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hards of tomorrow delivers on what it promises; a "old-school" SF RPG which contains a ruleset that should look familiar to anyone who's played the earlier editions of Dungeons and Dragons and/or the numerous clones spawned in the last decade or so. It does have a few new innovations, though--it uses a comprehensive "feat" system that resolves skill checks, saving throws and the like which is clean, easy to grasp and simple to use. It also has a Talent system which functions like the skill/feat systems found in other rpgs that can be used to flesh out a character; normally, I have some dislike for such systems because they tend to over-complicate things and restrict player creativity, but this is only two pages in length and simple enough to avoid such pitfalls. Overall, the system is one you should grasp quickly after a cursory read-through--in fact, it's the same system used in the author's previous rpg, "Saga of the Splintered Realm," so if you liked that this should be up your alley.
The ruleset is 136 pages or so in total, but it contains everything you need to play, from a bestiary of monsters to starship rules and the like, and even has a starter adventure to help you get started. It should also be noted that there are a lot of artifacts from Saga of the Splintered Realm (which was, in turn, heavily influenced by D&D). For example, undead, giants and elementals exist in this setting (and many of the alien creatures in the bestiary are also traditional D&D monsters such as Black Puddings), and one of the alien racial classes is essentially a cleric, with a spell list taken directly from the Saga of the Splintered Realm's cleric. The setting isn't described in great detail, but it seems a cruel race of alien warmongers unleashed some sort of doomsday weapon that tore a rift in the barrier between our galaxy and another dimension, which in turn allowed such supernatural horrors such as the undead to pour through and ravage the galaxy. I don't mind this in the slightest, but people who want a system not so heavily influenced by D&D should take note.
All in all, this game seems to fill the same niche as the White Star RPG does; were I to run a rules-light sci-fi RPG, I'm not sure if I would use this, White Star or Stars Without Number. (Maybe I should stop buying so many new RPGs to make these sorts of decisions easier!) I only have one criticism, which largely comes from my having read Saga of the Splintered Realm, which is that I feel this game could have been fleshed out more. As a rules-light system, obviously this is not a game that should be loaded down with numerous options and excessive mechanics that would slow down play, but even so I feel that a few more character class options would have been welcome. There are only two human character classes, one being a generic adventurer with a spaceship (a "junker") and a Jedi Knight clone. Granted, those two options, along with the various alien and synthoid classes, are certainly enough to make an interesting range of characters, but I would have liked to see a human mercenary/soldier class and a Noble/Aristocrat class (such as the one that exists in White Star) to more fully cover the common tropes that exist in science fiction media such as Star Wars. Saga of the Splintered Realm had an index that featured a few optional classes (such as the Bard and the Paladin), and I wish this game had the same. A few more pages describing the setting in order to provide additional adventure ideas would also have been nice, though there's enough mentioned for a creative game master to use as an effective springboard. As such, I feel this game really needed another 10-15 pages to earn a five-star rating, but as is it's a solid setting that should appeal to a wide variety of gaming enthusiasts.
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