certain doom! There is also a Tension pool which is spent as a group. It can be spent on a variety of things to do such as re-rolls, getting a hint from the GM or buying an additional Fate point for someone who is really really having a bad day. The trick however with Tension dice is that Tension dice spent by the players are given to the GM who can then use them for nefarious deeds.

On the plus side the game doesn’t take long to get into. One of the first few chapters has an adventure designed for both the players and the GM to learn as they go. The book is also filled to the brim with helpful side bars that sum up the contents of that particular section for quick and easy reference.

All in all if you’re familiar with most games the learning curve on this one isn’t going to be bad. And if you’re not well it won’t be that hard to pick up and go.

One of the strongest points for this game (at least for me) was the diversity in the setting. The 4 PC’s provided for the adventure hailed from different places and had a nice variety in ethnicity. You had an African, Chinese, German and Latina. The fiction that helped set the mood for the game also used a varied cast of characters that made the setting pop and come alive for me in a way that few games do currently.

On the flipside however I did find some things lacking. The book is small, and only has three monsters. I know there is a Monsters book available but the game makes frequent references to a lot of things that go bump in the night and it would have been nice to have a bit more offered. It is a cheap book, but you can’t really describe that many creatures and not really provide more meat for the PC’s to kill and investigate.

Speaking of PC’s there are only three options. Rules are provided to do a template less character but the game seems heavily geared towards using the templates. This should be remedied when the Advanced Players Guide comes out, but for now it feels like a weak spot in the game. I think The Void would have benefited heavily from maybe one to two more Warden templates. I would have likely broken the Researcher into perhaps two templates, one that is more book wormy and one that is more science techie. And perhaps an infiltrator styled template that could be used to do some deep cover work really well.

GM side I was a little bit disappointed with the magic section. I would have preferred a bit more meat to this section too. With luck there will be some additional work put into it in future books. It’s workable, just rules light. As a GM I kinda like my magic to be a bit more rules heavy than what is offered.

Overall though this is a game worth getting. You can’t argue with the price. And it has a lot of themes and places to go. You could do some nice horror style Firefly for instance. With the government theme you could also kick it old school with some space X Files. The politics behind the UWC, Earth and her colonies also leaves plenty of room for more mundane type adventures. And this point bears repeating, the game has a very nice support of minorities and people of color. You see it in the artwork and the stories and it’s something that is praise worthy in any company you find it in.

So I give this game 4 Fro’s out of 5 (I really need an icon for such things!). The game is straight forward and fast to get into. The setting is very interesting. The starter adventure makes it possible for both GM and player to learn as you go. Lack of character options and monsters aside this isn’t a game I feel you should pass on.

P.S. This setting needs psionics. Just saying, it would rule!

Almost unbelievable that such quality is free. Thx guys.

Another great supplement for The Void. Reading them gave me a great feel for how the game runs. Nice and concise with plenty of room for the GM to add as needed to start a campaign, run as one-shots or fit into an existing campaign.

This is a great start to what looks to be an amazing series of expansions for The Void. I've already run my first 2 game sessions and I'm liking it more and more with each session.

Racial Insecurities is a neat concept - introducing a small electronic and now-in-print supplement to the Cthulhutech line that covers a new player option. Fetch, however, falls short of the Racial Insecurities line's potential.

This supplement reintroduces the fetch, a magical, sentient assistant presented in the Cthulhutech corebook. Originally these gremlin-like creatures were discussed with only a few passing sentences, but Fetch presents them as a complete 6 page racial player option. Playing a Fetch requires the purchase of one or more Assets and selecting a few Attribute bonuses from those. Otherwise, character creation is the same.

Fetches provide the opportunity to play a psychopathic gremlin, Igor-like sorcerous aide, or mischievous Outsider in a Cthulhutech game. This obviously doesn't mesh with stories set in frontline combat or the ruins of China, but can work nicely for certain types of groups in certain occult investigation settings.

While the writing is decent, there are only 6 pages of usable gaming content in this 12 page PDF. With a $2.99 price tag, Cthulhutech fans should consider carefully before picking this up. I would never recommend getting this short supplement in Print.

Overall, this is a mediocre start to what I hope is a strong line of player options. Cthulhutech and the Cthulhu Mythos are ripe with creatures that can make intriguing, though rare, characters in your story.

Nur ein paar kurze Eindrücke

Gut

• Schönes Artwork
• Sehr fairer Preis
• Abenteuer sind gut strukturiert und nachvollziehbar gegliedert

Schlecht

• Abenteuer leiden alle unter massivem Railroading
• Mir persönlich sind die Abenteuer zu stringent
• SL Anweisungen sind meist völlig ohne weiterführende Informationen

Insgesamt

• Viel Potenzial verschenkt.

I recognize that my problems with the game is largely presentational. The presentation is too much how it looks and not so much encouraging different ways to present the setting. The setting is not as approachable as Stars Without Number or encouraging of gonzo scenarios like Mutant Future. The prodding is not as intriguing as the premise of Cthulhu in space. It could happen but the background density is just not as present as Eclipse Prime. I think that SF RPGs need to encourage story hooks much strong as this. It is free so there is not a problem and checking it out if will encouraging you is not a big risk.

Elevator pitch: It's Delta Green in space.

Okay, that's not entirely correct. The Void's Wardens are a sanctioned government agency, with the resources of the Unified World Council behind them, but their mission is basically the same as Delta Green's: seek out paranormal threats, eliminate them with extreme prejudice, and then make sure no one finds out about it. The "in space" part comes out in the influences: movies like Alien or Event Horizon or video games like Dead Space, all examples where the protagonists are isolated, far from any resupply or help, and faced with terrifying circumstances that they have to deal with by themselves. That's the main premise of The Void, which should make it like steak crossed with cheesecake for me.

And, I'll ditch the suspense and say that it was quite good, even though I had some initial misgivings. It passed the main test of, "Do I get ideas for games after I read this?" with an unqualified yes.

---Setting---

The Void is an alternate history, where the 2009 financial crisis turned out a lot worse than it did in our world, leading to the collapse of most international authority, the balkanization of the United States, and World War III, which ended in a nuclear terrorist attack that served to shock the nations of the world into making peace and getting things back on track. This seems kind of unlikely to me, but it takes place a century and a half in the setting's past and is there to set up a single government so that the PCs have the authority to go anywhere, and for that goal it works well enough.

After a new space race and the invention of the "transit drive" that allows travel at rough 50x faster than present-day space propulsion systems do, cutting in-system travel time to weeks or months even for far-away destinations like the Kuiper Belt (but not Pluto. No one goes to Pluto. Or at least, no one comes back), and the invention of the grav couch to allow people to survive the forces caused by acceleration and deceleration at that speed, humanity expanded out into the solar system and founded colonies basically everywhere. Most colonies were founded by corporate interests and are done primarily for mineral resources, but there are the occasional scientific colony or tourist destination. Europa's oceans contain non-terrene life, so there's a heavy scientific presence there, and Ganymede makes a ton of money as a gambling and resort destination for people in the Jovian colonies.

That leads to the modern day, where the solar system is more active than ever, but not entirely due to humanity. An object called the Cthonian Star is approaching the solar system from interstellar space, and in response to its approach, things are waking up. Monsters in the asteroid belt. Whatever it is that lives on Pluto. Even some places are changing--Callisto is apparently spontaneously generating an ecosystem.

That's where the Wardens I mentioned above come in. The PCs play Wardens, travel around the solar system, find bizarre and horrific alien life, and shoot it right in the face or closest face-like appendage. Meanwhile, they have to put up with transit times,

There are a couple small things that bothered me. The inhabitants of each of the colonies are given stereotypical descriptions, like Martians are, "often hardy and resourceful people, though somewhat resigned about life - even bitter" or Dionians are, "often optimistic and plucky, though suspicious of newcomers and provincial." I get that there needs to be a hook, especially since there are free skills provided for the various colonial origins, but it seems a bit like saying "Germans are often industrious and seriously, though they can be excessively detail-oriented" or "Americans are often confident and friendly, though somewhat xenophobic and brash."

Also, other than the transit drive and colonies in space, not as much as I would expect seems to have changed technologically. Organ transplants are done using cloned organs and it's possible to regenerate limbs and extend the average lifespan to 150 years, but there's no kind of genetic or cybernetic enhancement discussed. AI or automation aren't really mentioned at all, and nanotechnology is briefly mentioned but not really detailed. The guns are all still slugthrowers that wouldn't be out of place on a modern battlefield, but the melee weapons include lots of electrified or powered variants. I wasn't expecting out-of-control transhumanism, because we already have Eclipse Phase, but it's more static than I expected it would be.

However, The Void does do one thing that really endears me to it. It explicitly points out the impact of climate change on Earth, and that its effects still linger even though action has been taken to mitigate and reverse it. Of course, even with climate change, Earth is still by far the most hospitable place in the solar system, so not much space is devoted to it, but leaving climate change out of future histories is a pet peeve of mine.

---System---

The system is pretty simple and won't take long for a new player to pick up at all. Characters have six statistics--Cleverness, Grace, Perseverance, Awareness, Demeanor, and Physique--that should be pretty familiar even if the names are new. Those are rated 1 to 5, as are the skills, and a pool of d6s is built using Attribute + Skill. All dice coming up 5 or 6 are successes, and if there are enough successes to match or beat the roll's difficulty, the roll succeeds. Dice pools for humans are capped at ten, and bonuses to rolls tend to be bonus successes instead of bonus dice.

One thing I can see being a turn off is the number of skills. There are something like ~75 of them, with multiple subdivions of Athletics (Balance, Speed, etc.), a Freefall skill for microgravity, multiple Engineering skills to cover the various parts of a spaceship, over a dozen weapon skills, different piloting skills for ground and space, six different social skills...it's quite granular.

Characters are further rounded out with Quirks, which are very limited skills like Fine Wines or Video Games or Whistling While You Work; Advantages/Disadvantages, which follow the old paradigm of paying for advantages and getting points back for disadvantages; and Talents, which are things like not having to make Horror checks when seeing purely human corpses or being able to occasionally make attacks that ignore armor.

I think some of the Disadvantages would have been better going to the system where they provide no points at character generation but provide extra XP during the game when they cause trouble. Getting points immediately for something like Chronic Pain that has a specific rule for when and how it affects a character makes sense, but it runs into trouble for something like Enemy or Tormented where the GM might forget about it entirely. It definitely requires some GM oversight during character creation.

Combat is a simple opposed roll between the combat skill and the target's defense, and the damage is rolled, with additional successes on the attack roll adding to damage, and armor as a static value subtracted from the damage. Combat is deadly enough to make PCs cautious without making instant kills during a straight-up firefight more than an occasional occurence. There's also a social combat system based on shifting the other person's attitude up and down a chart from Friendly to Hostile, and rules for which skills can be used against which attitudes.

There's a brief treatment of money, but mostly in the context of a abstract Wealth system, which is probably best in a game where most of the characters' gear will be issued to them by their superiors.

As you might expect for a Lovecraftian horror game, there are rules for madness and horror (basically, long-term vs. short-term effects). Failing a horror check means the PC runs screaming or curls into a ball or attacks in a blind rage, and failing a madness check has the effects that anyone who's ever played a Lovecraftian RPG is familiar with. There are several levels of madness, from 0 to IV, where 0 is fine and IV is probably permanently institutionalized. It's no Madness Meters, but it works. My big problem here is the nomenclature. The levels of madness have names like "Bonkers" and "Loony," which really comes out of left field and doesn't fit the mood of creeping horror the game is trying to establish.

Last in my coverage of mechanics are Tension Points, which is a lot like the 7th Sea Drama Points economy. The players collectively get a pool at the beginning of each session that can be spend to reroll dice, force the GM to reroll, buy another Fate Point to save a character on the verge of death, find a clue or item that they otherwise would not be able to, and so on, though a majority of the players must agree on any points spent. The "tension" part comes in because every time the players spend a Tension Point, the GM gets one, and can spend them in much the same way. Unlike the players' points, though, the GM's points persist between sessions, so it's always a question for the players of whether they want to use their Tension Points and make things harder for themselves later or trust to the luck of the dice and hope they can carry the day.

There were a few typos here and there, but worse were the areas where I weren't sure where it was a typo or not. The setting chapter mentions the "Sino-China Union" repeatedly. The rules for extended physical activity say that characters can walk for days before having to rest. These are relatively minor issues, however.

Overall, The Void is highly focused on playing ordinary humans pitted against both the mundane horror of space travel and everything that can go wrong and the cosmic horror of Lovecraftian monsters. There aren't even any rules for magic, since it's supposed to be a plot device and absolutely isn't supposed to be used by the PCs. Come to think of it, that's probably why there's no extensive cybernetic enhancement rules or transhumanism at all, since it would override the feel of being fragile humans facing hideous monstrosities.

Sometimes, the game feels a bit unfinished. There's a drone use skill, but no drones listed in the book. There are only three monsters and three ships, and no real rules for ship combat or using the various repair skills to fix ships after said combat. However, since it's being offered for as little as $0, I can't really complain too much about that. And really, what do you have to lose? Get it, read it, and if you think it's great, toss some money the authors' way or buy the supplements, which include more monsters, ship rules, and all that stuff that's glossed over. There's definitely enough here to get a game up and running.

First impression based on reading the core book and playing through the "tutorial adventure"

THE GOOD:

• Very transparent design goals which are then implemented diligently - so you know up front if this is a game for you
• Very accessable game - while it plays in a genre spot close to (but still significantly different) Eclipse Phase and NovaPraxis, it leaves out all the transhuman complexity
• Clear role for PCs (Wardens) - GMs and PCs will not have the "and what now?" effect when trying to play
• All rules are summed up in sidebars throughout the book, making it possible to skim each chapter very quickly and also find what you need quickly
• A d6 dice pool mechanic that manages to keep pool size low (SR5 - look at The Void to see what you should have been dice engine wise!!!). Maximum pool size is 10d6, special equipment, maneuvers etc. don't give extra dice but free successes
• Balanced and simple damage mechanism - each attack has the potential to seriousely harm you, but usually a PC can take 3-5 hits before going down
• Choice of lifepath or "free design" CharGen
• Good short fiction pieces that bring up the feel of the game

THE NOT SO GOOD

• The setting (at least at this stage) lacks the depth of EP or NovaPraxis. This is an side-effect of the positive "accessibility", but I hope future supplements will expand the depth of the setting. Otherwise the "wardens investigate alien infestations/darks cults" might become tiresome after a while.
• Multiple pools/mechanics for player influence on story. You have fate points (avoid certain death, 1 per player) and 2 different group pools that basically do the same stuff (i.e. re-roll test etc.). Seems as if at least one of these pools is too much - might be an artifact from the design phase. If it is intentional I do not get it
• Skill list too long (e.g. 4 different athletics skills, multiple weapon skills etc.)
• Disadvantages give addtional points for CharGen. When will game designers finally get rid of this broken concept ...

Overall very happy with the product. On a setting complexity (and setting depth) scale I would say Void< NP < EP. My personal setting complexity sweet spot is in the range of NovaPraxis, but the Void might be more in the sweet spot for my players. Rules wise this is a well designed game. Nothing innovative, but straight forward good.

Have fun! The Pat

PS: The adventure is a good show case of some of the setting elements. Nice mix of investigation, dark horror and combat. The 2nd half of the mission could have needed a bit more details to better work for less experienced GMs. And I have cut out the 2nd supernatural threat, which just seemed to be there "by coincidence"

I've had a lot of family issues going on and I've been reading in the downtime between stuff going on, so I've just been voraciously going at anything that I can get my hands on that looks interesting. The Void looked pretty interesting to me when I first saw it, and it wasn't disappointing. The fact that it's Creative Commons licensed and available as pay-what-you want was particularly interesting, as I've always been a fan of open licensing, and even though in the past such games as Eclipse Phase have done major releases in CC they haven't made themselves widely available for free.

First things first, The Void is Lovecraftian in many senses of the word. If one got really technical on The Void, it tends to be more action-oriented than Lovecraftian tales, and while some of the in-game fiction is both creepy in the perfect survival-horrror way and manages to pull off the Lovecraftian elements well, you'll be looking at less true-to-Lovecraft and more Lovecraft-inspired, though that's true of most of the things that build upon his works. However, while it's not true to Lovecraft's original vision because the entities can be categorized and studied, it's still relatively truthful to Lovecraft's thematics and the universe builds heavily upon his lore. That said, it feels really a lot more like a late Resident Evil series game than Lovecraft; nasty slimy things wanting to lay eggs within/psychically traumatize/eat the characters is a major theme, which doesn't necessarily mesh so well with Lovecraft's more abstract visions of the genre, but still works very well for horror.

As far as the game goes, it uses a d6 pool system that won't feel strange to people who have played Shadowrun or World of Darkness games; roll above a certain number to get successes, then continue as you would. It's got a lot of good design decisions, and it's both fluid but steers clear of issues that come from, say, percentile based systems where success is too predictable/numerical, since every roll feels like a chance to either succeed wonderfully or fail miserably, reinforcing the genre feel. It's not hyper-lethal (though an unarmored fighter will go down pretty quick), as far as rulesets go, but it's certainly not something that treats combat lightly.

As far as the PDF goes, the text feels oddly large (it's something like 12.5 pt, I think, which isn't bad but sure feels kinda large), but it's pretty and there's lots of art; it may be available as a pay-what-you-want title, but the production values are very good; the art's all in color and pretty lovely. Length-wise it's not the longest, nor does it go into very much detail on any given thing, but it's certainly got a coherent direction and it covers everything that it needs to, plus the fiction's pretty good, though there are some bumps in quality between each of the individual opening stories. At one point there's a repeated part with the planet outlines, which I think are meant to just be handouts but it's still deja vu when you go back and recognize the exact same text as you saw in the beginning of the book at the end.

All-in-all, it's got its flaws that keep it from getting a perfect rating, but The Void really accomplishes what it sets out to do; it's a terrifying Lovecraftian space adventure game with slick and polished rules. It's definitely worth a look, especially since you can check it out for free, and I think it's going to get a place in my collection of things to keep on hand for a rainy day and some unsuspecting players.

An excellent product with clean, concise rules and formatting. I especially enjoyed the treatment of Lovecraftian creatures. It should provide an excellent reference for anyone wanting to add a little horror aspect to their games.

I really love this book. I'm also hoping that Wildstar produces a few more supplements.

The plus side is that they integrated Traveller with Lovecraftian horror quite well. The minus is that they didn't provide enough creatures and those they provided are a bit too easy to kill IMNSHO. And they didn't define Shoggoths! :)

I am about to run a Traveller campaign with Lovecraftian elements and this book helped a lot.

One thing I suspect is that this book would mix well with the Orbital setting for Traveller.

Great artwork, as per usual. I'm a little disappointed though. Allow me to explain. I have been eagerly awaiting this product for a LONG time. I understand that it was delayed because of production issues. But now that I have it, it's a little underwhelming. No real fault if the product, just anticipation outweighing reality. Also, I don't like the 'new' way the "adventures" are presented. I much prefer the formula in Damnation View. This, I know, is ironic because the editors come out and say they switched to the new style format because of constructive criticism from the fans. All that said, I did get a little out of it. Mostly the new fighters and rules for space combat. In the absence of this book for so long, my campaign moved in a slightly different direction then the meta-plot presented here and so I didn't get much use out of it. I knew that before I bought it, and still purchased it anyway because I love this game, love the fiction and love the art and wanted to support it. Thank you.

I received my print copy in the mail on December 12th, 1012. The packaging was good. The book in great shape. And had no printing errors in it at all.

This was my first experience of doing a print on demand book through RPGNOW. And the experience was entirely a positive one. And it definitely has convinced me to buy more print on demand books from here in the future.

Keep up the great work!

I liked the mood set by the Opening Fiction for The Void.

I love science fiction horror mashups and this gives a good picture of a rich setting to send my players into! The Void and the related materials are of particular interest to me because of their connection to H.P. Lovecraft's rich lore. The void should be an intersting product. Take a look at this free read for yourself!