RPGPundit Reviews: Hard Nova: Sovereign Space

This product by Precis Intermedia Games is a rarity in this day and age: instead of a regular-size hardcover or softcover, Hard Nova comes in the form of a softcover booklet, packaged in a ziplock bag with a small pack of hard-paper reference sheets for all the rules and a couple of nice-looking D6s.  This is definitely Old School Territory.

It also means that Hard Nova is certainly practical for carrying around in your backpack or luggage or to generally take with you when you need an RPG but don't want to lug around a big clunky typical-sized RPG book.

But how complete is it? Can you pack a complete sci-fi RPG in a 52 page softcover booklet? Let's find out.

First, some details regarding the game book itself: the book is a small sized 52 page booklet, with a nice full-colour cover. Aside from a very tiny handful of illustrations of the setting's different races, there are no pictures included.  This is definitely a no-thrills RPG.  It is practical however; you get the aforementioned ziplock bag for carrying it, the dice are included, and you get a stack of reference sheets with sample characters, sample ships, sample robots, blank character and ship sheets, and a single sturdy hard-paper reference sheet with a summary of the difficulty tables, damage penalties, and weapon and armour tables.

Like I said, all very practical.

Hard Nova is not a generic sci-fi game (though as a system it would be generic enough to be run in any hard sci-fi setting); it has its own setting.  The basic concepts of that setting are elaborated in the early pages of the book: "Space travel has transformed Earth into a galactic superpower". The Earth has forged "a galactic alliance, the Unighted Sovereign Worlds, which maintains the peace and empowers weaker members by way of trade, status and shared technologies". Essentially, the setting is a hard sci-fi setting where humans went out into the stars and ran into many other alien species, and today are at the center of a big "federation"-style alliance (hence the "sovereign space" subtitle).

The six basic species of the USW are humans, Digronians, Kt'Sorli, Migado, X-an, and Tarkosians.  Yes, there has been some playing around with "'" and "-" there, and your typical difficult-to-pronounce alien-sounding names.  

Humans come from Earth, from a number of small Earth Colonies, and from Alpha Centauri. The latter were an early Earth colony that broke away and are independent founding members of the USW.  "Centaurians" also have a much higher prevalence of psychic powers than other humans, just because psionics are cool, I guess. Psychics are "registered" and monitored, in what I imagine is shades of Babylon-5-plot-stealing. Incidentally, humans from Earth are described as still being vastly diverse in their culture and religions, and being fairly decadent at the time of the game's setting, Earth government being full of corruption, corporate greed and abuse, and the oppression of its colonies (all of which can be seeds for future conflict in a campaign).

Digronians are described as "upright chimpanzees" that have a kind of tribal culture.  Kt'Soril are an insect race (that vaguely resemble a cross of an ant and a praying mantis) that have a matriarchal culture and are described as very polite.  Migado are a bizzare grotesquely fat race that can only move with the aid of "bioframes" and have telekinetic powers.  X-ans are androids. Tarkosians are fairly "bishonen"-like pretty-boy aliens, that are apparently so pretty because of nanites and bio-engineering. They were originally the enemies of the USW, having fought a devastating war against the other species, which they lost.  Now their civilization is falling apart and many of them have turned to criminal activities.

Starships in the setting are divided into those who are capable of entering Hyperspace by themselves, and those that cannot.  The former can travel at FTL speeds on their own, the latter are limited to travelling within a single star system or using a "stargate" (a permanetly operating portal that allows non-hyperspace-capable ships to travel pre-set routes from one system to another; again, shades of B5). A star map has been provided on page 9 of the booklet, detailing the location and hyperspace routes of the setting's principal worlds.

The world of Sovereign Space is capitalist, so there are big interstellar corporations at work, many of them engaging in shady activites that the PCs can get caught up with.

Ok, now to the game system: Hard Nova uses the Genre Division-i system, the same system that Precis Games has used in many other RPGs, most notably the Coyote Trail wild west RPG. Being compatible, I could imagine combining those two games to run a Firefly-esque "wild west in space" setting if one had both products. The basic game system resolves all checks with a 2D6 roll. Character creation and mechanics are all very simple, enough so that a "character sheet" actually only takes up a quarter of a reference sheet.

The Genre Division system uses a set of attributes and skills; where one resolves checks by rolling 2D6 and comparing the result to the sum of his attribute+skill; different degrees of difficulty might require you to roll lower than the skill level by several points, or very easy checks might let you roll above the skill level. Characters will also have gimmicks, which might be cultural based (ie. criminal, or military rank), "Enhancement" gimmicks (ie. "claws" or night vision- gimmicks that are based on racial abilities or biomechanical implants), mechanical gimmicks (gimmicks for robots or androids), psionic gimmicks (psychic powers; and there's quite an extensive list of them), or detrimental gimmicks (disadvantages, like "clumsy" or "poor").  

The game book actually defaults to players picking one of the pregenerated characters included in the reference sheets; actual rules for character generation are found nearly at the back of the book, but they are complete. Essentially, it is a point buy system, where you are given 12 points to distribute among the 5 attributes; 30 points to divide among skills, and gimmicks are assigned to certain races, while PCs can choose additional non-racial gimmicks by reducing their attribute or skill point totals (while detrimental gimmicks will add attribute or skill points).

This system is basically identical to Coyote Trail's system; and I have the benefit of having actually played several games of Coyote Trail.  So what I can say is that the system is basically sound, but it does allow for min-maxing, and its relatively easy to create a character who is abusively good at a particular skill.  In my Coyote Trail game, several of the players had wisened up to this and were basically unbeatable crack shots with a pistol.

Gimmicks are described as being "automatic" in this game; that is to say that they "do not use a rating system", which is true; and that their uses are "either automatic or modify tasks in certain situations".  This is almost true (its true in Coyote Trail), but in Hard Nova it should be noted that psionics (at least some of them) seem to work as a skill+gimmick combo, in the sense that in order to use certain psychic powers you need to have taken both the gimmick pertaining to the power, and points in a skill to use the power (the psychokinesis gimmick, for example, requires the character to put points into a skill called psychokinetic control in order to be used).

Note that Robot or Android PCs essentially function the same as any other PC, having access to special gimmicks.

One interesting detail of the Hard Nova game is that spaceships are treated (and "generated") in a very similar fashion to player characters. Ships have five attributes as well, in their case they have two structural attributes (frame and shields) which represent the "protective potential" of a ship; and they have three "control abilities" (speed, handling, and sensors) which are rated between -5 to +5. These represent a penalty or bonus to the Pilot PC's abilities when operating that given aspect of a ship.
Ships also have their own particular list of gimmicks (stuff like "cloaking device" or "fighter bay").

A detailed section on task resolution (including explanations of difficulties and modifiers for certain trickier skills like "composure" or the various psychic skills) is provided, as is a fairly extensive section on combat.  Damage is handled by having a number of levels of damage in either fatigue or injury, or mechanical stress or structural damage for non-organics.  Having more than a couple of levels of damage will lead to penalties to all your checks. There are only five boxes of each type of damage, so its relatively easy for combat to be a quick and bloody affair.

Again, starship combat is run very similarly to character combat.  This is no wargame, the combat is very abstract, but you still get a lot of details in the book regarding different kinds of maneuvers and modifiers depending on the tasks you are trying to conduct on the ship.

All of this takes up roughly half of the booklet.  The other half of the booklet is dedicated to a brief but acceptable equipment list (though I imagine that in many sci-fi games GMs would have to be inventing prices for a lot of items), a very brief section of GM advice on things like how to play in different styles, and a set of four different sample scenarios (adventures) that each take up a couple of pages of the booklet. The first scenario details exploration into uncharted space, the second involves the PCs being hired to find out what happened to a mining colony that has lost all contact, the third involves the PCs as peace officers trying to resolve a diplomatic/military situation that might cause a civil war, and the last scenario involves a situation of Robots having run amok.

The last sections of the book (after the section on creating custom characters) details the experience system, which basically assigns advancement points that can be used to buy more skills, improve existing ones, or raise attributes or get new gimmicks. Experience points are awarded for avoiding violence (huh?!), staying in character, or describing your characters actions creatively (bwuh?!).  Two of the three seem like somewhat odd choices for the type of game we're talking about here, and one gets the feeling that the XP system may have been tacked on as an afterthought.

Finally, an addendum gives options for diceless play.

What can I conclude about Hard Nova? Its a great little package; useful for quick-start play, useful for situations where you want to have an RPG with you but don't want to lug a heavy book; useful for gaming-on-the-fly.  
Its game system (Genre Division i) is a sound system, and the game stands up to repeated play.  Is Hard Nova as a whole complete enough as a game to stand up to a lengthy campaign of play? Probably not by itself.  It would require quite a bit of additional setting material (and some additions to equipment and probably house rules) by the GM.
But what I can say is that Hard Nova has more in it than what I would have expected for a game of its size. You might not be able to play a full campaign out of the box without GM additions, but you can play a lot more than I would ever have expected.

So if you're looking for a good quick game, or a good hard-sci fi game with a relatively light and easy system, or even a game where portability is a primary concern; Hard Nova might be a choice for you.

RPGPundit

Thanks for the review.

Er...what makes this a hard Sci Fi game? My impression from the review is that it is pretty much as Space Opera as Space Opera gets. I mean, FTL and psychic powers does not exactly scream scientific accuracy.

Quote from: Axiomatic;228462Er...what makes this a hard Sci Fi game? My impression from the review is that it is pretty much as Space Opera as Space Opera gets. I mean, FTL and psychic powers does not exactly scream scientific accuracy.

We SF designers get this question all the time here and at tBP. The meaning of Hard SF has changed drastically in the last 15-20 years. Where it once meant that a lot of attention was paid to science except for where it was necessary for setting/plot purposes, it now has become far more rigid. Traveller, for instance, was once thought of as a Hard SF game, along with books by Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, and other golden age authors. Now it is the sole province of a handful of British authors and Transhuman Space. You are using the new definition of "Hard," while Pundit is using the older definition.

"Space Opera" has similarly changed meaning - it once meant star-spanning adventures where science was ignored. Now it just means a star-spanning setting, and the adventures and the science are immaterial. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

-clash

Ah, I see. As always, semantics conspire to ruin my life.

Quote from: Axiomatic;228819Ah, I see. As always, semantics conspire to ruin my life.

This is a given, like death and taxes.

-clash

To me, the simplest dividing line between Hard and Soft SF is that Hard SF puts an emphasis on realistic people and situations, has no presence of the supernatural, and places significant emphasis on tech, where that tech is supposed to have a rationalization to it (not necessarily a REALISTIC rationalization, but there is an internal consistency to the setting's tech).
So yes, Traveler is Hard SF.

Soft SF and Space Opera are where the tech and science are there really to further the setting/story, no great emphasis is placed on internal consistency of science/technology, the supernatural is often present, and the emphasis is on "amazing adventures". Space Opera in particular tends to have the latter two as a big focus.
Star Trek is soft SF.  Star Wars is space opera.

RPGPundit

Would you count psychic powers under supernatural?

Not usually.

RPGPundit

Not usually.

RPGPundit