Renaissance: The Rebirth

A long time ago . . .

2011-12-27T17:14:00.000-08:00

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.

Too Many Rules

2011-12-16T11:28:00.000-08:00

I haven't updated things in a while (and I know you're still waiting on that Galaxy Prime review) but work on Renaissance and table-top role playing have been on unintentional hiatus for a while. In part because of scheduling issues preventing everyone from being able to get together and also partly because of SKYRIM!!! I'm 100 hours or so in (on one of my characters) and I'm still psyched about it every time I think about it. I'm sure this excitement will die down eventually, but maybe not.

Returning to my original topic, though, I was making a note to myself about some table-top thoughts I'd been mulling over and thought they'd make a good article, maybe something others could benefit from as well.

I've been reading a lot of articles by Monte Cook (Legends and Lore) and Stephen Radney-MacFarland (Save My Game) in the D&D article archive for the magazines "Dungeon" and "Dragon". The last Save My Game article (from 12/2011) and a number of Cook's latest articles have addressed an issue that I think Renaissance is suffering from. Mechanics Creep or Rules Creep. I enjoy designing mechanics and can come up with them on the fly on a fairly regular basis but often these mechanics, while they are fun at the time, end up getting codified into writing in the book.

This is good because then those mechanics are available for reference and we can expect the same situation to work the same way every time thereafter. However, it also results in yet one more thing for the DM to have to remember or, far worse, reference, during gameplay. Constant references to the book (or even a summary sheet) during gameplay slows down the game and interrupts the fun, which is what the game is all about. I don't have a solution for it yet, but I need to take a long hard look at the mechanics in the book and see what can be removed, what can be categorized into "optional" rules in a separate section and what rules need to stay to preserve the core flow of the game.

Starship vs. Dragon

2011-10-24T12:28:00.000-07:00

In my last post I commented that I had an opportunity to try out a local game designer's system in lieu of my regular game and promised to post a summary of the session. Said summary is long overdue and is now brought to you by the letter 'P' for Procrastination!

The adventure we ran was a very simple concept: Important diplomat chased by assassins crashes on restricted, underdeveloped, planet and must be retrieved and protected by the PC's. Our crew was a Lawman, a Smuggler informant of his and a Kryzmalian (humanoid crystalline entity) Novice Kineticist (aka Force User) sent along for the experience he would gain and the benefit of his skills and training to the others.

Entering orbit, the group's first encounter was with a being known to fantasy characters but highly unfamiliar to space farers: a dragon. Taking the ship to be some sort of territorial rival the dragon descended upon them and, in the ensuing battle, drove them out of the sky. By diverting power to the shields they were able to prevent their total destruction and, when the dragon landed on them for the killing blow they trained their remaining functional weapons on it and drove it off with a point blank volley from their fusion cannons.

After leaving the ship in the care of the repair-bots and making their way through the semi-jungle they found themselves in, the group's next encounter was a small, primitive village where they were taken for monsters (the primitive people were essentially human). However, successful mimicry and handgestures allowed them to avoid slaughtering the entire village and communicate what they sought after several moments of tense posturing from the locals. Upon seeing the Kryzmalian, which had remained hidden until this point, the villagers assumed he was some sort of deity and one among them volunteered to lead the group to the "piece of fallen heaven".

Upon arrival at the diplomat's ship the group encountered a party of primitive adventurers investigating the wreck. As adventurers are wont to do, they ignored the attempts at parley, took the party at face value for the monsters they appeared to be and attacked the group. Despite their technology, the party was outnumbered and the opposing group had two "shamans" with them, what the rest of the galaxy would consider Kineticists. The battle was long and arduous with only a single PC survivor (the Lawman) remaining in the end. Afterwards, he was able to retrieve the diplomat and her guards from the wreckage of the ship and return to his own vessel, by now repaired, and depart, leaving the primitive locals to weave tales of wonder that would become legend and myth in later years.

Galaxy Prime

2011-10-23T11:07:00.000-07:00

My normal game didn't make this weekend because three quarters of the players didn't show up. In defense of two of them, they had valid reasons. For the third, the world may never know. Since we were short on players I decided to put the Scorched Earth campaign on hold and run a one shot game in a system (called Galaxy Prime) that a local game designer here in Houston wrote. I was expecting the absence of two my players so I had some prep time before hand to familiarize myself with the system and build some characters for them to choose from and, for one shot games, this really speeds up the process of getting into the game. I'm working on a review of the system and a summary of the game so check back tomorrow for an update on those!

Gnomes!

2011-10-19T22:20:00.001-07:00

I've been working on editing and "finalizing" my races tonight and was particularly proud of the gnomes' homeland!

"Gnomes may be found living in any environment with any number of interesting and sometimes questionably safe apparatus and gadgets designed to make the area more habitable. Their cities are often extremely organized in the core and initial design but any growth beyond the original plans for the city tend to be haphazard and rambling, growing over one another in the gnomes' eagerness to expand, update and start over. There have even been entire sections of city which have been known to become abandoned because the gnomes decided they wanted to expand, did so, and found the new constructions more to their liking and forgot about those they had vacated."

Welcome!

2011-10-18T05:22:00.000-07:00

Five years ago I designed, wrote and self-published a tabletop role-playing system which I called Renaissance: The Rebirth. It was a . . . learning experience. Two years ago I decided it was time for an update. I wanted to do the system justice. So, I started re-working the system, simplifying, tweaking and correcting the editorial gaffs that had somehow been previously overlooked. It was a casual process since so much of my time was taken up with work but it was something I thoroughly enjoyed doing.

As the simplification and tweaking process continued, I realized I was expending a lot of effort having to work around the mechanics already present in the system so I decided on a whim to try a side project. Termed tentatively Renaissance 2.0, I opened a new word document and started over from scratch, completely re-designing the system from the ground up. It quickly took shape and I soon had a whole folder for the project; Renaissance 1st edition editorial repairs were set aside and essentially archived.

It's been about a year and half since I began working on 2nd edition Renaissance and at first it continued to be a casual process. However, in the last few months I've made it a distinct priority. If I have spare time, I'm working on Renaissance. The system has been taking shape very nicely and I have a very definite and manageable list of mechanics to finish before it will be ready for public testing.

As I work on whittling away the list of remaining mechanics I'll be updating this blog with news and progress of the project. Additionally, because I spend a lot of time thinking about gaming, and not just Renaissance, not all posts will be Renaissance specific. It's a wide world of gaming and related entertainment out there and there's a lot of material to cover!