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This is an excellent little supplement that gives new background packages and training packages for the Stars Without number.
A few of the packages reminded me of the old Traveler: Supplement 4 characters and some are straight from popular sci fi. For example a package to make mentats from the Dune books is included.
I was actually surprised that some of the packages hadn't been offered in other SWN products before too. Cyberninja and doctors are mentioned in the core SWN book but no packages existed for them until now.
The only problems and things that could be improved I could find in the PDF are these minor ones, (some of which can be easily fixed):
1.) The Free Merchant package on page 6 (7 in the PDF) is out of alphabetical order.
2.) The Pugilist on page 9 (10 in the PDF) has Artist/Martial Art as a skill. I don't follow the logic of this. Martial Arts are a Combat Specialization according to the Mandate Archive Martial Arts published by Sine Nomine for SWN.
.A Martial Artist would have been nice to include instead or in addition.
Maybe adding in a boxing Martial Art, to go with the Mandate Archive Martial Arts rules, and letting the Pugilist have access to it. would be something to add in an update.
3.) The letter first "g" in gamling needs to be capitalized in the Entertainer's skills on page 5 (6 in the PDF).
4.) The Machine Empath on page 7 (8 in the PDF) is best suited if if your using Thunderegg Production's SWN product The Machine Symbiot, but no mention of this product is given in the PDF. The new psychic powers in that product is a perfect to use with this package and I don't see getting much use out of the package unless you have that Thunderegg Productions book.
5.) One or two of the Packages was a little surprising into what class it was assigned to and what skills it got. The Cop for example is an expert yet I can see how the character could be a Warrior.
6.) As this is a character options book one thing that I also would have liked to have seen mentioned in the intro is the increasing the skills gained per level by class by 1 to bring the characters more in line with other Sine Nomine games. (This is on several websites that have compiled errata/rule clarifications for SWN that Kevin Crawford of Sine Nomine gave in the past).
Overall, this is a great product and I'll definitely be picking up more SWN stuff Stellagama Publishing releases.
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Creator Reply: |
Thank you for the great review and excellent suggestions! We will definitely consider adding them to a second edition of our product. |
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We have now corrected the errata. We again thank you for the useful feedback. |
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I'd been looking for an easy way to depict the near earth stars in a map, finally found it. It's hex based and thus 2d rather than 3d. This is the standard approach with traveller like games as it simplifies space navigation for the gm and players, letting them concentrate on the story elements more. If you want 3d maps there are plenty available.
Near Space is a 13 page pdf booklet with four maps, which plot the known near earth stars with as much accuracy as a 2D map allows.
The maps are a quarter the size of a Traveller sector map, encompassing a 20 x 16 parsec area of near earth space.
Two of the maps include additional fictitious stars to fill gaps making travel easier and two have only real stars plotted.
Each pair of maps includes one with a white background and one with a black background.
The booklet includes 3 pages of Star System data in Traveller style UWP format.
System data is basic, in that only the main world data is provided and all provide only world size, atmosphere, and hydrographics figures, the rest are for you to develop.
The details provided for earth are a full UWP code, however it is meant to reflect our contemporary earth, not a future earth.
The booklet provides some expanded world generation rules, compatible with the Cepheus Engine, an OGL sci-fi rules set, but are readily adaptable to any of the Traveller rules sets as well.
I am working on my own system data for the map, and plan to use this product as the base setting for my sci-fi RPGs and Wargames.
I hope that Stellagama Publishing publishes some more maps expanding upon the region surrounding earth.
I recommend this product to anyone interested in near earth gaming.
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Creator Reply: |
Thank you very much for the excellent review! |
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A nice little addition to any Stars Without Number GM's repertoire. Civilian Starships has some good examples of slightly more than stock civilian ships and some welcome additional starship fittings. I especially like the semi-civilian ships: commerce raiders, smugglers, and the Tribute-ship. That last one is an entire rebellion-against-the-sky-kings campaign in a single ship stat block: a capital-class ship with terrifying weaponry and fittings designed to terrorize lower-tech planets into coughing up all their wealth in exchange for not being bombed from orbit. I am sure some intrepid PCs could stow away and escape...
Overall, for the price of a cup of coffee, this little volume provides the GM and interested players with new ships, ideas for customizing their own ships, and a few new fittings that increase the available ship options without breaking the simple ship design system of Stars Without Number.
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The world generation system presented in Stars Without Number is excellent, but some GMs might find need of a little more structure in their world generation rules in order to get usable results. Stellagama’s Expanded World Generation Rules are a useful addition to the SWN rules.
The Good: Things like a given world’s temperature, population and tech level are now influenced by the results for the environment and atmosphere. This isn’t to say that you can’t get weird, but implicit in the tables are rationales for why an airless world would not typically have billions of people living on it. That isn’t a critique of the SWN rules as presented, but the Expanded World Generation Rules are intended, I think, to give the GM some measure of structure and realism to world generation.
Also provided are rules for incorporating newly generated worlds into the rules for building and maintaining fleets provided in Skyward Steel. This is a really nice touch. Two sample worlds are generated as well, giving an example of how dynamic and fun world generation using these rules can be.
The Not So Good: The only issue I have with these rules are the new World Tags that come from the 2d6 OGL rules. The Stars Without Number world tags are evocative and do half the work before a harried GM has to put pen to paper. Some of the new world tags in the Expanded World Generation Rules are too general. Compare, for example, the SWN tag “Xenophobes” with the new tag “Taboo”. “Xenophobes” is a specific example of a taboo, and provides specific hooks upon which to hang an adventure. “Taboo” is just too vague, and requires the GM to do additional work. Some of the new tags, like “Fusion”, are interesting, while others like “Unusual Custom” are far too general.
Overall, Stellagama’s Expanded World Generation Rules comprise a solid and effective toolbox for world generation. The new world tags require a little more work to be as inspirational as they should be, but otherwise, these rules are handy and well-presented.
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A great little bundle of new skill package options for player character generation in Stars Without Number. What's great about these options is that they give players what they want--more options, more choices--without unbalancing anything at all. Some of the class-specific packages are intriguing, and occasionally much needed: the Vehicle Specialist Warrior allows players to generate fighter pilots as well as tank commanders. The Psychic Navigator is exactly the package needed to combine precognitive powers with space navigation, and the Diplomat and Detective are great Expert skill packages for players looking for sci-fi staples from a variety of genres. There are many great options, and combined with the different packages provided in the published SWN line, players are spoiled for choice regarding their PC's starting skills.
There are a couple of discrepancies that creep up here and there in the text: the Pugilist might be better served with Combat/Martial arts (as per the free Mandate Archive), and the Engineer doesn't really need Profession/Engineer, when the package has three Tech/Any skills. But these are small details that individual GMs can fix to suit their campaigns.
What I would have liked to have seen in Character Options are suggestions for changing class skills to better suit a character concept. The aforementioned Psychic Navigator should probably get Navigation as a class skill, but would have to drop something like Tech/Medical, Religion, or History in exchange. The same goes for the Vehicle Specialist Warrior, who probably needs Vehicle/Any as a class skill, in exchange for Stealth, or Survival as class skills. These make sense for specific character concepts, and it's important to mention them in a book listing character options.
But regardless of the little things, this little pdf is jam-packed with useful, evocative material for any Stars Without Number GM or player.
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I've been a fan of the author's since he published The Outer Veil, a Spica Publishing game setting for Traveller. Cheating Death is a neat little collection of consistent rules and tables for the GM to use when player characters have inevitably been overexposed to lasers, hard vaccuum, artillery strikes, and/or space-wood-chippers--to name a few grisly ends common in science fiction. If the players (or GM) are especially attached to the stricken PC at zero hit points, why not use this opportunity to shake things up a bit and build a new character out of the tattered remains of the old?
Cheating Death provides the GM with quick and easy tools to do just that. Cheating Death covers possible side effects of a character being reduced to zero hit points, and being resuscitated, or undergoing cybernetic conversion, or having an entirely new body grown (assuming the brain survives, of course). As well, the case of artificial intelligence characters being reduced to zero HP is given a similar treatment. Every situation gets a table of possible side effects of cheating death by one of the means mentioned above. The consistency of the rules does border a bit on the repetitive, but I don't see this as a drawback, necessarily. There is no sense in developing mini-games for these scenarios. Some basic ideas furnishing a collection of tables, followed by explanations of each case is more than sufficient.
Designed for White Star OSR gaming, Cheating Death would work well in any OSR game with very little modification. Without applying the effects and just using the tables, Cheating Death can provide inspiration to GMs using any game, as long as they're willing to do the rules-wrangling themselves.
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"Scum and Villainy" is likely to be the most aptly named supplement for the White Star game I have picked up in a long time. After all, if White Star is the godchild of Star Wars and 70s D&D then Scum and Villainy had to come up sooner or later.
S&V is a 17-page book (cover, credits page, table of contents, 1.5 pages of OGL bring us to 12.5 pages of content) for playing the low-life of the galaxy. Written by Omer G. Joel it also features some really nice art from Luigi Castellani. It is very evocative. I see that and I think "Traveller" and that is not a bad thing. Nor is it an accident.
I am in love with that cover.
There are two new classes, the Assassin and the Rogue who do pretty much what you think they do, but there are some nice features to make them fit the WS universe a bit better.
The gems of this though are the expanded rules. How to go unnoticed in space. How to sell stolen goods. Really the stuff that you expect to see in a book like this, but never really do.
There is a section on ship mods, new equipment and new weapons.
There was a lot of good things here, but I was hoping for more. Maybe a bit on a notorious crime synidicate or something along those lines.
With 17 pages at $3.99 I was expecting more. Compare this to the B/X Rogue which is 24 pages at $1.50 and covers similar ground. Combining the two would give you some really potent rogues!
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