RPGPundit Reviews: Sweet Chariot

This is a review of the print version of the Sweet Chariot RPG by Albert Bailey, Clash Bowley, and Klaxon Bowley; published by Flying Mice games. This is a 297 page book with full colour cover and black and white interior art.

This game is set on a single world of the Starcluster Universe, the setting of one Flying Mice's other RPGs, Starcluster II.  The setting itself is sci-fi, but the particular setting of Sweet Chariot is perhaps one of the most unusual planetary settings I've ever encountered: imagine a world where any place under 2000ft in altitude is toxic to human habitation; human beings can only live in the highlands. On top of that, the world of Chariot has a gigantic moon that keeps one side of the world in near-constant darkness.

Systemwise, Clash Bowley makes an interesting choice; keeping the same stats and such as in his typical percentage-based "house system", but changing the mechanics to work using a pool of D20s instead; as he did in his Blood Games RPG.  It works by having PCs roll a number of D20s equal to your skill rank +1, and counting the number of successes (a success being any roll that gets equal or less than the attribute that governs the skill in question).

Clash has certainly gotten good at summarizing the details of how task resolution works; getting it all pretty much out of the way by page nine.
Character creation is pretty standard for one of Flying Mice's games too; and will also be familiar to anyone who's ever played Traveller. In it, you generate your attribute first, then your social background which gives you a set of "Mother's milk" skills, then go through the evolution of your character's age, choosing or rolling different skills depending on what career you are following.  Along the way you make checks to see if you get promotions, can roll for a waiver if you meet the minimal social class but not the attribute requirements for a career, and of course, you age.

Like in most of Clash's games, there's dozens of skills, a list where you sometimes get the sense of repetition, or wondering if certain skills were actually necessary. Psionic powers are essentially treated as regular skills. And absent, as usual, are actual experience point rules; presumably characters develop by aging and nothing else.

But really, the selling point of this game in particular is obviously not the system (if all you wanted was the system, you should pick up starcluster II, which is a far more generic hard sci-fi setting).  No, this game's appeal is in the world of Chariot, the bizzare setting of a particular harsh world with a strange mix of earth cultures, and an aesthetic that can only be described as a wedding of sci-fi and steampunk.

Chariot's habitable regions are tall "islands in a sea of Argon"; the lowlands of the planet having too great a concentration of that element to make it habitable for human life. The world has much higher atmospheric pressure and humidity, and has no axial tilt.  All of this adds up to make a world that is very different from our own.  
Human settlements can only happen up in the highlands and mountain plateaus; and aerial transportation becomes essential.  As chariot is a world rich in certain resources (radioactives, electricity, geothermal) but poor in others, the result is a world where travel by baloon, airship, and dirigible are all common; and where swashbuckling is mixed with biotechnology and psychic powers. The high presence of radioactives (in the lower areas of the world) make for a great deal of mutations as well; and mutations being generally negative and prevalent among the lower classes (as the rich can afford to live higher up and further away from the radioactivity).

The premise of the human habitation of Chariot is the same as that of the entire Starcluster setting: the action takes place thousands of years from now.  Earth was destroyed but not before a series of fleets of "slow boats", vast generational ships, managed to escape earth's demise heading for distant starsystems to survive.  Many of them ended up in the Starcluster, an area of great stellar concentration where travel between systems is relatively easy.

Now, where it gets a little less credible, IMO, is in the idea that on these generational ships, "in order to avoid social conflict", the multi-national crews strictly adopted the cultural habits of historical societies. So you had, for example, the ship crew that based their society on Victorian England; and another that based theirs on the ancient Mayans.
I don't really see this as being a credible idea or a believable solution to the kind of problems Clash presents; let's face it, its an excuse to have "Victorians (or Mayans) in Spaaaace!"

But well, I think the author can be forgiven for this, on account that the result is very cool: Chariot was settled by a group of different cultural imitators.  Additionally, some of these were from the crew, some were passengers, and some were hijackers that tried to take over the ship in a desperate attempt to escape the destruction of Earth. Today, all of the various groups have their own settlements.  

There are 19 major nations on Chariot, and they vary from the aforementioned Victorians ("Spenceria") and Mayans ("Kukulkan"); to cultures based on Greek Cypriots, Brazil, Manchurian China, Yemen, the lost Ibo state of Biafra, Sicily, and the world superpower that was the 22nd century Phillipines (which makes one have to wonder if Clash is a Doctor Who fan, recalling the line the Doctor once let slip: "I was with the Phillipino army for the final advance on Rekjavik").

Each of the 19 nations in Chariot are fleshed out in sufficient detail, each receiving somewhere between 5 and ten pages of info; including the history of the settlement, the culture its based on, what society is like in that nation, the important cities found there, business and trade, powerful organizations, and powerful individuals.

All of this is very cool, and takes up most of the book; from page 105-253, with the pages 80-105 giving details about the star system as a whole and the world of Chariot in general (all with a very hard sci-fi styling), and p. 255 onward giving details on animals, vehicles, common weapons and items, and optional rules.
Despite this coolness, however, one is left with something of a sense of "awesome... now what the fuck do I do about it?".
I mean, I can see using Sweet Chariot as a sourcebook for a larger Starcluster campaign; and I can see a Sweet Chariot campaign itself being a kind of travelogue campaign where the point is going from place to place on this weird world having weird adventures; but I don't really see much else.

There isn't even enough of a sense of overarching conflict; there are certainly some nations that hate other nations, but not any sense that things are about to come to some kind of a head where individual heroism will make a big difference or anything like that.

In other words, the one thing this gamebook really could have used was some kind of a chapter on adventure possibilities on Chariot.

On the whole, Chariot is a fascinating world with very cool steampunk sensibilities melded onto a hard-SF shell.  The system is basically good, and familiar to anyone who's ever played any of Clash's other games (in spite of the change in mechanics).  The real question is what to do with it.  If you don't have trouble taking a somewhat odd setting with a lot of details, and figuring out how to adventure in it; and if you like the idea of the aesthetic I've described for the game, then Sweet Chariot will be worth your while.

RPGPundit

Hi Pundit!

Excellent review as always!

As to what kind of adventures can be played, I probably should have put in some ideas for campaigns and adventures. Personally, I find the setting tends to generate its own adventures, for example as characters deal with the environment or as the environment deals with them, as characters encounter strange societies, as characters explore odd nooks and crannies of the world. This is probably my favorite setting to play in because of this.

-clash

This is of course a common problem with these sorts of setting books; the designer can ALWAYS see adventure potential; while it might not always be so clear to anyone else who reads the book.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditThis is of course a common problem with these sorts of setting books; the designer can ALWAYS see adventure potential; while it might not always be so clear to anyone else who reads the book.

RPGPundit

Very much true. I'm afraid my love for this setting has blinded me.

-clash

Well, its a very cool setting no doubt about that. I certainly enjoyed it better than the book of Jalan, I must say.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditWell, its a very cool setting no doubt about that. I certainly enjoyed it better than the book of Jalan, I must say.

RPGPundit

Heh! You're not alone! Book of Jalan was a failure in any way you want to measure it, though there were a couple nuggets of good stuff there, like the Psi/Magic system. Luckily, I count it as my only failure.

-clash