Ages ago I promised you a review of the new role-playing system, Galaxy Prime, that I was given the opportunity to sample one Saturday in place of my regularly scheduled game. Life has been . . . kind would be too optimistic, but it hasn't been harsh. Time, on the other hand, has been down right elusive. If you will follow me to the full article I'll give you the run down on the system and my thoughts on it.
Galaxy Prime, at first glance, appears scarce. The book is reasonably thick, around 240 pages, but only about half of it is gameplay mechanics with the other half being dedicated to outlining the sci-fi setting which accompanies the mechanics. Because the book is divided into two sections and provides two very different readings, I will also separate my review into two separate reviews (both to be included here, though).
The Mechanics
As I said, Galaxy Prime appears scarce at first glance. There are three primary stats which govern a series of secondary stats as well as all of your character's skills. The skills chapter has a single page of skills, totaling around 15 skills. What appears to be a weakness, however, turns out not to be when experienced, rather than merely seen.
To begin with, the skills are broadly defined and any GM worth his salt can easily add to or expand upon them if he or she wishes to do so. The general mechanic for determining skill values is so streamlined that it is intuitively easy to add new skills if the GM or players so desire. On top of this, with a few broadly defined skills, the time it takes to create a character is significantly reduced once you are familiar with the process. All systems have a learning curve during character creation and in this Galaxy Prime does very well. I sat down to familiarize myself with the system and build a few test characters and with only a basic skimming of the rules I was able to create a character in short order by my fourth character.
What the system gains in simplicity of skills it gains again in the expansiveness of the Race and Class selections available to players. The races are well defined with a short paragraph of flavor text, enabling you to skim through the nearly 40 races available and have a strong understanding of them quickly so that you can choose the race that best fits the type of character you wish to play.
The actual mechanics of play are equally streamlined, with combat relying on your character's secondary stats and simple, direct rolls. The system becomes a little bit more complicated with space combat but in a way that allows you to really feel the use and tactics of piloting and fighting with a starship.
While we're on the topic of mechanics for space ships, the system includes a variety of pre-built ships for ease of use as well as modular mechanics for building and customizing your own vessel unique to the needs of your party (or NPC's for the GM). The mechanics were even fluid enough for me to tweak them and use them to represent a dragon during the sample game I ran without sacrificing the feel of the encounter for my players.
Finally, while the system does not have "magic" or "psionics" it does have Kinet. Kineticists use powers akin to psionics and while the number of powers is limited compared to other systems, the scope of the powers available easily make up for this theoretical weakness. There are a few rules for the kinet powers themselves which seem awkward or confusing but nothing that an intrepid GM cannot work around and while the author makes a point to limit Kinet powers to a single class, allowing them outside the class did not, in our brief session, seem to cause any issues. Most importantly, the powers themselves are immense fun (I cannot stress that point enough) and the potential for kineticist adventures and intrigue is extensive.
The Setting
I won't spoil the setting by actually telling you all about. I couldn't do it justice here anyway. Slightly more than half of the Galaxy Prime book covers the setting packaged with the system and its presentation is ideal. There are a wide variety of sectors or systems within the portion of the universe detailed and the book provides enough detail to really cover the interests, basic history and alliances of each sector.
GM's utilizing this section will benefit from having plenty of information to make sure that the settings for their adventures have the flavor to really put the characters in the story without bogging them down with excess, tedious details that they have to memorize about every single little planet or settlement in the region. Instead, each sector is covered in just enough detail to enable the GM to build and design his adventures with plenty of designer's license to add venues, planets, intrigue and encounters.
The broad but definite strokes with which the setting is presented allow the GM to wing it and run games off the cuff or to prepare his or her adventures in excruciating detail. This style of setting design is one I've been drawing nearer and nearer in my own search for a "best of both worlds" design method for settings and it will definitely be inspiring my future setting design.
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