So, a few years back Margaret Weis Productions got the license for Serenity, capitalizing on the recently released Geek Bait movie of the same name. MWP seems to specialize in licensed product, as I can't recall a single release of theirs that didn't come from someone else's creation. Even their first release, Sovereign Stone belonged to... um... (checks book...) Larry Elmore, back when they called themselves Corsair Publishing.

Serenity wasn't without problems, of course. The most glaring of which was the simple fact that the Geek Bait they'd licensed was only half the package, meaning they couldn't use anything from the TV show.  Minor hitches like a lack of an initiative mechanic, or a decent character sheet* only acerbated the problem.

But honestly, the basic rules were fine, if showing a bit of their pre-D&D3e roots. Not everyone wants to adjust the size of their dice to reflect their ability, but whatever.  It worked, it was simple and fast, and it even had some clever, if not quite original, ideas such as treating the character's star ship as a character as well.

Now, as Firefly enters High School, in terms of age, someone finally got the license right.  And between the release of Serenity and Firefly (the RPGS, not the movie and tv show, respectively), MWP overhauled their ruleset, bringing it... I assume, fully into the modern age.

Now: I consider myself something of an expert in RPGs, being experienced with a truly staggering array of mechanics and systems, and being all to eager to buy some book from the dusty and forgotten shelf if only to figure out 'how it works'. But I do have one gaping blind spot in my knowledge, that being the entire FUDGE/FATE phenomenon.  I heard about it, decided it was too far removed from my tastes and that ten years later everyone would have forgotten about it.  More fool I, since it seems to be going stronger than ever.

What does that have to do with Firefly?

Well, based on what I DO know of FUDGE/FATE and all the rest, MWP's new 'Cortex Engine' is essentially a bowlderized hybrid of their old mechanics (Different sizes of dice) with the Fudge bit about picking a meta-trait that can be related to your roll to add to your dice pool.  You might imagine that I don't really like Firefly, the RPG on account of this change, and you would be right. However, as I know many of you are fans, I'll try to fairly review the rest of it without coloring my judgement unduly.

Let me start by saying this is a beautiful product. In addition to taking screenshots from the show, they have any number of photographs of actors in costume.  I know, ususally that's a bad thing, but they actually do a good job with it, professional and slick rather than a pathetic bunch of fans trying to look good on a shoestring budget.  There is actual artwork as well, for the record.

So, it looks good. It looks, in fact, a bit like one of those coffee table Geek Books you find for stuff like Star Wars, only with a lot more text and a lot less engineering.

Setting: The very first chapter of the book is an episode by episode breakdown of the TV show, written as introductory adventures to slowly introduce play concepts.  There seems to be some conceit that the game will be played, at least a significant percentage of the time, with the characters from the show rather than with all new groups, and that was true of the Serenity incarnation as well. Luckily, both incarnations fully support 'new' characters.   One issue I long had with Serenity was how very stupid, from an astrophysics point of view, the Starmap in the book made Joss Whedon look. I always assumed it had come from him. I'm no Carl Sagan, mind you, but the implied physics of that map made my teeth ache.  There is no Map in Firefly, but descriptions of the setting make clear concepts that are far more palatable and help explain the setting of the show better than the show itself did.  It'll never be Traveller, but its at least as playable as Star Wars.

Da Rulz: Here is where the game lost me, and I'm afraid that will result in a truncated review.  Essentially you build a dice pool using roughly three dice (somethign about Big Damn Hero dice giving you a shot at four or more... but I'm talking in general).  Dice range mostly from d4s to d10s or d12s at the outside, and tend to fall mostly in the middle of that spread.  You roll a stat, a skill and a trait. With me so far?

So every character has only three stats, best summed up as 'brains, brawn and charm'. I'd try for the alliteration, but the only word that comes to mind is balls, and that would be misleading.   Anyway: They all start as a d8, but you can adjust one down to raise another, so they range from d6 to d10.

My quick off the cuff math tells me that this means there are only nine possible combinations of attributes.  Likewise, the statistical variation between the stats themselves is almost trivial. This strikes me as highly problematic in the long run.

the next step is to pick your traits, called Distinctions. You get three, and they are broke down into rough catagories, though I can't see how the catagories matter except from an organizational standpoint.  Being the ship's captain is a distinction, as is being a veteran of the unification wars or being a mercenary, or simply being a cold hearted bastard.  Now, every Distinction is a d8, and from what I can tell, this doesn't vary.  There are a couple of elements to Distinctions: A list of skills attached to that distinction and a list of 'triggers', the first trigger is always that you can halve the die rolled to a d4 in exchange for a plot point.

The skills list is important, since you step up your die for that skill each time it appears in a distinction you picked. Triggers are less important as you'll have about six different triggers available, but can only pick two, having to unlock the rest later.

the skill list is fine. Everyone has all skills at a d4 minimum, stepped up by their distinctions. You then get nine points to further improve your skills, and there is room for specializations (which add an extra d6 to your pool).

You don't get equipment, or even money. Gear is 'assets' which are just like distinctions in how they are handled during game play. You can shoot people all day long without having a gun asset, but if you have a gun asset, it has a die attached to it, and you roll that die for using that asset.  ALL equipment is treated like this, and far more than distinctions, this drove me from the game, screaming.  

Now: Starships did get some loving in Firefly, beyond the simple Asset thing, or rather a more complex series of assets unique to ship to ship adventures.  It is fair to say that they are treated much as they were in Serenity, as a unique form of character, what with having three stats, some distinctions and assets and whatnot.  Me? I prefer deck plans and weight to thrust ratios, but I can see the appeal of a more abstract system.


I couldn't bring myself to delve into the rest of the mechanics, which is why I apologized at the beginning of this review, but the appendix at the back is almost worth the price of the book if you are a die-hard fan, given a good chinese glossary, schematics of the Serenity herself (Yay!), and yes: simple maps of each of the star systems that make up the setting (I know, I know: I said there wasn't a map. What I meant was there wasn't a bleeding eyesore, a festering boil on teh buttocks of physics pretending to be a map...).  Now, my copy of the book (which came shrink wrapped from my FLGS, which I assume is standard in this case) has a curious flaw here in that the top corner of the pages of the appendix were not cut properly, and there are little paper bridges holding them together. This may be of some note to collectors, but I assume if you aim to play this sucker you'll just cut those damn things off and be done with it.

Now that I've covered that, I was planning to work in some snarky comment about how the people in Firefly (the show/movie) clearly came from the European part of china, given the near total lack of asians of any sort, which is not true of the book, but I just couldn't find a good place to stick it, so I'll just stick it here, at the end.


*Fan made character sheets demonstrated just how badly MWP had fallen down on this particular element.

I played the first RPG when it came out and it felt like a Savage Worlds clone (which was fine) and the Ship-As-Character was perfect to the show. It's something that belongs in Star Wars or Star Trek where you have ships that somehow exceed its specs and all others of its kind, just because the captain and crew loves her so.

I don't remember a D&D pre-3e vibe though, but maybe because we had been running Firefly with Savage Worlds back when the show hit DVD before the movie or the RPGs.

I did a demo of the second RPG and I was Bwah? but maybe that was the GM.

BTW, if you are going to investigate FUDGE / FATE, also check out RISUS (and Donjon) which to me feels like their progenitors, but I could be wrong since its been a decade plus since I played those.

For reasons that I don't understand, I can't play RPGs with "tapping aspects" as it kills immersion for me, but it clearly works for lots of gamers who love to tap that aspect (as they hang around the table saying, yeah baby, tap it again).

The Pre-D&D3e comment is referencing the Sovereign Stone incarnation of the game, which hit the shelves a few months before the (then) new D&D utterly destroyed the market for alternative fantasy games.  I remember clearly, as I was in a SS campaign that died on the vine the same week 3e hit the shelves, which made me sad.

As for trying Fudge/Fate/Risus... the only reason to do it would be to collect what now appears to be common RPG knowledge so I don't have to worry that I'm drawing comparisons that just aren't so.  I don't like the whole aspects thing either, but I often proclaim that I think like an engineer.  I prefer my games to not rely too heavily on broad abstractions and lots of meta-mechanics... the combination of which nearly perfectly sum up aspects (or Distinctions) quite neatly.

You don't tap stuff in Fudge, which is why I own two Fudge games but won't touch Fate with a stick.

feel free to explain the difference to us dirty heathens. It'll save me futile efforts studying up games I have no intention of using.

FUDGE: simple-ish GURPS with funky dice.

FATE: Bits of FUDGE + aspects and fate points.

Quote from: Spinachcat;789317BTW, if you are going to investigate FUDGE / FATE, also check out RISUS (and Donjon) which to me feels like their progenitors, but I could be wrong since its been a decade plus since I played those.

FUDGE = 1992
RISUS = 1993

Although now that I google RISUS I see that the earliest versions were being shared in xerox in 1989, so now I feel less confident in the date thing. The whole "light mechanics" and "weird dice mechanics" were just kind of in the water back then in any case.