I have to give this 2 stars. I have been running games 40 years. literally all genres. At first I didn't understand it. A solid two weeks of reading it, plus questions to the team at the publisher's site, who were very helpful, multiple times, cleared up a lot of it for me.
Then once I understood it, It became a case of other systems do the exact same thing, easier. There are some nice bright spots in the rules but almost all of it is a system that simulates survival in space, but does so in a way that delves unneccessarily into minutiae, and uses mechanics that do not reflect reality or simplicity.
Literally, you get what they say... A toolkit for skills, abilities, and disadvantages, no setting. So it is an open world, create what you want, on a blank canvas. Okay great, but the details of the tools given to do that are just so complex, so full of jargon and abbbreviation, so densely written, without enough page references, it COULD be run, but unless you scrap half the book, running it as written is going to be very unnecessarily difficult.
There are spots in the rules for credits. From flat broke to 10,000 as a rich person. No cost charts. When queried, the response from the authors was, costs will vary across different campaigns. decide what things cost yourself.
If you want to design gear, you design it yourself, except for a few small page s of examples usimng their "Kit" system.
If you want planets, design it yourself, there are no rules for planets. I defaulted to using Traveller, to design planets for the campaign I planned to run.
If you want spaceships, there are no design rules for spaceships, other than a ship has locations, like Medbay, or Engine room, which usually is used as a force multiplier for a skill check or as resource points for gear. There are no rules for ship to ship combat. There are no rules for interstellar Travel. It is all design it yourself.
There are no rules for costs or costs of ships, or gear. "All of it will vary by campaign, so we left it up to the referee."
The art is amazingly wonderful.
If you have the time and desire, you could take a few weeks, and design things...using the Kit system to add "Descriptors" to an item, like...
Gun, Rifle, Flashlight, Supressor, Auto-Fire, Scope. Each one of those things evokes like a Tag from a game like Fate, to give you a skill bonus.. if you have the relevant Skill to use that item's Tag.
This would be best used to run a game like Aliens or Pitch black or some similar shoot em up in space, but be prepared to create 90% of what you will use for your game.
The Mechanics are extremely difficult to grasp, and badly explained. Again, Jargon everywhere. Things like Encounter Check are abbreviated E%. Descriptor level, which is a measure of Tags, which add multipliers are DLv.
The character sheet is super complex. It has places where skills are calculated you have a box for the toal, but those formulas are not on the sheet, they are inside the book in the text descriptions of each skill.
The book text is hampered in grasping concepts for skills because of abbreviations, making it a foreign language check every few sentences.
The system does not flow, it is like jugglimng baslls of air to figure out how to generate a character with no foundation or grounding.
In actual play, you do not drink from a canteen, and mark it off, you have a system that has 5 points of water to be depleted. you might get one drink, you might get up to 5 drinks, it depends on making a roll of "5" on a d6 for the first drink. For the second drink, that's 2d6, on a 5 or more it is depleted. thrid drink 3d6. So literally you are tracking Individual drinks of water by dice roll, not knowing if you are emptying the canteen or not until you make the roll.
That kind of "micro-management by guessing" minutiae pervades the whole system. The attempt was to "Not have to worry about marking stuff off on a sheet minutiae, replaced by this die roll system to "add tension as befits horror, you do not know when you will run out of ammo, or food or water, or bandages."
What it added was Tension Headache over a few weeks of digging through to figure all of this out.
Forgive me, but if I have three bandages, and I use one, I got two left. that is pretty much kindergarten mathematics of resource management, done by 5 year old hands, not needing a calculator or dice.
People have run this at conventions, by scrapping a lot of the mechanics, and it was reported to be great. it was also reported to be worst Sci fi RPG ever made.
It has it's bright points, but for me, it was unworkable, needlessly complex, and a bear to understand.
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