The artwork is gorgeous. I would love to see the game that goes with the art. Mindjammer is not that game. Mindjammer is described as transhuman space opera, based on Fate Core. However, the actual text of the game materials is aggressively hostile to this conception.
The designer consistently describes transhumanism as a threat, one that the player characters are assumed to be actively fighting against. This is quite explicit in the tie-in novel, written by the primary game designer. The core book, and most of the supplements, like the novel, assume the characters are agents of the technologically advanced Commonality, working to extend its influence through a frontier of lost colonies. However, the source book for the Core Worlds, Earth and the other worlds of the Commonality, describes its inhabitants with the deeply problematic term, "decadent", because of its advanced technology and its limited tolerance of transhuman technologies. So the characters are supposed to be spreading the political influence of the Commonality, while stopping the spread of its dangerous technology.
The game mechanics are nominally based on Fate Core, a narrative game system. However, it goes so far in battering Fate mechanics into the mold of a "crunchy" game system that it is no longer recognizable as Fate. In particular, Mindjammer abuses the concept of Aspects, arguably the central concept of Fate. Instead of being a freeform description of a character that has narrative weight, Mindjammer restricts Aspects to a fixed list of traits with fixed modifiers.
I'd be tempted to say that Mindjammer tries to force Fate into the shape of Traveller, but it also lacks Traveller's elegant simplicity. And beyond that, the now classic game Diaspora does a masterful job of hybridizing Traveller and Fate mechanics.
I'm ultimately puzzled why the game designer even tried to create this game, when every line of text makes it clear they hate transhuman science fiction and every game mechanic makes it clear they hate Fate Core. I can only imagine they were under some sort of contractual obligation.
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