Context: I've been an on-again-off-again user of Savage Worlds for something like 5-10 years now. I like its versatility / easy adaptability, although IMO find that most setting-specific RPGs are better at their exact thing than SW. That said, with my group that is not highly interested in rules, having one ruleset I can use for anything that I don't have a specific ruleset for is handy. I own all the Companions from SW Deluxe and the SWADE core book. This is the first SWADE Companion I've bought.
The good:
- Great breadth of rules that will let you model pretty much anything sci-fi without rules-ing you to death with minutiae.
- Expands on the SW Deluxe SciFi Companion. There's more in this one.
- Lots of the rules / NPCs provided play off classic sci-fi tropes and make it easy to emulate those particular settings. SW is already good at exactly this, and the SciFi Companion continues the tradition.
- Mostly sensible layout (see some minor comments below) that looks reasonably good.
- I like the art style that they continue to use across the SWADE books. I particularly appreciate that they've gotten rid of some of the sexualised female images that were around in the SW Deluxe period (think of the Fantasy and Horror Companion book covers for SWD, for example).
- As always with SW products, the PDF is layered so you can turn off parts of it for printing at home. Great work on this PEG. The bookmarking is also thorough.
The not-so-good:
- While this expands on the SW Deluxe SciFi Companion, it covers a lot of the old ground that the SWD book did. It's definitely an improvement though.
- There is a decent amount of repetition of rules across the different sections (most notably modules for starships / vehicles / walkers). I wonder if this could have been boiled down. Prospective buyers should be aware that they are not getting 306 pages of all unique stuff. There's still lots of content here though.
- It's not real cheap. I've seen the cost of all PDFs go up substantially in recent times, so I won't say it's overpriced, but it's definitely not the bargain that the SWADE core book is (which is indeed a bargain). I have bought other non-PEG PDFs recently though that were cheaper and felt like they had higher production values (i.e. some really great art, for example), so I feel like this is on the more expensive end of stuff that's going around at the moment.
Conclusion:
If you already have the SWD SciFi Companion, you can probably largely make that work for SWADE with a little effort if you don't want to spend the money on the new version. If SWADE is your go-to system and you want to run sci-fi games, you could do worse than picking this up, especially if you don't have the older SciFi Companion.
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