Mars Colony

This new indie is a small but beautiful book illustrated with colour photographs from NASA's missions to Mars. The game is a bit unusual, designed for two players. One of the player takes the role of someone sent to resolve the problems at the Mars Colony and the other effectively seems to play the GM.

One thing I found interesting about the book is that this would have been a seen as a scenario once. The addition of a specific rules system for the scenario doesn't really change that either.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Troika!

Most OSR community is based around Dungeons and Dragons, however like a lot of Europeans my first encounter with roleplaying or fantasy gaming was not through D&D itself by through reflections of those who had read a copy or heard of the idea and created their own. Like a lot of early British roleplayers my nostalgia is really for Fighting Fantasy, a formative experience that was notable different in tone from American fantasy while being composed of much the same tropes. Troika! is an attempt to create a retro-clone that brings together Warhammer and Fighting Fantasy into a simple rules system that bakes weird fantasy into core of character creation in the same way that the Ratcatcher career did in the 1980s. The basic mechanics are pretty simple. Mainly 2d6 are used and the basic characteristics are Skill , Stamina and Luck . If you are attempting something against the environment you try to roll under your Skill on two dice, if contested you roll and add, aiming for t...
Read more

Ruma: Dawn of Empire

Ruma is a Powered by the Apocalypse game about a Roman Empire that is facing off against supernatural threats summoned by it barbarian neighbours. Players take the role of characters who are confronting those threats. The rules introduce Latin-flavoured playbooks that reflect various roles in historical Roman society and within the Legions. Irritatingly Ruma introduces some alternative names and spellings for the various countries and peoples of its world. It tries to put some fictional distance from history but not in a way that adds to the historical roots. While flawed as a narrative campaign Hunters of Alexandria did a better job of blending the historic and supernatural fantasy of its world. Apocalypse World, as a ruleset, seems appropriate to the environment, the Empire is powerful but besieged by threats that seek to overthrow it. Characters will win big eventually but the costs will be high. Ruma's fundamental problem for me is that I'm not sure why this isn...
Read more

Cabal

Cabal is a game about sinister conspiracies trying to seize power through a corporation or organisation. Mechanically it feels weirdly like a game where a group of players share a single Runequest character and try and make them a Rune Lord. The company has various attributes that are rated on 0 to 100 scale with points being spent at generation time and then the players going on missions to try and raise the value of the attributes by between 1 and 5. The target value is also used to set the difficulty and provide the mechanisms of opposition. The game uses a GM to manage the opposition and provide the colour to the missions. Something that feels like a design cop-out. The game does make some interesting use of the fact that the players take on the role of individuals in the company and therefore you get to play very different characters and the risk of them dying is lessened by the meta-reward to the organisation. However it also has an experience mechanism that makes chara...
Read more