Every so often I’ll indulge in what I call a “mythos delve”. This is where I’ll just dive wholeheartedly into whatever transmedia empire has transfixed my attention. A few years ago it was Star Wars. Before that Heavy Gear, The Matrix (this one was easier), Star Trek, and so forth. (This exploration of multi-faceted fictional milieus is undoubtedly part of what I find appealing about RPGs.)

Most recently, the Halo franchise has captured my attention. A little less than a decade ago, I played both Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, but then the franchise jumped to the Xbox 360 and I didn’t. That recently changed, however, and I started playing my way through the older games as prep for the newer ones. In the interim, I had also acquired the first three Halo novels from the $1 racks at Half-Price Books, which brings us here.

HALO: COMBAT EVOLVED (Bungie Studios): I’m not going to attempt anything even remotely resembling a full review of the Halo video games. (Largely because that would be redundant and pointless.) But what I will say is this: The original video game was basically Ringworld + Starship Troopers + zombies. That’s a pretty awesome premise.

HALO – THE FALL OF REACH (Eric Nylund): I bring that up primarily because the premise for The Fall of Reach can basically be summed up as Ender’s Game + Starship Troopers.

This proves to be an effective and entertaining variation on the themes of the original game. By shifting the underlying tropes of the story, Nylund manages to weave a tale which is true to the original without merely rehashing its content. (This can be a very fine line for tie-in fiction to tread: If you simply retread the original the result is repetitive and dull — like looking at something that’s been xeroxed too many times. If you chart your own course, on the other hand, you can end up violating the reader’s sense of how the fictional universe should work.)

Unfortunately, the training sequences lack the cleverness and unique insight which make Ender’s Game or The Hunger Games into effective young adult literature by bringing the reader along on the protagonist’s journey of discovery.The military ops are handled with more cleverness and detail, but end up being just a trifle too disjointed: They’re effective vignettes, but don’t feel like a cohesive narrative building towards some greater climax.

With that being said, if you’re a fan of Halo — or just a fan of military SF — this is a book worth checking out. It’s a fun read that kept me turning the pages.

(As a tangential note, I was amused when this book made me aware — for the very first time — that the SPARTANs are supposed to be super-fast. One of the things I had always kind of liked about Halo was the more slow / more-realistic pace it had compared to other shooters of the time. Discovering that it was actually supposed to be representing superhuman speed only served to drive home how completely inferior console controls are for first-person shooters.)

HALO – THE FLOOD (William C. Dietz): The back cover pitch for The Flood is that it will depict the events from the first video game from alternative points of view. That actually sounded really interesting to me: One of the things I really enjoyed about Halo: Combat Evolved was the implication that there was a wider, guerrilla-style war being fought across the surface of Halo as both the UNSC and Covenant forces explored this strange and alien world. Between the armed conflict, the mega-relics of the Forerunners, and the emerging threat of the Flood itself, there’s a ton of potential for developing original material while capitalizing on the video game narrative itself by showing the Master Chief’s journey (and its impact) through the eyes of others.

Unfortunately, the back cover pitch was lying to me. 80% of the book is just a novelization of the game (which is precisely as interesting as you would imagine a faithful novelization of a first-person shooter would be). The rest is just bland cliche starring a rotating cast of dimwitted stereotypes who have been hit over the head a few too many times with the Stupid Protagonist Hammer.

This is a book you should definitely skip.

HALO – FIRST STRIKE (Eric Nylund): One of the most fantastic and fascinating aspects of media consumption is the act of closure. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud refers to this phenomenon as “blood in the gutters”, demonstrating how the space between one panel and the next forces the reader to perform a creative act: “Here, in the limbo of the gutter, the human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea.” He uses the example of showing a serial killer raising an axe in one panel and then “hearing” the victim scream off-panel in the next. “I may have drawn a raised axe in this example, but I’m not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why. That, dear reader, was your special crime, each of you committing it in your own style.” (The parallel to a horror film in which a victim is killed off-screen is obvious.)

But this phenomenon, in my opinion, is not limited to small events. And one of the dangers of tie-in fiction which attempts to “fill in the gaps” between one story and the next is that it can very easily start screwing with the closure which the viewer has already provided. This creates a natural friction and resistance from the reader as the foreign, incompatible material tries to “wipe out” their own creative response.

This is a problem which First Strike — which seeks to fill in the gap between Halo and Halo 2 — runs into headlong. And it’s severely exacerbated by some significantly inaccurate handling of continuity from Halo 2 (which may be at least partially the result of Nylund writing the book before the game was finished).

With that being said, Nylund succeeds once again at giving us an entertaining pulp romp through the Halo universe. The military ops are once again clever and varied, and Nylund also succeeds at bringing to life a cast of supporting characters that give the book depth and significance.

GRADES:

HALO – THE FALL OF REACH: C+
HALO – THE FLOOD: F
HALO – FIRST STRIKE: C-

Eric Nylund / William C. Dietz / Eric Nylund
Published: 2001 / 2003 / 2003
Publisher: Del Rey
Cover Price: $6.99 / $6.99 / $6.99
ISBN: 0345451325 / 0345459210 / 0345467817
Buy Now!

Since writing my review of D&D Gamma World, I have GMed two more sessions of the game while picking up a couple new players. On the basis of these sessions, I offer this random assortment of final thoughts on the game:

(1) The “incompleteness problem” (where powers will reference and use rules which are present in 4th Edition but have been removed from Gamma World) is really huge and glaring. It proved to be far more troublesome than I had anticipated. If I didn’t have previous experience with D&D, I would have quickly found Gamma World completely unplayable.

(2) Encounters in 4th Edition just take too damn long. When I put together The Egyptian Incursion I thought it would be a fun little one-shot: 6-7 modest combat encounters, a light scaffolding of investigative work, and some evocative Egyptian pulp mythos. Instead it took three sessions, with even the simplest combat encounters taking 70-90 minutes to resolve.

(Direct contrast: On Friday, I ran Gamma World. One of the encounters was a big, solo bruiser vs. 5 PCs. It took 70 minutes. On Saturday, I ran my Ptolus campaign. One of the encounters was a big, solo bruiser vs. 6 PCs. It took 15 minutes.)

(3) I made a strategic error in handling the final encounters of the adventure. I momentarily forgot the system I was using and made the mistake of playing the game world: I allowed the surviving monsters outside the tomb to flee into the tomb and seek reinforcements. This completely unbalanced the precarious encounter balance of 4th Edition and resulted in a near-TPK (with only two PCs managing to flee the scene in a badly damaged pickup truck).

(4) This is one of the reasons I really dislike the My Precious Encounters(TM) school of adventure design. Balancing every single encounter on a razor’s edge can make the game very unforgiving. And Gamma World is even less forgiving due to the lack of any characters fitting into the role of Leader and a complete paucity of healing. There’s simply no elasticity in the system for dealing with situations that turn pear-shaped.

(Nor can you simply design encounters using a different methodology, because Gamma World hard-codes My Precious Encounters(TM) into the system.)

FINAL ASSESSMENT: I had a couple of players at my table who had only previously played in my OD&D open table. They preferred the system to OD&D, which is probably a fair assessment. (I noted particularly positive responses to having a skill system, which I hadn’t anticipated but which makes perfect sense in retrospect.)

The character creation system was universally beloved. There was a lot of talk about taking the character creation system and grafting it onto some other system: Legends & Labyrinths, OD&D, Apocalypse World. (I might also take a look at something like Mutant Future or Encounter Critical.) This is something that I think is quite likely to happen in the future. I’m also strongly tempted to start goofing around with how to generally cannibalize the whole “randomly determine two origins and then combine them” thing for all kinds of character generation. It’s very, very effective and evocative as an improv seed.

But unless my perception radically shifts in wrapping up the “Famine in Far-Go” adventure I’m playing in with another group, D&D Gamma World is going to get shelved.

Tagline: “Chess will never be the same!” This innocent looking pack of 80 cards completely alters the game of Chess – from a static strategic puzzle to a dynamic tactical conflict. Moody and evocative art by Rogerio Vilela. Translated from the original French.

I actually have quite vivid memories of writing this review. It was the first time I really became aware of how thoroughly I’d been bitten by the reviewing “bug” because I started thinking about how I would write the review of the game as I was playing the game.

The tagline of Knightmare Chess is, “Move a piece. Play a Card. Chess will never be the same…”

There you have the whole game. In the elegant box in which Knightmare Chess comes you will find 80 cards – each of which subtly alters the rules of Chess in different ways. These cards let you do all the things you always wish you could do in a tight moment during a game of Chess – resurrect a piece which has been captured, move a piece out of the way, take not one piece, but many on a single move. On each of your turns you can play one card.

When first approaching this game I was both anticipatory and doubtful. Anticipatory because it sounded like a fun thing to do once or twice. Doubtful because chess is an ancient game – its grace and its beauty come from the fact that its rules are carefully balanced, all the pieces are known, and the challenge comes from manipulating a known set of variables in a strategic way to overcome your opponent.

The premise of Knightmare Chess, while seemingly innocuous, actually radically alters the very basic appeal and structure of the game. The rules are no longer balanced, they are in constant flux. The pieces are not known, they can be altered and rearranged. There is no known set of variables, the variables are unknown and changing.

At first glance, therefore, Knightmare Chess has the potential to completely screw the only appeal chess has – its strategic component.

After playing the game awhile I realized I was wrong. Knightmare Chess transformed Chess into a radically different game, but it did not destroy it. Where Chess is a static strategic puzzle (with its elements known and the possible interactions between pieces completely proscribed), Knightmare Chess is a dynamic tactical conflict. Just because the rules are always changing, doesn’t mean that Knightmare Chess is an inferior game. It does mean, however, that it appeals to an entirely different aesthetic than Chess.

Chess has often been described as a wargame. Indeed, in some ways it is – if you are willing to accept a certain degree of abstraction. Nonetheless, it is an odd one – one in which you have only a certain number of troops, in which both sides are equal, and in which everything is ultimately predictable. If Knightmare Chess is similarly a wargame carried to an extreme degree of abstraction, then it presents a model of modern warfare – where the sides can quickly become unequal, where reinforcement is conceivable, and where combat is anything but predictable.

Knightmare Chess is a fascinating game. If you are a chess player, approach it with an open mind. If you have no taste for chess, then it is entirely conceivable that this game will appeal to you nonetheless.

It should be noted that I am using a copy of the Second Edition for the purposes of this review. The differences between the first and second editions are extremely subtle and largely inconsequential to the overall gameplay and assessment of this game. For a list of differences you can check Steve Jackson Game’s website.

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Author: Pierre Clequin and Bruno Faidutti
Company/Publisher: Steve Jackson Games
Cost: $14.95
Page count: n/a
ISBN: 1-55634-319-1
Originally Posted: 1998/05/30

Something I didn’t delve into with my review of D&D Gamma World yesterday was the sample scenario that’s included in the back of the rulebook.

The brief advice given in the rulebook on creating adventures tells the GM to prep a railroad. The sample adventure, unsurprisingly, delivers just such a railroad. (It even goes out of its way to warn the GM not to create any significant diversions from “the main adventure”.)

This, of course, is fairly predictable. But beyond the railroad, this sample adventure — “Steading of the Iron King” — is one of the most bizarre scenarios I’ve ever read. It consists of seven combat encounters and virtually no connective tissue whatsover.

Let me unpack that statement a bit: We’ve certainly come to expect WotC’s modules to be completely dominated by combat encounters. But what makes this particular scenario remarkable is that it gives almost no indication of how the GM is supposed to transition the PCs from one combat encounter to the next.

The first three encounters are easy enough: Every day for the past month, a robot has come down out of the hills, fired a single rocket at the town’s wall, and then blown up. The PCs follow its trail up into the hills and find a tower full of bad guys. They attack the tower (Encounter S1), go through the door and fight some more bad guys (Encounter S2), and then go down a flight of stairs and fight some more bad guys (Encounter S3).

But this is where the adventure gets weird for me. Because they have now entered the “Steading Warrens”:

After the adventurers enter the steading and make their way to the installation of the Ancients beneath it, the encounters between poster maps are not physically connected. They pass through dozens of interconnected chambers, descend stone or metal stairs, and occasionally find straight connecting passages. These corridors, tunnels, and chambers aren’t shown on the battlemaps.

And that’s pretty much all you get.

As an experienced GM, of course, it’s fairly trivial to handle this sort of thing on-the-fly. A new GM, unfortunately, would probably be left floundering. (Which is unfortunate, because in many other ways the Gamma World boxed set would be an ideal introductory product.)

One can, of course, also comment on the eye-opening revelation that WotC thought an adventure consisting of one thin hook, seven combat encounters, and nothing else represents a good evening of gaming.

But the reason this scenario particularly caught my eye is that the almost complete absence of connective tissue actually calls a great deal of attention to the fact that we so rarely do pay attention to the way in which content is connected in an RPG scenario.

Consider, if you will, all the ways in which you could functionally connect these encounters.

It’s a big, underground complex, so we could very easily whip this up as a traditional dungeon crawl: Put the various encounters on a map, draw some corridors connecting them, and let the PCs explore room-by-room and intersection-by-intersection.

Option 2: We could use skill challenges to navigate the complex. You could either have a fresh skill challenge between each encounter, or maybe successful checks on an over-arching skill challenge would bring you to each encounter in turn.

As another option, the GM could simply narrate the transitions (making a point of describing the dankness of certain tunnels, the strange humming heard elsewhere, and so forth).

How else could you structure and/or connect a sequence of encounters?

By this I mean, what’s the actual interaction — mechanical or otherwise — which happens at the table which moves you from one combat encounter to the next.

And this is, of course, the simpler version of this question. Remove the assumption that you’re moving from combat encounter to combat encounter, and suddenly we’d also have to take into consideration how each “chunk” of content is structured… and how are we deciding what an appropriate “chunk” is?

This is an area that I don’t feel gamers actually give much conscious thought to: We’ve learned a few forms subliminally and by chance, but because it’s largely an invisible bias we rarely consider whether there might be a better way of structuring scenarios.

Tagline: The Heavy Gear universe is perhaps the best in all of role-playing and tactical gaming – practically unmatched in depth, detail, texture, and life. This book is the key which opens this magical treasure trove of adventure.

My first review on RPGNet was of a Heavy Gear sourcebook and I would go on to post more reviews of Heavy Gear sourcebooks than of any other RPG. This is largely because I was more enthused about Heavy Gear than any other RPG of the time: I reviewed what I read; I read what I liked. This is one of the advantages of being an amateur reviewer: The professionals only get to review some of what they read and rarely get to read what they like.

When you delve into science fiction or fantasy you will often find yourself encountering worlds either entirely separated from our own or at least placed so far in the future that the extrapolations from our current time have rendered them almost wholly different from what we know. When you encounter these worlds you will find that they often break down into two broad categories – those worlds which might actually exist and those worlds which have clearly been created merely to suit the whims of the author’s story and couldn’t possibly exist.

In role-playing we have all encountered the latter many, many times. (“If this dungeon is so close to the town why hasn’t it been looted over the centuries?” “Because the locals are all frightened by the monsters.” “Yeah, speaking of those monsters – what are they eating down there?” “Look, do you want to play or don’t you?”) Fortunately those of the former have grown increasingly frequent in our hobby (although, frustratingly, we are often prohibited from playing certain characters by the rules of the game).

Sometimes, however, you come across a real jewel of a world. A world so intricately detailed, so deeply described, and so excellently constructed that you realize that not only can you tell “science fiction stories” in this setting, but any story in this setting. Terra Nova – the world of the Heavy Gear game – is such a world.

THE WORLD OF TERRA NOVA

For more details on the history of humanity (which is presented in great detail within this volume) in the 4000 years which separate its time and our own see my review of the second edition of Heavy Gear elsewhere on RPGNet the Alexandrian.

Terra Nova is a world divided into two lush polar regions by the great deserts referred to collectively as the Badlands around its equator. Following a period of chaos in Terra Nova’s past the two polar regions coalesced into a series of leagues. Those leagues eventually allied with themselves to form the two great polar alliances – the Allied Southern Territories (AST) and the Confederated Northern City-States (CNCS). The Badlands have a few centers of power in the forms of city-states, but are largely settled only by isolated villages which are focused around “oasis towers”. Because the Badlands generally lacks the political power of the two polar alliances, it is easily exploited as a “neutral” battleground between the two. A little over a decade ago all of Terra Nova came together in order to beat back aggressive conquerors from Earth who had returned to reclaim their colony.

To begin in the south, the AST is composed of four leagues – the Southern Republic, the Humanist Alliance, the Mekong Dominion, and the Eastern Sun Emirates. The Humanist Alliance was, in fact, the first league to form on Terra Nova. Based on the teaching of Yuri Gropius it is a realized utopia similar to the teachings of the ancient Greek philosophers (most notably Plato) – the only price of this utopian existence is freedom. The Mekong Dominion is a society based entirely upon the corporate structure. It is the economic and production center of the entire South. The Eastern Sun Emirates is a feudal society which formed around the power garnered from the distribution of supplies from the space freighter the Eastern Sun during the time of chaos which plagued Terra Nova centuries ago. Finally, the Southern Republic is supposedly a free democratic society – in truth the people have bargained away their power as voters in exchange for a comfortable and luxurious lifestyle. Further, the Southern Republic rules the AST – having been responsible for its formation in their wars of aggression.

In the North the CNCS is composed of three leagues – the Northern Lights Confederacy, the United Mercantile Federation, and the Western Frontier Protectorates. Similar to the Mekong Dominion the UMF is focused upon production. Unlike the Dominion, however, the UMF focuses more heavily upon the work ethic than upon the philosophy of “business is war”. The society of the WFP is focused upon its military forces. Like the society detailed by Heinlein in Starship Troopers (the book, not the movie) only citizens who have served in the military for a certain amount of time are allowed the right to vote – not out of fascist beliefs, but out of the belief that only those who are willing to die for their country should be allowed to control the destiny of their country. The NLC is a democratic society which is increasingly dominated by religious fundamentalism – although it, like the Southern Republic, is both the most powerful league of its alliance and has fought wars of aggression in the past it did not – like the Republic – force the formation of its league, and does not rule it with an iron glove.

There are two important city-states in the Badlands – Peace River and Port Arthur.  Peace River is ruled by a company known as Paxton Arms, and most of its citizens are employees of the corporation. Peace River and Paxton Arms have recently come into conflict with Port Arthur (a city-state established by Earth troops abandoned after the recent invasion, but which has since become a haven for Badlanders in need) because both city-states see it as their duty to protect the Badlands – and have different ideologies about how that protection is to take place.

This, in brief, is a broad picture of the world. Unfortunately I cannot go into the details of this world – unfortunate because it is in the details that this world truly shines. Every league (and the Badlands as a whole)  is a hotbed of activity. Besides the main conflict between the CNCS and AST (and, indirectly, the NLC and Southern Republic), there are numerous other conflicts at large. The Badlands are torn apart by the Badlands Revolutionary Front, the Saragossa People’s Front for Independence fights the oppressive government of the Southern Republic, revolutions dot the Eastern Sun Emirates, the Humanist Alliance is attempting to secretly prepare for a break from the Southern Republic, and the entire globe is plummeting towards war.

Beyond simple conflict, this world is exquisitely detailed. Not only do you learn of the “big picture”, but you learn the little details which can be so important while roleplaying. What foods do people eat in a given location? What drives the local economy? What do people wear? What music is popular right now?

You will be hard put to find a campaign setting – particularly a science fiction campaign setting – on the market today that allows you so many options and provides you with so much detail.

CONCLUSION

Although not a direct part of this product, it is important to remember that the story of Terra Nova is not only evolving – it is evolving in a very deliberate, easy to understand, easy to follow method that is alien to nearly every other game system I have ever encountered. (See my review of the second edition rulebook for more details on this.)

As a result in buying into this world you not only buy into a world of incredible depth and detail – but a world where that depth and detail is evolving and progression.

In short, not only should you buy Life on Terra Nova because of the incredible strength of the product itself, but due to the incredible strength of supplementary products which the purchase of this book will open up for you.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Gene Marcil and others
Company/Publisher: Dream Pod 9
Cost: $19.95
Page count: 160
ISBN: 1-896-776-00-0
Originally Posted: 1998/05/16