Classic Era Science Fiction Gaming

Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition is a Science Fiction roleplaying game with a long history. If Dungeons & Dragons has its own Systems Reference Document containing guidelines for publishing content under the Open-Gaming Licence, then so does Traveller, the classic Science Fiction roleplaying game inspired by Imperial Science Fiction, published by Game Designer’s Workshop in 1977. This is the Cepheus Engine System Reference Document, which contains the ‘Classic Era Science Fiction 2D6-Based Open Gaming System’, which provides a common framework for Referees to create and run, and players roleplay, whether for their own table or for actual publication. This is a roleplaying game which enables the Player Characters to travel the stars, explore new worlds, engage in speculative trade, conduct small scale military missions, fight off pirates preying on interstellar trade, investigate strange alien ruins, and more.

Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition is published by Stellagama Publishing, best known for the campaign setting, These Stars Are Ours!. It is an update and expansion of earlier versions of the rules. The changes include the inclusion of the hexadecimal notation system beloved of Traveller being optional; combining skill and characteristic modifiers—which means that the target thresholds for actions are higher; Player Character is less random and a Player Character cannot die during the process, although he can be injured; damage suffered by Player Characters and NPCs is not deducted from characteristics, but from Stamina and Lifeblood, instead; Player Characters have Traits, heroic abilities which makes them stand out; spaceships can be larger—ten thousand, rather five thousand tons—and can be equipped with main guns, like Particle Guns and Gravitic Disruptors; technology is shifted up and down slightly, so that Cybertechnology can be available at Tech Level 9 and Force Shields at Tech Level 16; Player Characters can suffer mortal wounds instead of dying and can even undergo Cyborg Conversion or Bio-Reconstruction; and a section for the Referee has been added. There are innumerable changes and additions throughout Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition, but they are compatible with previous editions of the Cepheus roleplaying game. Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition is upfront about these changes, but in addition, throughout the rulebook, the Referee is given options that she can include in her campaign.

A Player Character in the Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition has six characteristics—Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education, and Social Standing. These typically range between two and twelve, but can go much higher. Then a Player Character has skills. These range from Admin, Airman, and Athletics to Tactics, Watercraft, and Zero-G. Notable omissions are the Mechanics and Electronics skill, replaced by repair, Admin includes the Advocate skill, and Gambling is part of Carousing. Skills range in value from zero to five, and are gained from a Player Character’s Homeworld and his Career. He also gains one or more Traits, depending on the length of that Career. These are tied to particular skills, so for example, ‘Jump Tuition’ requires Piloting 1 as a skill and allows the Player Character to roll with Advantage when making a Jump throw and travel faster-than-light, whilst ‘Explorer’s Society’ grants a high passage ticket once every two months and free stay at the society’s hotels.

To create a Player Character, a player assigns an array of values to the Player Character’ characteristics. He chooses one skill for his character’s Homeworld and then puts him through a Career. There are twelve of these, and include Agent, Belter, Colonist, Elite, Navy, Pirate, Rogue, Scholar, and more. A career lasts a number of terms, each four years in length—though an option allows for their length to be random—and a player picks skills as he takes his character from one term to the next, learning fewer skills as he ages. Once per turn, the player can also choose to give up a skill option and instead increase a characteristic. There is also the chance of suffering from the effects of age, but the main thing that the player will be rolling for is an event each term. This creates an incident which the Player Character can gain from or suffer because of it, and it can be career-related or it can be life-related. At the end of the Career , a Player Character will gain mustering out benefits in terms of money, items, ship’s shares, and characteristic bonuses. In extreme situations, a Player Character will find himself being trained in psionics or being sent to prison!

Using the Event Tables allows a player to create a bit of background about his character. For example, this belter grew up on an inhospitable colony before signing on with a mining concern to strike it rich. He never did, but he was sponsored for university and trained in the sciences and technical subjects. After nearly getting injured during an attack on the company facilities, he decided to retire, believing he had sufficient skills to go it alone and look for his own strike.

Karol Stounten
Strength 4 Dexterity 6 Endurance 7 Intelligence 11 Education 11 Social Standing 8
Career: Belter, 4 Terms Rank: Crew Boss
Stamina: 7 Lifeblood: 7
Age: 34 Homeworld: Inhospitable Outpost
Events: Pirate Protection Racket (Resisted), Study, Specialist Training, Cyberterrorism!
Skills: Athletics-0, Computer-2, Demolitions-1, Engineering-1, Melee Combat-1, Piloting-2, Repair-1, Science-3, Streetwise-1, Zero-G-1
Traits: Sensor Ace, Scientist (Physical Sciences)
Equipment: Spacesuit, CR 10,000 Prospector

Mechanically, Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition is simple. For a Player Character to undertake an action, his player rolls two six-sided dice and aims to beat a target number, typically eight or more, for an average difficulty task. The player will add modifiers for the characteristic and the skill being used, a skill rating of two indicating that the Player Character is a trained professional and an experienced professional if three or more. A roll of twelve always succeeds, and sometimes, a situation will give the Player Character Advantage, enabling his player to roll three six-sided dice and use the best two. This is usually due to a Player Character trait. The amount by which the roll exceeds or misses the Target Number is called the Effect. Effect itself is not clearly explained, although there are numerous uses for it throughout the book, such as increasing the damage by a successful attack or the captain aboard a starship in combat using Leadership to ‘Lead Crew’ and create bonuses that his player can assign to the other crew members.

As a Science Fiction roleplaying game, Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition provides a wide range of equipment. This includes armour, exploration and survival gear, arms, armour, and cybernetics. The latter is classified into four grades, which start with A-Grade, superficial or common implants, such as cosmetics or an Internal OmniComp, all the way up to R-Grade cybernetics, invasive, experimental, and irreversible implants like a Berserker Module or a Hercules Frame Replacement. Every cybernetic implant has a point cost. If a Player Character has more than six points worth of Cybernetic Points, he suffers from cyber-disassociation, which will affect his ability to socialise. The weapons include vibroblades, gyrojet guns, tanglers, blasters and laser guns, and even a grav launcher that fires a floating plasma bomb that the user can guide to the intended target. A solid selection of vehicles is included too, as well as a quick and dirty robot design sequence, which allows them to be created in a few minutes, alongside a few examples, ready to be used in play.

The rules for combat allow for cover, aiming, automatic weapons, suppressive fire, grappling, morale, and more. If a combatant suffers more damage than his Dexterity characteristic, he is knocked prone. Damage is deducted from Stamina first, and then Lifeblood, the latter indicating that he has been wounded. If it is less than half his Lifeblood, he is seriously wounded. He is mortally wounded if it is reduced to zero. There are rules for trauma surgery and recovery. The rules for chases cover both foot chases and vehicle chases. Psionics are handled in a straightforward fashion, possible talents consisting of Awareness, Clairvoyance, Telekinesis, Telepathy, and Teleportation. What talents a Player Character might have are determined randomly, but at the very least, he will have Telepathy. His Psionic Strength, essentially an extra characteristic, determines the number of PSI points he has and the abilities he has within a talent. In order to use a psionic ability, he simply spends the PSI points.

Understandably, the longest section in the longest section in Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition is devoted to starships. Spacecraft below one hundred tons are smallcraft and do not have a Jump Drive. Interstellar travel is achieved by the aforementioned Jump Drive, rated between one and six, indicating how many parsecs a starship can travel in a single jump. Speed within a system is measured in gees, again from one to six. The rules begin by explaining how starships are operated and the costs of doing so, including speculative trade in terms of cargo and passengers. The procedure for the latter is explained and there are suggestions too, on how to make the ferrying of cargoes more interesting. There is a similar procedure for designing spaceships and starships, all the way up to hulls displacing ten thousand tons. The latter enables the creation of large vessels and arming at that scale with large weapons that fit in triple turrets and bay weapons that displace fifty tons, and even main gun weapons that displace one thousand tons. In general, these are outside of the scope of most campaigns that a Referee might run, but their inclusion allows the possibility of a big, naval-based campaign. The procedure is the most complex in Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition, involving as it does quite a lot of decisions and arithmetic. The process does take a bit of practice to get right and get the numbers to balance. Numerous common spacecraft designs are included too, from a ten-ton fighter and ten-ton gig, all the way up a thousand-ton cruiser. Most of the vessels that will be within the purview of the Player Characters include the two-hundred-ton trader, one-hundred-ton scout vessel, and so on.

Spaceship combat is similarly complex. It is conducted in six-minute rounds which allow for weapon recharge cycles, the distances that missiles have to travel to reach their targets, the time needed for repairs, and so on. In that period, each crew member has time to take a single action. For the captain, that will be to ‘Lead Crew’ to orders, and more importantly, possible bonuses, or to ‘Outmanoeuvre’ the enemy and gain a better Position in relation to them; the Pilot has a choice of Attack Vector, Disengage, Evasive Manoeuvres, Plot Jump, and more; the Sensor Operator can Spoof Missiles, Jam Sensors, Target Systems, gain a Sensor Lock, or Break a Sensor Lock; the Gunner can Fire Energy Weapons, Launch Missiles, Launch Sand (which screens against attacks), or fire Point Defence weaponry; and the Engineer can Overcharge weapon or Redline Engines, or conduct jury-rigged repairs. It starts with attempting to gain Position over the enemy, this replacing what would be Initiative or Range in ground or air combat, as there is neither in space in Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition. Combatants can target specific locations on a spaceship, and if an attack does get through and hit an enemy vessel, it can inflict surface, internal, or critical damage. Internal and critical hits can damage or destroy specific components or locations aboard a vessel. The rules also allow for radiation damage too. Overall, the rules are busy and detailed—but not overly so, and they do work to keep every Player Character aboard a ship busy and useful in a fight.

The rules for world creation remain unchanged. The procedure enables the Referee to roll for the various factors which make up a world—size, atmosphere, water percentage, world government, law level, starport, and tech levels. All these will together indicate trade codes and the presence of bases, whilst the Referee determines what travel zone the world lies and what allegiances it has, if any, plus communication and trade routes. The procedure is straightforward and much less complex than the rules for either starship combat or design. In addition, there are rules and tables for social encounters, detailing NPCs, plus some sample generic stats, plus a guide to creating and running animals or xenofauna. This is perhaps the shortest section in the rulebook.

One new section specifically for the Referee provides her with a range of advice. This is broad in its coverage, its primary suggestion being for the Referee to start small with a handful of worlds and build as her players and their characters begin to explore the setting. There is advice on using contacts, enemies, and so on, as to what to allow or terms of technology since Cepheus Deluxe has a high number of baked-in features. These start with no Faster-Than-Light communication, slow interplanetary and interstellar travel, physical rather than virtual activity, and so on. The Referee is further supported with six detailed adventure seeds and then several appendices. These include a bibliography, options for using the ‘UWP’ or ‘Universal World Profile’, cyborg conversion or bio reconstruction to avoid death, and options for aliens. In general, Cepheus Deluxe is a humanocentric setting, but it is also a Science Fiction rules set, so rules for creating NPCs or Player Characters from alien species are almost obligatory. There are three given here, the Greys, the Reptiloids, and the Insectoids.

Lastly, Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition does include what every player and Referee wants for their Science Fiction roleplaying game—starship floor plans. Presented in ‘Appendix F: Schematics’—and not Appendix ‘F’ for ‘Floor Plans’, these accompany the full stats given for various spaceships earlier in the book, including an Assault Ship, Explorer, Prospector, Research vessel, Scout, and System Defence Boat. Many have a rocket-like quality to them, landing on their ends and having multiple small decks rather than fewer, but larger decks. However, they separated from their stats, and worse, they produced far too small to use with any ease.

Throughout Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition the Referee is constantly given two things. The first is options. For example, the ability to increase characteristic value once play starts; Hero Points to allow rerolls by both the players and the Referee; letting Player Characters switch Careers; allowing dodging and parrying in combat; armour as a penalty to hit rather than absorbing damage; heroes and grunts in combat for more cinematic play; and more. They lessen in number towards the end of the book, but they provide the Referee with numerous choices if she wants to tweak her Cepheus Deluxe game.

The second thing that Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition provides the Referee with, is examples. Examples of Player Character creation, combat, chases, starship combat, and so on. In some cases, more than one example, there being three examples of Player Character creation and two of combat, plus the examples of starship combat is lengthy and detailed, enabling the Referee to understand how the procedure works. In each and every case, they help to bring the rules to life.

What the Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition does is shift the ‘Classic Era Science Fiction 2D6-Based Open Gaming System’ away from its Traveller origins, and through that, any association with Imperial Science Fiction and specifically the Third Imperium, the setting for Traveller. However, the problem with that, is where it leaves Cepheus Deluxe, because it is not quite truly a generic Science Fiction roleplaying because its underlying architecture is still that of Traveller. This is not to say that Cepheus Deluxe could not do other types of Science Fiction. It could—and that includes many of the sources of inspiration listed in the roleplaying game’s Appendix A, such as The Expanse, Babylon 5, Dark Skies, and Outland. However, advice on adapting or adjusting Cepheus Deluxe to the possible subgenres of Science Fiction it could encompass, for example, Biopunk, Cyberpunk, Dieselpunk, Military Science Fiction, Space Opera, Space Western, would have been both very welcome and expanded its utility.

In some ways, this is not helped by the underwhelming treatment of alien races, either as NPCs or Player Characters. The inclusion of the three in the Appendix D feels like an afterthought. Here perhaps rules for the Referee to create her own would not have gone amiss, again, expanding the utility of Cepheus Deluxe. The inclusion of this and a more detailed examination of other genres would have made the Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition a better toolkit. Perhaps there is scope here for a Cepheus Deluxe Companion with tools, options, and essays to expand on this?

Physically, Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition is disappointing. For the most part, the layout is clean and tidy, but it does need an edit in places. Worse, the artwork is often garish and simplistic, really failing to depict the tone of the roleplaying game’s Science Fiction. Conversely, the spaceship illustrations are excellent, though small.

Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition is ultimately a passport to the Classic Era Science Fiction ‘Classic Era Science Fiction 2D6-Based Open Gaming System’. It presents and supports the Cepheus engine in a thoroughly accessible and—for the most part—supported fashion, especially with the engaging examples of play, providing the Referee with the tools to create her own content and use content available from other publishers.

Space Crime

There is a big difference between making ends meet and making a living when it comes to operating a starship. With expansive docking fees, fuel costs, and repairs to be made, let alone paying the crew, making a profit is never easy, unless that is, you pick up a contract from a crime boss. A crime boss like Algoth Nieminen, who just happened to take over and expand the Jitana Syndicate to the point where it is the primary crime organisation in the binary. Now he has a cargo which he needs transporting both carefully and speedily and he is short of his usual ships and crews. He will not say what it is, but it is sensitive and highly illegal. He will, however, say where it is. The cargo is aboard a ship which has been impounded and the held at the impound yard in orbit around Kandhara. So all the crew has to do is, fly to the Shan system, infiltrate the Kandhara Independent Impound yard, get aboard the ship, steal the cargo, and deliver it as Algoth Nieminen, as promised, right? Wrong. We not entirely wrong. The crew do have to fly to the Shan system, infiltrate the Kandhara Independent Impound yard, get aboard the ship, steal the cargo, and deliver it as Algoth Nieminen promised, but it is nowhere as simple as that. First, there are three ships and crews who worked for Algoth Nieminen in the impound and one of them has the cargo. Second, Algoth Nieminen has hired four other crews to retrieve the cargo and will only pay the bonus to the crew which successfully retrieves the cargo. Third, there is a detective who wants to make a name for himself—and if that means arresting Algoth Nieminen and breaking up the Jitana Syndicate, then all the better.

This is the set-up for The Kandhara Contraband: A System Agnostic Sci-Fi Adventure. Published by LunarShadow Designs, this as the title suggests is a rules free, mechanics free, stats free scenario for the Science Fiction genre. So more plot than numbers—and more set-up than plot—this is also a scenario which involves space crime. Which narrows it down to the types of roleplaying game it will work with. In terms of generic roleplaying games, Savage Worlds or GURPS or FATE Core would all work easily with this plot. In terms of setting, the set-up and theme points to two obvious choices. Star Wars is the most obvious, whether that is the D6 System version from West End Games or Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars: Edge of the Empire. The other option is the Firefly Roleplaying Game published by Margaret Weis Productions. But whichever system or setting the Game Master decides to run The Kandhara Contraband, the key elements are crime and space travel.

Half of The Kandhara Contraband is dedicated to the set-up and describing the other interested parties in the adventure. This includes the three syndicate ships and their captains who got impounded, as well as the four rival ships and their captains that Algoth Nieminen has also hired to retrieve the cargo, plus of course, the police detective. These are all given a good paragraph or two’s worth of description, which in most cases is accompanied by a question, which the Game Master has to put to her players. For example, Jacinda Sedius is the captain of The Icarus, a ship which though the same make and model as the Player Characters’, but is often on the verge of breaking down and in need of much maintenance. Captain Jacinda and her crew has suffered a rash of bad luck and really needs the payout that successfully retrieving Algoth Nieminen’s cargo would bring. The accompanying question is, “Ask the PCs about a time they have previously helped Jacinda and her crew. How many drinks does he owe them?” The Kandhara Contraband asks similar questions for each of the NPCs in the scenario, as well as at Kandhara Station, the orbital station. The effects of this are twofold. First, it involves the players in the creation of elements of the scenario, tying locations and NPCs to their characters and into the setting or game that the Game Master is running, and in the process setting up background details and roleplaying hooks. Second, if The Kandhara Contraband is run as a convention scenario—and it is about the right length to do that, even if there are no suggestions as to how to that or pace the scenario—each time it is run, it will be different for the Game Master.

The second half of The Kandhara Contraband is devoted to the scenario’s locations, which consist of the barren mining world of Shan, Kandhara Station, the orbital station above Shan, and the Kandhara Independent Impound Yard, and the final destination for the cargo. Here individuals, facilities aboard Kandhara Station, and events are all described. Most of the detail is spent on Kandhara Station, as it is here that the Player Characters will find the crews of the impounded ships and learn more about the cargo—which is very much far from ordinary.

Physically, The Kandhara Contraband is a plain and simple affair. Behind the decent cover, the scenario is unaccompanied by either maps or illustrations. Otherwise, the layout is tidy and the booklet a clean affair.

The advice for the Game Master in The Kandhara Contraband is brief. For the Game Master with experience of running a fairly improvised scenario, this should not be an issue. A less experienced Game Master might well have wanted more help and advice, or at least a summary of the events and hooks which help her more readily prepare the scenario and give her some idea as to what might happen once the players and their characters get involved.

The Kandhara Contraband: A System Agnostic Sci-Fi Adventure is plot and set-up. Both though, are more than enough to get a good session or two’s worth of Sci-Fi action and intrigue going, as well as provide content that the Game Master can easily add to her campaign and the players add to their characters’ backgrounds. Of course, it is going to need some effort upon the part of the Game Master to supply the stats, but once she has that, the Game Master is ready to run her Player Characters into trouble and hopefully, back out again, hopefully with The Kandhara Contraband in their cargo hold and out again.

The Other OSR: Electric Bastionland

Imagine a roleplaying game which gives you two hundred pages of character options. Imagine a roleplaying game with a large expansive setting. Imagine a roleplaying game which builds the details of its setting from its character options—all two hundred pages of them. Imagine that Player Character generation in such a roleplaying game—with all two hundred pages of its options would take a mere five minutes. Actually less. Imagine a roleplaying game in which the Player Characters are adventurers and treasure hunters across this large expansive setting. Imagine that such a roleplaying game has Old School Renaissance sensibilities in terms of its simple mechanics—simple mechanics which are explained in four pages—and the dauntingly dangerous nature of its world. Combine all of these aspects together and what you have is Electric Bastionland, a roleplaying game of failed careers, debt and treasure hunting, and exploration and survival, across, under, and beyond a vast metropolis which is created and improvised through play and from tables.

Electric Bastionland: Deeper into the Odd is published by Bastionland Press, following a successful Kickstarter campaign. As its title suggests, it is an expansion to the author’s earlier Into the Odd and Bastion Ein Sof, but a standalone expansion, one that takes the seemingly formerly wretched city of Bastion into the Electric Age and sees it glow with the fierce yellow of Electricity and grow and encroach upon other cities, to become a modern metropolis of bright lights and possibilities. It is a city that juxtaposes the familiar and the odd, the latter making those that engage with the oddness also odd. It is a city without a council, but many councils and many boroughs. It is a city which is constantly being built, but nobody claims to have built. It is a city of modernity with the sensibility of the past. It is a city of electricity and the consequences of that electricity—strange transmissions on the Radio, unnerving headaches near power stations, and machines that serve themselves. It is a city without a history and a city whose history has become a physical thing. Bastion is the present. Deep Country, beyond the limits of the city where everything was better, but simplistic and inconvenient, is the past. The Living Stars are the future. Connecting the three—Bastion, Deep Country, the Living Stars—is The Underground. It connects everything, tests everyone, and lies beneath reality, but it will get you where you want to go—eventually. Bastion as a city and a setting has the feel of La Belle Époque and of La Ville Lumière, and then hints of the Jazz Age verging on an ecumenopolis, but stranger, weirder, and odder the closer you look. Just how strange, just how weird, and just how odd, begins with the Player Characters.

Each Player Character begins play in debt, their career a failure, desperate to pay off this debt such that they embark on ‘great’ treasure hunts. Working with a fellow band of Debtors, they know that if they can find it, the treasure will surely be enough to pay off their debts. Yet they have a rival, and he also knows of the treasure. Tarry long in their expedition and the rival may retrieve the treasure and so their debt remains, grows even. In working to retrieve the treasure the Debtors will encounter the oddities and the weirdness of Bastion. Both will rub off on the Debtors, leaving also weird and odd, and that is in addition to the scars and bruises they may gain along the way. If they survive, they may also become Grizzled as well as scarred.

A Player Character in Electric Bastionland has three abilities—Strength, Dexterity, and Charisma. These are rated between three and eighteen. He has a six-sided die’s worth of Hit Protection and a six-sided die’s worth of New Pounds—this is not a lot of money. Together with his fellow Debtors, he owes £10,000. The exact nature of the debt is determined by the Failed Career of the youngest player. For example, a Fashionista owes The Lion Council—a literal council of lions—£10,000 and its members want the debt to be repaid in interesting meat, whilst a Petty Officer simply owes The Petty Court that amount, but can pay off half that amount by personally attending The Petty Court and representing himself in a tediously long trial of trivial affairs. Every Debtor has a Failed Career. Exactly what is determined by cross matching the Debtor’s lowest Ability score with his highest, and that gives a page number.

Every Failed Career is given a two-page spread and with one hundred Failed Careers in Electric Bastionland, that is the aforementioned two hundred pages of character options and a third of the book already taken up! However, each Failed Career is described in relatively broad detail. Along with an illustration, each Failed Career is accompanied by a simple explanation, some sample names, and the reason for the Debtors’ debt. Besides one or two items of equipment, each Failed Career gives options which add further detail and flavour. Exactly is determined by many New Pounds a Debtor has and how many points of Hit Protection he has. For example, the Necro-Engineer specialises in the most modern means of dealing with the growing industry of corpse production. His name might be Do, Jincey, Gognon, or Zephryne; he owes money to The Jolity Engine, a sentient, building-sized gambling machine; and he owns sombre formal wear and a shovel. A pair of tables ask two questions—‘how did you get your start in the corpse disposal industry?’ and ‘what was your great project? (you couldn’t get funding)’. If Necro-Engineer begins play with £6, then the answer to the first question is, by ‘Chasing Scavengers Away’ and he is accompanied by a barely-domesticated hyena which sticks with him. If he begins play with £2, he was a ‘Professional Grave Visitor’ and has a lifetime’s supply of bouquets from various florists around the city. As to his greatest project, if the Necro-Engineer only has the one point of Hit Protection, it was The Incineration Dome and he has a fire-proof protective suit which fits over his formal wear, whereas if he has four points of Hit Protection, it was The Protein Reclamation Initiative and he has a jar of flavour-masking rub, which makes anything palatable! Each of these tables is different for each Failed Career, but each balances the amount of Hit Protection and New Pounds with a piece of equipment or a power or other benefit. The lower the amount of Hit Protection and New Pounds, the potentially more powerful the piece of equipment or power or other benefit—and vice versa.

Name: Slipper
Failed Career: Academic Debater
Strength: 13
Dexterity: 13
Charisma: 11

Hit Protection: 5
£5

Debt: Conglomerated Taxes (You are exempt from certain taxes, gaining an effective 50% discount on pets, hair products, and offal.)

Possessions: Cane (d6), pocket-watch

What Can You Debate Forever?: Formal Wear (Headgear)
What Did Your University Provide As A Leaving Gift?: A Novelty Umbrella (also a clarinet).

Go through the list of Failed Careers and what Electric Bastionland is doing is not just providing the means to create characters, but detailing aspects of the world. Thus, Gutter Minder Failed Career might establish that the Debtor is Rat given human form in a lab experiment or a former High Society member, the only survivor of a mob uprising. The first establishes that somewhere in Bastion, someone is experimenting on animals, and that perhaps there might be a laboratory where they might be working on more, that there might be other, similar creatures out there, and so on. The second that of an uprising which could be any number of reasons. From the Trench Conscript which suggests a war and a battle and a Criminal Bureaucrat who specialises the legal loopholes which make every crime legal to the Wall-Born which suggests Bastion is surrounded by walls to the Integrated Alien passing as human which suggests a Science Fiction aspect to the city and the Un-Revolutionary, who seeks to prevent, even undo change in a city that is changing, the Failed Careers each hint at and add aspects to Bastion. Of course, not all of them will come into play necessarily, though those pertaining to the Debtors currently being played, certainly should.

Mechanically, Electric Bastionland shares much in common with the earlier Into the Odd. If a Debtor wants to undertake an action, his player rolls a twenty-sided die against the appropriate Ability, aiming to equal to or under to pass. For initiative in combat is handled with a Dexterity save. Combat is equally as simple. A player rolls the die for the weapon used to determine how much might damage be inflicted—there is no ‘to hit roll’. The target’s armour is subtracted from this and the remainder is subtracted from first his Hit Protection and then his Strength. Once damage is inflicted upon his Strength, a Debtor must make a save against his Strength in order to avoid being debilitated—which of course gets harder and harder the more Strength lost. Lastly, should a Debtor be reduced to exactly zero Hit Protection without suffering damage to his Strength, then he also scarred, which can be anything from an actual scar to doomed to die! And that is it in terms of mechanics, which are fully explained in just four pages! They are mostly player-facing, meaning that the players will probably roll more than the Conductor—as the Game Master is known in Electric Bastionland, and combat is in general, short and nasty, and best avoided if possible.

The last third of Electric Bastionland is for the Conductor. Advice, even direction for the Conductor, is to the point and laid out in short, easily grasped bullet points in ‘Preparing The Game’. The point of the roleplaying game is to find the treasure which will lift the Debtor out of penury, and so the treasure should be valuable rather than useful, there should be an explanation as to why it has not been found yet, and it should be thought-provoking. In a series of three bullet point blocks, the Conductor is guided through a range of subjects covering preparing and conducting the game, essentially presented as the principles behind the game. In turn, Bastion, Deep Country, and the Underground are presented in the same fashion, looking at how to understand, map, stock, and conduct (or referee) each of these weird and wonderful locations, often accompanied by tables that the Conductor can use as inspiration.

The advice for creating the inhabitants of Bastion is to make them interesting and memorable. Although they make up the majority, Humans are not the inhabitants of the city and beyond. Others include Mockeries, creatures of felt, wood, and string given life, hated by animals, but loved by children. Each has a particular talent and acts as if on the stage. In Bastion, they tend to be based on animals, Mock People though are loathed and Mock Objects stick to the Underground. Machines, connected to the Underground or a part of it, initiate change and monitor it, creating and modifying rather than destroying—and that can include the Debtors when encountered on their treasure hunt. Aliens are more advanced than the inhabitants of Bastion, but typically just a very specific way, and cannot truly integrate into society. Out in Deep Country, some have become gods or monsters of myth and legend. Monstrosities are each unique, each made rather than born, each mundane before it became what it is now.

The last part of Electric Bastionland is ‘The Oddendum’, a collection of short articles which the Conductor can include in her game. The first of these though, ‘A Player’s Handbook: Strategy Guide’, is not for the Conductor, but the players. It is a two-page spread on how to play Electric Bastionland and explore its city and beyond, and it is very useful. However, situated so very near the end of the book, it feels very much out of place, when really it should have been placed earlier, after the rules explanations and examples, where prospective players could have more readily found it. The rest of ‘The Oddendum’ covers a wide range of subjects, from Oddities, the strange devices and things whose workings defy explanation, but which might be magic or Sci-Fi and which everyone will want to buy or steal to an explanation of why the designer named the Game Master the ‘Conductor’ and how the city of Bastion is not a refuge or sanctuary to come back to from the Deep Country or Underground, but a continuation of the adventure. It includes sections of advice for the Conductor alongside sections of things to put in the game, so ‘The Balancing Act’ examines the balance between mechanics and making things interesting is followed by a list of Noble Weapons. This is followed by ‘Example Content’ such as ‘Unions and Rituals’—cults, clubs, and armies, ‘Dedicated Followers of Fashion’—an emporium of haute couture, and ‘The Bureaucrolabyrinth’, a table for running and complicating any bureaucratic process. All of these can be added to a Conductor’s game as she desires, but these final pieces do feel a bit of a jumble. And that in a way is fine, since Bastion as a setting is not meant to be a coherent whole, it is meant to be cluttered and discordant, part-patchwork, part-tangle.

Finally, the designer steps in with ‘The Last Word’. Here the designer makes clear that Electric Bastionland is designed to be played by anybody, to be played at the table, and to be created at the table. Further, that what it is not is a textbook intended to be studied. For the most part, the designer succeeds. Electric Bastionland is simple enough that it can be played by anyone, and it is definitely not a textbook, but very much more of a toolkit, one set of inspirations after another. Mechanically though, despite its simplicity, Electric Bastionland is not very forgiving—especially in combat where every attack succeeds and what matters is the amount of damage rolled. This is an issue continued from Into the Odd and it may be off-putting for some players. Electric Bastionland does include advice that addresses this—all of it good, but despite the simplicity and the advice, Electric Bastionland is not necessarily a roleplaying game for the beginning Game Master—or Conductor, since it relies heavily on improvisation. Which simply may be too daunting for the prospective Conductor. For the more experienced Game Master, the advice and simplicity will be nowhere near as daunting and should nicely ease her into running her first Electric Bastionland treasure hunt.

One side effect of the improvisation inherent to running and playing Electric Bastionland is that unlike the earlier Into the Odd, there is no traditional adventure or scenario, or in this case, treasure hunt, included in its pages. Into the Odd had a hexcrawl, a town, and a dungeon, and whilst Electric Bastionland has sample boroughs, what it does not have is a sample treasure hunt. Perhaps including one would have pulled away at the degree of improvisation which the designer of Electric Bastionland wants the Conductor to engage in and the lack of proscription that he wants Electric Bastionland to have, but certainly a working example of how treasure hunt can be put together and improvised might have been a useful edition, especially for the new or less experienced Conductor.

Another issue that Electric Bastionland shares with Into the Odd is just how much play can be got out of the roleplaying game. The set-up is simple: the Player Characters are in debt and each having a Failed Career need to find treasure to pay off what they owe. In the process, there is a magical, fantastical cityscape and beyond to explore, interesting NPCs to interact with, interesting other Debtors to interact with, obstacles to be overcome, and more. But what then? What next once the debt is paid off? There is potential in perhaps the Debtors having become part of the city becoming involved in its events and in perhaps exploring further aspects of their Failed Career, but that is beyond the scope of Electric Bastionland. Ultimately, Electric Bastionland is best suited for short campaigns, and since it includes one hundred Failed Careers, each one very different, each one adding to the nature of the city, there are multiple stories to be told and debts to be repaid. Thus, Electric Bastionland is better suited for repeated play rather than long term play.

Physically, it feels odd that a roleplaying book as large as Electric Bastionland is not in colour, the use of one artist—Alec Sorenson—and the judicious use of yellow colour palette as a highlight gives the book a uniform look throughout. Further, the illustrations impart a strong sense of the ordinary and the outré which pervades the city of Bastion and beyond. In terms of look and layout, Electric Bastionland is notably spacious, which when combined with the three-bullet point motif which mostly runs throughout the book, makes everything accessible and easy to find. If there is an issue with Electric Bastionland as a book, it is that towards the end it becomes a little disjointed, a collection of things, and as much as that fits the tone of the roleplaying game, it may not be to everyone’s taste. Otherwise, the book is well written, it is engaging, and it is well presented.

There is an elegance which runs throughout Electric Bastionland: Deeper into the Odd, from the simplicity of its mechanics to the delightfully evocative nature of the Failed Careers which build story into a campaign and across the sprawling metropolis of Bastion. The city itself has a surreal, almost ethereal feel to it that is just waiting for the Conductor to improvise and work with her Debtors to explore and perhaps make a little more real. Ultimately, Electric Bastionland: Deeper into the Odd is a roleplaying game whose every page is begging you to be played and explored, and just for a little while, you really should.

On the Star Frontier

The year is 2260 AD. Two years ago, the United Terran Republic and its allies won the Terran Liberation War, forcing the mighty and ancient Reticulan Empire to sue for peace after twenty-five years of uprisings and war. For some one-hundred-and-seventy-five years, Earth and Humanity had been repressively suborned as the Reticulan client state of House Thiragin, the Earth Federal Administration. Humanity was allowed to expand and establish colonies, but in return had to commit auxiliary troops to serve in the wars against House Thiragin’s rival houses in the Reticulan Empire and other alien species, and was subject to both a tight rein on its economy and Reticulan abductions and bio-technological experimentation. The latter not only resulted in the confirmation and development of psionics among humans, but also the creation of Human-Reticulan Hybrids. Besides having a higher likelihood of possessing psionics, Hybrids were favoured by House Thiragin and dominated the Earth Federal Administration government, the loathed Federal Security Apparatus, and the Exalted Order of Fomalhaut, the latter the Earth Federal Administration’s state sanctioned faith. Ultimately, it would be an unexplained mass abduction of children by the Reticulans that would trigger the Terran Revolution and it would be troops who had served with House Thiragin, known as the Returnees’ Circles, who would form the backbone of the Terran forces in the revolution.

As of 2260 AD, the United Terran Republic is a presidential republic attempting to switch from a wartime to peacetime footing; to expand coreward to explore and establish new colonies and make contact with lost ‘black’ colonies established in secret from the Earth Federal Administration; and maintain vigorous defences against Earth’s former master, the Reticulan Empire to rimward. Although there is trade and contact between the United Terran Republic and the Reticulan Empire, the two states are wary of each other and a state of cold war exists between them. The territories of the United Terran Republic and the Reticulan Empire come together in an area known as the Terran Badlands, along with a third interstellar power, the Ciek Confederation. Located within the Terran Badlands are two client states supported and maintained by the United Terran Republic, the Reticulan Technate and the Ssesslessian Harmony. The first of these is governed by the rebel Technocratic Movement, consisting of Reticulans who supported the Terran revolution, whilst the latter was given to the serpentine Ssesslessians as a new homeworld after theirs had been glassed by the Reticulans.

This is the set up for These Stars Are Ours!, a near future setting published by Stellagama Publishing for use with the Cepheus Engine System Reference Document from Samardan Press which details the core rules for a Classic Era Science Fiction 2D6-Based Open Gaming System. If the Third Imperium of Classic Traveller draws upon the Imperial Science Fiction of the 1950s, then These Stars Are Ours! draws upon another sub genre of the same period—UFOlogy and ‘little green men’. Or rather, ‘little grey men’, for the Reticulans are akin to the Greys of UFO lore and their spaceships and starships are saucers. What these point to are the space opera or  pulp sensibilities of the These Stars Are Ours! setting, and these sensibilities continue with the other alien species to be found across known space. These include the Cicek, aggressive and personal glory-obsessed warm-blooded, humanoid reptiles complete with tails; the snakelike Ssesslessians, a theocratic species with a complex pantheon who served the Reticulans as assassins; and the Zhuzzh, pragmatic, opportunistic, and nomadic insectoids who all but worship technology and who are inveterate tinkerers rather than designers and innovators. There are other races to be found across known space, but these are the main ones to be found in the Terran Badlands. Behind them though are the ‘Precursors’, one or more ancient species who disappeared millennia ago following a devastating war leaving behind mysterious ruins, who may have seeded and manipulated species across known space and who may be the forebears of numerous species.

Now despite the strong nods to both pulp and space opera sensibilities with these alien species, These Stars Are Ours! is not really a pulp or even a space opera setting. This is because it still uses the dry, technical mechanics and terminology of the Cepheus Engine System Reference Document—and thus ultimately of Traveller. So it employs Tech Levels, Maneuvre Drives, Jump Drives, Parsecs, Sectors, Subsectors, the Universal World Profile, and so on.  Looking to the sources of inspiration in the book’s appendices and it is clear that the tone and feel is other than Pulp Sci-Fi—so Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Barry B. Longyear’s Enemy Mine, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy; films such as Alien, Outland, and Serenity; television series like Babylon 5, Dark Skies, and Space: Above and Beyond; and computer games including Mass Effect, UFO: Enemy Unknown, and Dead Space. The Science Fiction of These Stars Are Ours! is much drier than straight space opera, but the inclusion of both the film Serenity and the television series Firefly point towards another influence and that is the Western genre. Much like both of those sources, These Stars Are Ours! is set after a devastating war, during a period of reconstruction, much like the years after the American Civil War. 

Now as much as there are similarities between the aftermath of the American Civil War and the aftermath of the Terran Liberation War—or the Terran Rebellion as the Reticulans call it—there are numerous differences too. The most notable difference is that These Stars Are Ours! presents an obvious and very alien enemy in the form of the Reticulans whilst moving the Human-Reticulan relationship into one of a cold war. Yet it retains the sense of distrust and resentment that arises from a period of occupation and civil war, which in the United Terran Republic—and beyond of These Stars Are Ours! is aimed at Reticulan Hybrids—humans genetically modified as embryos with Reticulan dna—who were seen as collaborators.

In terms of background, These Stars Are Ours! is richly packed. Not just with a history of the Terran Liberation War, but also the state of the United Terran Republic and its politics, military and intelligence agencies—notably CRC-32 which provides the military and government with covert Psionic Intelligence (or PSINT) support and its civilian research counterpart, the Psionic Research Institute (or PRI). It also covers the major corporations in the United Terran Republic, along with religion and spirituality, legal system, and various criminal and terrorist groups. It covers the various alien races in similar detail, from the Reticulans of the Reticulan Empire and the separatist Reticulan Technate to the eight-limbed, two metres tall, crustacean-like Klax who serve as security forces for the Reticulans, whilst of course adding details about their various biologies, psychologies, and societies. Where a particular alien species is available to choose as a player character, notes are given on how to play them. 

As well as Humans, These Stars Are Ours! offers the Cicek, Reticulans, Reticulan Hybrids, Ssesslessians, and Zhuzzh as playable races. The main major difference in the setting to the more familiar Traveller is that Psionics are more freely available and that Psionic Strength is added as a seventh attribute. In terms of Careers, These Stars Are Ours! uses those from Cepheus Engine System Reference Document, but adds another twenty on top. Those available to Humans are the most diverse, including Teran Navy and Terran Police as well as Terran Naval Infantry and Teran Marines. For the most part,  the new Careers reflect the past quarter of a century that Humans have spent at war. If a character is a Psion, then he will serve in CRC-32 or the PRI, depending upon his Psionic Strength. Those of the Alien species are not as diverse, apart from the Reticulans, typically presenting one Career per species—essentially much like Basic Dungeons & Dragons did Race as Class. There are Event tables for all of the new Careers and the character rules also allow for cybernetics and cyborgs.

Creating a character in These Stars Are Ours! is the same as Cepheus Engine System Reference Document or Traveller. A player rolls two six-sided dice for his character’s seven attributes and then chooses a Career for him. Over the course of the Career, the player will add skills and other benefits to the character. A character may have an illustrious career, be discharged following an injury, and so on. The process will require a little flipping back and forth between These Stars Are Ours! and Cepheus Engine System Reference Document, especially if a player decides on a career not in These Stars Are Ours! Either way, the process is a lengthy one.

Our sample character was one of the elite of the Earth Federal Administration who was in training to become a politician and administrator before he discovered the extent of Reticulan activities in Terran space and defected. He was tested for psionic capability and recruited by CRC-32 and constantly trained throughout his career. He was on active military campaign in the last years of the Terran Liberation War, but was captured and held captive until the armistice between the United Terran Republic and Reticulan Empire was signed.

Brigadier Jeffry Ennes
Reticulan Hybrid Age 50
Elite-2 (Rank 3: Manager)/CRC-32-6 (Rank 5: Brigadier)
7B5C8B-D
Admin-2, Advocate-3, Carousing-o, Clairvoyance-1, Comms-1, Computer-1, Gun Combat-1, Jack-of-All-Trades-2, Leadership-1, Liaison-0, Linguistics-0, Medicine-1, Melee Combat-0, Reticulan-1, Telepathy-3, Teleportation-3, Vehicle-0, Zero-G-0
History: Political Infighting, Psionic Training, Strange Science, Advancement, Psionic Training, Battle, Captured.
Benefits: Explorer’s Society, CR 30,000, Pension: CR 12,000
Traits: Bad First Impression (humans only), Engineered (TL13), Notable Dexterity, Weak Strength, Psionic.

In terms of technology, These Stars Are Ours! is roughly Technology Level 11, with military equipment and technology being typically Technology Level 11 and Technology Level 12. This means that starships are commonly capable of Jump-2 (travelling two parsecs in a single jump), fine gravitics is being developed, fusion power is freely available, and so on. Reticulan technology is generally higher, most notably shown in its mastery of gravitics and longer Jump ranges. As befitting the setting, their ships are saucers rather than the sleeker, if not streamlined ships deployed by other races. Some six ships—starships and small craft—are detailed and given deck plans, and where necessary civilian and military versions are both given. They include the Reticulan Abductor and Saucers, the Ssesslessian Infiltrator, Zhuzzh Scavenger, Cicek Raider, and Terran Shaka-class Light Military Transport. The latter is the only Terran ship, which is perhaps a little disappointing, but given the post-war state of the United Terran Republic, these ships are commonly available to purchase and are used as by free traders. Plus the fact that it happens to look not unlike the Firefly class is likely to make it a popular choice with the players (if not their characters). 

Some seventy or so worlds of the region Trailing-Rimward to Terra are described as part of the Terran Borderlands. The latter lies at the point where three interstellar powers meet—the Reticulan Empire, the Cicek Confederation, and the United Terran Republic—and contains the two Terran client-states, the Reticulan Technate and the Ssesslessian Harmony. Each of the worlds comes with its own Universal World Profile and a fairly detailed description, though this can vary in length from one to as many as five paragraphs. Along with the accompanying star map, this gives a good-sized area for the player characters to explore and to support that, These Stars Are Ours! comes with a dozen patrons. These range from supporting a colonisation on a ‘jackpot’ planet and transporting a Reticulan diplomat—hopefully her money will be enough to overcome any lingering antipathy towards the Reticulans, to the exploration of a Precursor site and a hunt for a celebrity’s missing yacht. They represent a good mix of adventure types and make good use of the background to the setting. These Stars Are Ours! is rounded out with a pair of appendices, one a bibliography of inspirations, the other various news entries or Terran News Agency Dispatches, which the Game Master could develop into scenarios of her own.

Physically, These Stars Are Ours! is simply and clearly presented and there is a good index. The few illustrations are decent, the star maps clear, and the deckplans good. As much as the content is interesting and engaging, what lets the setting supplement down is the editing. At worst someone has edited the book, at best no one has, and in places, the unpolished writing in These Stars Are Ours! does sometimes make a cringeworthy read.

If there is anything missing from the These Stars Are Ours! setting it is perhaps a few more starships to individualise the setting some more and certainly some personalities. Apart from the president of the United Terran Republic, no individuals are really mentioned, so the history and setting do feel slightly impersonal. There is no advice for the Game Master, but anyway, she should be able to come up with scenarios and campaign ideas from the background material given in These Stars Are Ours!.

Although using mechanics derived from Traveller, the setting of These Stars Are Ours! is very different to that of Traveller. It is not ‘high’ or Imperial Space Opera, but has a harder, rougher edge to it, drawing from a source that is more pulp Sci-Fi in its sensibilities even as the Cepheus mechanics serve to reduce said pulp tendencies. Nevertheless, These Stars Are Ours! draws deeply upon its source material of UFOlogy and ‘Little Green Men’ and infuses them with a frontier, almost Wild West feel to present a very accessible setting in terms of background and size.

Pulp Sci-Fi Jockeying

Britannia Game Designs Ltd is best known for continuing to publish Chivalry & Sorcery, the roleplaying game of medieval chivalry with an emphasis upon realism, first published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1977. It makes a complete switch in terms of both genre and realism with the recently published Rocket Jocks - Blast Into the Future, a roleplaying game of Pulp Sci-Fi inspired by the Saturday morning serials starring Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers, by the Skylark and Lensman novels of E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith, and so on. Thus this is a roleplaying game of the space opera from the 1930s and 1940s, when men are real men, women are real women, and anthropomorphic tigers from the jungle planet of Venus are real anthropomorphic tigers from the jungle planet of Venus. This is a roleplaying game where a crazy, bearded scientist builds a rocket ship, gets a crew, and together they escape the bonds of Earth to find new civilisations across the Solar System. This is a roleplaying game where mankind’s first interstellar destination is a star system of multiple occupied worlds under the rule of a tyrant. This is a roleplaying game in which the men and women of the Inter-Planetary Patrol keep the space lands free of pirates, investigate mysteries, enforce interstellar law, and more. This is a roleplaying game which can do all three in a future history which takes mankind from the year 1927 to 2148.

Eighteen years in the making, it should be no surprise that being published by Britannia Game Designs Ltd, Rocket Jocks - Blast Into the Future, a roleplaying game of Pulp Sci-Fi uses ‘Essence’, the same rules first seen in 2011’s Chivalry & Sorcery Essence. For a character to do anything, his player simply has to roll under a Success Chance with a twenty-sided die. This target is typically the total of an appropriate attribute plus suitable skill, modified by various penalties or bonuses. Higher rolls are better than lower ones, and a critical result is scored if a player rolls the target number exactly. The penalties—known as ‘Murphy Numbers’—are quite harsh though, running from -1 for even a ‘Very Simple’ Murphy Number up to -24 for a ‘Seemingly Impossible’ Murphy Number. A player can have his character take a Risk by lowering his Success Chance and in return a +1 bonus to the roll. Although this increases the chance of the character failing, it increases—ever so slightly—the chance of a critical being rolled.

Combat uses the same basic mechanic to cover everything from punch-ups and sword fights to Colt .45 pistols and beyond—the beyond including rocket guns, atomic bullets, sliver guns, and ray guns—blasters, stunners, and disruptors. This is covered in ‘Mad Scientist Levels’—as Rocket Jocks’ Tech Levels are known—which run from the Stone Age at MSL 0 to teleportation at MSL 10. Combat takes place in thirty second rounds with characters capable of a number of actions depending upon their Agility and the size of weapon being wielded if a melee weapon and the Rate of Fire if a missile weapon or a gun. Range modifies both the roll to hit and the damage done, with damage also being modified by half the attack roll made by the player as well as half the character’s Strength if the attack was made by a melee weapon or muscle-powered missile weapon. Ray guns have needle settings that use up two shots, but which can pierce armour and wide settings to hit more targets.

Combat is the most complex aspect of Rocket Jocks, primarily because there are a lot of fiddly little technical details as to what a weapon does, how it is reloaded, and so on. Given how relatively simple the Essence mechanics are supposed to be and what Rocket Jocks’ genre is meant to be, it just feels overly complex. Conversely, the rules for starship combat are covered in barely half a page, little more than a series of modified rolls. Sadly this is more coverage than spaceships receive elsewhere in the book, such that there are no stats or deck plans of any kind. Just what kind of a rocket is a jock supposed to ride in this near future?

Rocket Jocks does devote more than a few pages to other types of technology. Not just arms and armour, but also lots of ray-powered gizmos—because, hey, this is a Pulp Sci-Fi future—vehicles of all types (except spaceships), communication devices, sensors, and just some of the best entries from ‘The Megalomaniac’s Catalogue of Cunning Contrivances’, such as the Brainstawm Incorporated Neural Scrambler and The Handee Dandee Nerve-centre-of-evil-o-matic™. Of course, every robot comes with a chance of brain madness. Lastly, there are alien healing devices and there are psionics. The latter because despite the power of rays, the power of the mind is superior to everything else (except, of course, love and a punch to the snoot). Each psionic power gives a psionicist access to a range of abilities, so Heal, Pain Block, Purge Poison, and Sustain for the Autosophy (or self-healing) psionic power, and is bought in levels that are both a character’s skill with the ability and its power. Psionic use is fatiguing, though mysterious alien devices called Sunstones can aid a their use. Overall, the psionics rules are simple enough and suitable whether running a psionics-based campaign or wanting to give them to any villain who has a preference for mind control.

Characters in Rocket Jocks are defined by nine attributes—Strength, Constitution, Agility, Intelligence, Wisdom, Grit, Appearance, Voice, and Conviction. These are rated between six and fifteen, a player halving the roll of a twenty-sided die for each one and adding five to get the final value. A player’s choice of Species, Environment (the equivalent of home world and its gravity), and Background (social class) will provide some modifiers to the attributes as well as some skills. Humans are the baseline species, but others include the Tigermen of Venus, the mobile, intelligent crystals known as Electromen, the merman-like Nitholest, and the ursine June who find buying things weird. These are not the only species given in Rocket Jocks, there being more in the campaign settings. Backgrounds include not just Working Class, Middle Class, and Upper Class, but also Barbarian, Barbarian Aristocracy, and Escaped Slave so that other genre character types can be created by the players or the Game Master. Finally, a player selects a Vocation, such as Athlete, Merchant, Engineer, Solitary Inventor, Journalist, and so on. There are just eighteen of them, but really there are actually sixteen of them, since Deposed Space Tyrant and Unemployed Minion are probably best suited to NPCs. Unless of course, the Game Master is running a decidedly odd game, perhaps in the vein of Doctor Smith in Lost in Space.

Our sample character is Wilf Goadsby, a Gentleman’s Gentleman. From a Yorkshire farming family, he entered service as a lad and has accompanied his master all over the world, including into the Space Patrol. He is unnerved by it all and believes that mankind were not meant to leave the planet. Nevertheless, he is determined to make the best of it and not show his master up, whatever scraps they get into. This means that he is never without the means to make tea, press a suit, sew on a button, or serve cocktails.

Name: Wilf Goadsby
Species: Human
Environment: Normal (Earth)
Social Background: Working Class
Vocation: Soldier

Strength: 08 Constitution: 15 Agility: 13
Intelligence: 09 Wisdom: 15 Grit: 10
Appearance: 09 Voice: 12 Conviction: 14

Skills
Beguiling 2, Brawl 1, Craft (Farming) 1, Craft (Tailoring) 2, Dancing 1, Healing 1, Pilot 1, Rifle 1, Sleight of Hand 1, Sports (Lawn Bowls) 1, Survival (Temperate) 1

As well as advice for the Game Master, Rocket Jocks come with three settings, which can be used singly or as three consecutive periods in a short timeline. These take the player characters out into the Solar System, then interstellar, and finally intergalactic. All three settings come with adventure ideas, new character Species, threats, Vocations, and puns—terrible puns. There is a fair degree of gameable content around which the Game Master can create games. These are very much the most fun parts of Rocket Jocks. 

Unfortunately, Rocket Jocks can be described as physically disappointing at best. Its greyscale look feels outdated and bland, the artwork is adequate if uninspiring, and the layout scrappy and inconsistent. In places, it is so inconsistent that some of the game’s technical information is lost in a game example box such that it is incredibly difficult to find. That said, the real problem is the editing. It is simply not of a professional standard, which is disappointing given the fact that there has been an eighteen year wait for this roleplaying and really, a few weeks’ delay whilst it was in the hands of a professional editor would have made a great deal of difference.

Another problem Rocket Jocks is its untimely release. Eighteen years ago, this would have been an unusual release. Plus, it would have just been in time for release of Rocketmen, WizKids’ constructible strategy game produced in 2005. In 2019 though, Pinnacle Entertainment Group has released the Flash Gordon roleplaying game for use with Savage Worlds and Modiphius Entertainment will soon release John Carter of Mars - Adventures on The Dying World of Barsoom, so when it comes to Pulp Sci-Fi, a gamer is going to have more choice and more colourful choice.  

Rocket Jocks is designed to emulate Pulp Sci-Fi, a fairly broad, muscular genre, and it a great many ways it does this. Whether it is the discussion about ‘Ray’ technology, weapons such as ray guns and atomic bullets, the inclusion of the Deposed Tyrant and the Unemployed Minion as Vocations, the nicely done three-in-one settings, and the tone of the writing, Rocket Jocks actually has quite a bit to like. It is also obvious how fond the author is of the genre. Yet, the rules feel overly technical in places, as if an adherent sense of realism had wandered in from another roleplaying game, hampering the author’s pulp intentions. And that despite the fact that spaceships are all but ignored. The real problem though, is the physical layout and editing, which makes the book awkward to both read and use.

There are some good ideas and some fun content within the pages of Rocket Jocks, but without spaceships it feels unfinished and incomplete. Of course, a Game Master can get around such omissions as Rocket Jocks is hindered by, just as she will have to get around the disappointing layout and editing. Rocket Jocks - Blast Into the Future is not a terrible game, but it is one with problems and that is an issue in a hobby that expects better.