What Do I Know?

Language and communication are very important. When a term gets used, sometimes that term is very broad, and has different connotations to different segments of the audience. For example, the term “space opera” has been used for Flash Gordon and Star Wars, and in that context, it means a broad action epic that involves space travel and alien worlds, but revolves around personal action. Sword fights, dogfights, and gun battles abound.

Space opera can also mean that the themes of alien worlds, war, and epic storylines are less focused on individual heroes taking on hordes of bad guys individually, and more about that individual influencing large and important events.

The inspirations for Andromedaare mentioned as the Lensmen series, the Foundation books and Dune, among others. Because inspiration can get glossed over at the beginning of a book, it’s important to put this out there up front in the review. As I was reading the first third or so of the book, I was wondering why something like Battlestar Galactica wasn’t mentioned as an inspiration, having very similar themes. This becomes apparent as you read further into the book, because your characters aren’t acting on a scale of second or minutes, and they aren’t acting as individual heroes. This is a game about turns that represent weeks, months or years, being acted out by characters that are members of factions.

The book has consistent formatting with other Fate Worlds of Adventure books, which is to say that it looks very much like the Fate Core book, with clean, professional formatting and little artistic flourish common to some RPGs today. This makes the pages very readable, and leaves the tonal aspects of the game to the prose and to the accompanying artwork. The artwork is a little odd. It features the same range of characters in different situations, but the details shift from almost cartoonish in some instances to fairly detailed and more comic book-like in other frames. The more cartoonish illustrations, especially, don’t fit the overall tone of the book. The PDF is 60 pages in length, which includes individual character sheets, an Ark tracking sheet, and an alien culture character sheet at the end of the book.

This section includes the inspirations for the book, and explains how and why the book approaches some items the way it does. The setting introduces four main factions to which the player characters will belong, and introduces the idea that the campaign will take place on a world ship travelling from the Milky Way to the Andromeda galaxy, after disaster befell all of human civilization back home. Additionally, the assumed play style of the game is to use the Deck of Fate—a deck of cards with numerical outcomes, phrases, and symbols on them—rather than Fate/Fudge dice. This is in part to allow the generation of secondary points beyond the regular Fate points. These points are used to advance agendas and trigger certain special abilities in play.

I’m going to say this up front, and I apologize if I’m off base. I think it was a mistake to try to sprinkle Esperanto into the text to make things feel more “futuristic.” There are already a lot of moving parts to this variation of Fate, and adding in some words that, to a native English speaker, might have some awkward structure or pronunciation, just adds to the mental energy needed to process the text.

This isn’t any kind of statement on the validity of any language. To me, it just doesn’t add more than it complicates. In settings that are tied to a real world culture that sprinkle in words from those cultures, it feels more natural to me. Knowing that Esperanto is a constructed language that is only being used to feel “futuristic,” I can’t get comfortable with it. 

This section of the book has a pretty robust section on creating alien species that the ark will encounter. This will determine their demeanor towards the humans, the specific stats of the alien culture, how many points they have in their various pools, and what their name and appearance is.

You can make up your own results based on these charts, or just pick and choose. You can make up cultures on the fly and improvise how they function at the table with the charts as a guideline. The text calls out that these are all valid ways of utilizing the information presented.

I really like the variety of alien aspects presented in this section, and it’s actually kind of handy for coming up with random alien cultures for other games. You can generate points for the alien’s various pools, and modify their stats based on the chart options. What kind of stats do you have in this game, and what do the pools do? The text hasn’t done much to explain this yet.

This section includes information on how to determine who is on the ship, what they are carrying, if they arrived in the beginning, middle, or towards the end of the migration to this galaxy, and what shape the ship is in physically and culturally. This informs your creation of characters in the next section.

This section explains how to create your individual character. This includes picking a faction (mentioned above at the beginning of the game), then picking aspects based on your authority on the ship, your agenda, and free aspects that may relate to your history or relationships with other characters or factions. There are also some sample names given in this section.

This is also where we learn that in this version of Fate, you don’t get stress boxes. Everything goes right to your consequences, unless you spend points from your pools to negate stress on a one for one basis. In general, there is a pool that represents more social resources, and one that represents more physical resources. When you successfully complete an action, you get extra points to assign to these pools.

The skills that you use in this game are limited to Physique, Intellect, Presence, and Empathy, and the example stunts resemble the structure that stunts take in FateAccelerated, which makes this game’s resolution a hybrid of special rules, Fate Core, and Fate Accelerated.

There are some stunts in the previous section that characters can spend refresh on, but this section also presents the option of spending refresh on Extras, in the form of special actions that your character can take, based on their factions, or the ability to have companions that can operate either on the personal scale or larger. While it’s been mentioned one or two places, the exact scales and what it means to act on different scales still hasn’t been explained yet.

Characters, factions, and alien species will have agendas, and those agendas have multiple tiers for the amount of time they would take to accomplish. For example, to advance an agenda one step further towards a goal that can be completed in a single lifetime, you are spending two points out of a relevant pool. To advance something that might take multiple generations, you spend four, and so on.

Agendas and the pools that feed into them get a little complicated. When you draw a card, the symbols on the card tell you what kind of points you get, and if you don’t spend them to advance an agenda, then they convert into the broader pool of similar points that you can use to do things like trigger feats or negate stress from social or physical situations.

Advancing an agenda causes you to write an aspect that represents an incremental goal towards the next step in that agenda. This is also the way that you track advancement in this version of Fate, as completing aspects of your agendas, and the scale of the agenda, triggers your ability to change aspects, rewrite consequences, and other advancements that other versions of Fateoften assign to the completion of individual sessions, story arcs, or important milestones.

This section explains a lot of what was previously hinted at. You don’t take turns that last only a few seconds or a few minutes. The GM frames the general situation that is going on and determines the time scale involved. It could be hours, days, weeks, or years. Once the situation is established, characters explain how their characters are broadly affecting this situation and act on those plans.

That means that if an alien threat is selling mind-numbing drugs to your population to get their hooks into them, you aren’t acting against an individual pusher, you are describing the actions you are taking in the next few days to determine how devastating the drug is, where the pushers are located, and possibly concocting a chemical blocker to eliminate the effects of the drug on the population. You don’t fight off a raiding party of hostile aliens, you plan a defense of the ark against either fast raiders, that can be driven off in an hour or so, or dig in to avoid or resist a large assault fleet.

The individual factions are ranked, and player actions are always taken in the order of ranking, with the the “space admirals” acting first, then the social/religious faction, engineers, alien threats, and finally, the common populace. I understand the logic of this, but there is something that also kind of bothers me about this structure as well. I wish there had been a few mechanical supports for juggling this structure around. Ironically, for the added complexity added elsewhere, this is where the setting chooses to keep things simple.

There is advice for the GM to stage a scene aggressively, but broadly, and to use the descriptions on the card from the deck to flavor what happens at the beginning. Players can also bid on the ability to draw the card and chose the descriptor, starting with the highest ranking PCs. Given how broadly drawn some of those phrases are, I’m not sold on how useful this aspect of scene framing is, and player bidding seems like a lot of effort for what amounts to picking a scene aspect. It almost feels like an attempt to add one more function of the deck to the game to justify using that as a resolution method.

After a scene, if the scene represents at least “weeks” in game terms, players roll for aging on the characters, and the GM will roll for wear and tear on the ark and cultural changes to the factions.

I understand that part of the point of these rules is to reinforce a generational time frame, but it also feels like a lot of rolling, especially if you frame several “week” scale scenes in a row. While the check against the “Weeks” scale of time is +0, it still feels odd to have aging potentially kick in at that time period. Players are instructed that if they have an aspect related to health or longevity they can invoke it to ignore making this roll, but honestly, this is one of those things that I feel might have been better just to tell the GM “if you act on this scale, compel a setting aspect to advance the character’s age.” 

There are scale tables in this section for general scale and the clock, which helps to put some of the previous rules into context. Having a larger scale companion, for example, lets you use them at that scale without the bonus defense that the alien threat or circumstance may have due to its scale.

This may just be me, and if it is, I really want to read about it from anyone with a different perspective. That said, the order of information presented is a little frustrating to me. I understand that the information is presented in the order that you would generate the setting, from the top down, and that you need that information to inform the characters that you create. However, presenting the information in that order does not clearly convey what a game session is going to look like, and these rules aren’t just a checklist of what you need to do when you start a game, they are teaching you about what kind of game this is and how it is intended to be played.

I’m going to resist going too far down this path, but I have noticed this tendency in several Fateproducts, where the presentation of the big ideas comes way before a clear communication of what the game is about, and what the PCs will be doing. 

I’m not sure that the pools are as streamlined as they could be. As it stands, it feels like you have two types of points that are generated, and if they aren’t used right away, they then convert to what amounts to specialized Fate points, and the game also has regular Fatepoints as well. It feels like a nice idea that is still one step too complicated.

I really like the scope of what this game is trying to portray. Having actions take place over the scale of days, weeks, or years really shows what I had previously mentioned on the blog about the versatility of Fate as a toolkit. While I may not have been thrilled about the particulars of how it works, I also really like the idea of advancement being tied to moving agendas forward. That is the kind of mechanical reinforcement that really helps keep players onboard with the type of game the products is trying to facilitate. 

In general, this is an ambitious product for the scope and size of the Worlds of Adventuresupplements. It has some really good ideas. Because its sheer ambition and scope, and for showing the different kind of game you can create still using the Fate framework, this book is probably worth your time if you are at the intersection of Fate and sci-fi in your interests. That having been said, this may be an investment when it comes to mental energy, either to juggle all of the moving pieces in the game, or to alter the existing structure to do something similar, but in a way that works for you. It definitely feels like in some places there is more structure and complexity than is needed for the payoff at the table.

*** (out of five)