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Mindjammer - The Roleplaying Game
Publisher: Mindjammer Press
by Brian [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 11/11/2023 10:51:17

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.



Rating:
[1 of 5 Stars!]
Mindjammer - The Roleplaying Game
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50 Planetary Stations
Publisher: Fishwife Games
by Brian V. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 02/08/2021 16:02:13

The examples rolls are, to be fair, genuinely typical of what you get from this resource. But, that's all you get: a list of fifty single-line descriptions of small outposts, in a single page. There's not even a bit of flavor text to flesh out the descriptive tags. It's fairly obvious that these lines of text were randomly generated from an algorithm, with a table of descriptive tags. You might be able to work out the algorithm and the table from the fifty examples given, but it's not provided directly, as you might expect.

I'm generally in favor of inexpensive tools to generate content on the fly. But this feels like the creator was deliberately ratcheting down to the bare minimum they thought they could provide in a product. The best feature is the cover art. That there's a second volume, with the same cover art, makes it feel almost like this is a deliberate insult. It could have as easily been a thousand stations as fifty. Or better, it could have been the algorithm and the table, a bit of flavor text, and a few examples.

It's hard to say that something that costs less than a dollar isn't worth the price, but I think that's the case here.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
50 Planetary Stations
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Piracy and Privateering
Publisher: Stellagama Publishing
by Brian V. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 06/22/2019 12:55:15

This is good stuff, written with care to be useful for a broad range of space opera role-playing games.

Pirates are adventurers, by definition, and space opera often includes space pirates, so I've wondered why there isn't more material that directly addresses space piracy as the premise for a campaign. This starts to fill that gap.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Piracy and Privateering
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