I generally agree with Vincent's review from 2011. Laws presents a system of terms and symbols for tracking story beats, whether the narrative is moving towards hope or fear, and illustrates the use of them through close readings of Hamlet, Casablanca, and Dr. No. I enjoyed those close readings in themselves. But several things struck me as odd about this book; it's missing quite a lot I would have expected.

The first thing that struck me as odd is that several times, Laws points out that the relative intensity of a story beat is very important. Yet there's nothing in the terms or symbols to reflect that.

The second thing that struck me as odd is that Laws never explains what is the point is of analyzing story beats in this way. He occasionally refers to the fact that a narrative has a lot of downbeats, or that there's a series of downbeats interrupted by an upbeat. But he doesn't really discuss what patterns to look for, merely implies that we ought to be looking for patterns.

The third thing is, he doesn't really explain how to apply this to role-playing games. In most role-playing game systems, there are mechanics to introduce uncertainty into the narrative, and what is uncertain is precisely whether the outcome will be a downbeat or an upbeat.

In the game system FATE, for instance, players can accumulate FATE points when they experience significant downbeat outcomes, and use those points to make an upbeat outcome more likely. So there's a pattern of failures leading to an ultimate success. However, this pattern is baked into the structure of FATE; it's probably obvious to most people that players would most enjoy a game in which the characters have setbacks but win in the end.

Arguably, Laws's system would suggest that a GM should adjust the difficulty of different challenges to make success or failure more likely, given an understanding of patterns of upbeats and downbeats in classic narratives and the significance of those patterns. So the lack of direct discussion of patterns of beats, and the effects of those patterns, is what is most obviously lacking from this text.

It's as if a literature professor told you to make a note of syllabic stress patterns in Shakespeare's plays, but never mentioned iambic pentameter, or the significance of when he uses it and when he doesn't.

Anarcho-syndicalists in mechs!

That's pretty much enough to get the attention of most of my friends.

The game is impressive in how lightweight and comprehensible it is, while still allowing considerable character customization and mech customization. Similar to Lancer and some other games, each player has effectively two characters: a pilot, and their mech. The resolution system is simple and consistent, and I like the simplicity of the single table against which you roll a d20 for nearly everything.

Similarly, the setting is lightly detailed, but the style and tone are distinct and consistent. The cover art resembles the work of Simon Stalenhag, and the interior art reminds me of the character styles in the Borderlands games, only from a somewhat less crapsack world. It's left unsaid whether the world of Salvage Union is a future post-apocalyptic Earth, or a neglected mining colony in a space opera setting. I particularly liked that many of the mech designs were focused on utility -- salvaging, mining, hauling, repair -- and not just on combat. This fits well with the implicit goal of the characters, to build up the community of their mobile homebase, the union crawler.

I had the chance to play in some one-shots with the game designer, Panny, and the game runs very smoothly even for new players.

The artwork is gorgeous. I would love to see the game that goes with the art. Mindjammer is not that game. Mindjammer is described as transhuman space opera, based on Fate Core. However, the actual text of the game materials is aggressively hostile to this conception.

The designer consistently describes transhumanism as a threat, one that the player characters are assumed to be actively fighting against. This is quite explicit in the tie-in novel, written by the primary game designer. The core book, and most of the supplements, like the novel, assume the characters are agents of the technologically advanced Commonality, working to extend its influence through a frontier of lost colonies. However, the source book for the Core Worlds, Earth and the other worlds of the Commonality, describes its inhabitants with the deeply problematic term, "decadent", because of its advanced technology and its limited tolerance of transhuman technologies. So the characters are supposed to be spreading the political influence of the Commonality, while stopping the spread of its dangerous technology.

The game mechanics are nominally based on Fate Core, a narrative game system. However, it goes so far in battering Fate mechanics into the mold of a "crunchy" game system that it is no longer recognizable as Fate. In particular, Mindjammer abuses the concept of Aspects, arguably the central concept of Fate. Instead of being a freeform description of a character that has narrative weight, Mindjammer restricts Aspects to a fixed list of traits with fixed modifiers.

I'd be tempted to say that Mindjammer tries to force Fate into the shape of Traveller, but it also lacks Traveller's elegant simplicity. And beyond that, the now classic game Diaspora does a masterful job of hybridizing Traveller and Fate mechanics.

I'm ultimately puzzled why the game designer even tried to create this game, when every line of text makes it clear they hate transhuman science fiction and every game mechanic makes it clear they hate Fate Core. I can only imagine they were under some sort of contractual obligation.

The examples rolls are, to be fair, genuinely typical of what you get from this resource. But, that's all you get: a list of fifty single-line descriptions of small outposts, in a single page. There's not even a bit of flavor text to flesh out the descriptive tags. It's fairly obvious that these lines of text were randomly generated from an algorithm, with a table of descriptive tags. You might be able to work out the algorithm and the table from the fifty examples given, but it's not provided directly, as you might expect.

I'm generally in favor of inexpensive tools to generate content on the fly. But this feels like the creator was deliberately ratcheting down to the bare minimum they thought they could provide in a product. The best feature is the cover art. That there's a second volume, with the same cover art, makes it feel almost like this is a deliberate insult. It could have as easily been a thousand stations as fifty. Or better, it could have been the algorithm and the table, a bit of flavor text, and a few examples.

It's hard to say that something that costs less than a dollar isn't worth the price, but I think that's the case here.

This is good stuff, written with care to be useful for a broad range of space opera role-playing games.

Pirates are adventurers, by definition, and space opera often includes space pirates, so I've wondered why there isn't more material that directly addresses space piracy as the premise for a campaign. This starts to fill that gap.