This setting answers a questions I never thought to ask. What if Humaniti were a minor race in the Imperium? What if instead of spaceships everyone not a major race was forced to use sometimes dangerous portals between worlds aand galaxies? What if a major race decided we weren't worthy of our own planet, took over, and put us on a reservation? And it answers those questions really well, with just enough information to undertsand the setting and then take it and go on with my own ideas.

I have no idea why I decided to pick this up, I wasn't looking for a new setting, but I love Traveller/TCE and I decided to take a chance on it. It was well worth it. I highly recommend this to anyone who is into Traveller, but either doesn't care about the Imperium or who is just looking for a new setting. It's fairly short, but very to the point and I felt it hit that sweet spot of enough to build off of without feeling I was going to need to change much if I decided something needed changing.

Overall, highly recommended.

Outcast has a very original setting, with humanity having been evicted from Earth by superhitech aliens. Our descendants are forced to eke out their lives on marginal worlds that are interconnected by stargates. Unfortunately, the book is too thin to be a useful foundation when building a campaign. The authors don't provide sufficiently fleshed-out worlds. My advice is straightforward: revise and expand. Outcast should contain at least twice as much text to be attractive to me. This is a pity, because I like Outcast's underlying concept a lot.

For once a truly original concept in RPGs! And even better, humans aren't the dominant or "special" race (a la Traveller, Babylon 5, Star Trek, most sci fi books ever...) Apart from a few typos, it's well produced. I'd like to see adventures published for it.

A sandbox setting that combines several underused sci-fi tropes (underused in RPG's anyway). Earth was conquered by a hyper advanced alien race and humanity has been exiled to a distant, harsh “reservation” world where they have managed to eke out a meager existence over the course of many centuries. But fear not, this world is connected to a galaxy-spanning (or perhaps even universe-spanning) network of portals similar to stargates. Some gates connect to worlds of other races (themselves exiles), some gates connect to unexplored worlds, some to horrible death. Only a minuscule fraction of these have been explored and charted so the setting is perfect for an exploration campaign. Other possible campaign ideas center around resource exploitation and trade with the other “outcast” races. Most humans no longer entertain thoughts of retaking Earth (really not even possible at this point), but I suppose you could make that the focus of a military themed campaign if you really wanted. While I was reading it I kept getting the feeling that this game is what Stargate SG-1 would have been if the Tok’ra had defeated the Goa’uld and gone on to conquer the galaxy themselves instead. Yeah, after typing that out I still feel that way.

This setting offers several elements that you don’t often find in sci-fi, but that I often want in sci-fi. The first is a distinct lack of space ships. I know most people probably play SF games for the space ships. I do not. I find designing ships and conducting ship combat boring. If that’s what you’re looking for, I’ll recommend you look elsewhere. The second element is a lower, mixed tech level, one where you are more likely to get in a knife fight than a blaster fight. But guns exist. Even laser guns exist, they’re just extremely rare (and illegal for a human to own). And it's entirely possible that one of those portals might lead to an astonishing cache of some kind of "precursor" tech. It's up to you, really. My gripes would be typos/editing issues and a lack of bookmarks. The pdf is hyperlinked to chapter headings, however.