Review: Nova Praxis Enhanced PDF

I don't do a lot of reviews, but I feel compelled to do so in this case. The game I'm reviewing, Nova Praxis, a FATE-based ruleset, is just that good. And the delivery system, an enhanced PDF, is really amazing in terms of its clean aesthetic and overall usability. Color me very, very impressed.

What is Nova Praxis, anyway?

Nova Praxis is dystopic human future-based world produced by +Mike McConnell for Void Star Games (listed as such on RPG Now, though Void Star Studios is the company).

All of the major sci-fi themes seem to be allowed for, from Cyberpunk netrunning to safari-style dinosaur hunting on distant colony worlds. From transhumanists yearning for post-human perfection to body-Puritans who bomb the labs where that post-human potential is realized. The information about the setting is based on a "default setting." You are members of a group of operatives working for one the major corporate "houses" of the Coalition, engaging in a Shadow War against other Houses and their operatives. You do the dirty work that makes things work for the Houses, that keeps people in their places, that preserves the Powers That Be from shame or blame, while further helping them to cement their influence.

The default setting is interesting in and of itself. It reminds me quite a bit of elements of Cyberpunk mixed with with the various versions of the space opera genre embodied in our favorite TV shows, comics, films, RPGs, and other sources. The author is very clear about this in his response to critics claiming he ripped off other systems/settings:

Eclipse Phase didn't invent the concept of the Technological Singularity (ask John von Neumann who first talked about it in the 50's), nor the idea of transhumanity. In fact, Eclipse Phase very clearly "rips off" aspects of Altered Carbon, Revelation Space, and many others. And so did Nova Praxis. And Nova Praxis also goes on to "rip off" Mass Effect, Deus Ex, and other inspirational sources. That's how fiction works.

Yep. Couldn't agree more. Ain't nothing new in the world that ain't been said already, and I think that's absolutely awesome. That's why we can have things that we share. That's why we can make cool things together. That's why subcultures like the OSR exist. That's why everyone can take something old and make it new again in very personal and interesting ways (or, alternately, in stereotypical and boring ways. YMMV.).

Also, props to Mike for doing a great job editing his text. It's easy to read, well-organized, and almost completely free of spelling and grammatical errors. This warms the cockles of my little, black heart.

How useful would this setting be to me?

The setting is detailed and well-realized, and the elements of the setting are diverse. There's a lot to see here, and a lot of possibilities for tweaking the setting to one's own personal tastes. You get bits like this, about the colony world of Proch:

Large reptiles and ferocious mammals still roam the forests of Proch. These large, at times massive, creatures have become a source of much interest for many of the Coalition’s people. The creatures have provided scientists with many hours of amusement, and a gruesome end to more than a few would-be adventurers.

Land of the Lost/King Kong in motherfucking space, people! That's what I'm talking about.

And this about Earth:

Today, it is believed that no human remains alive on Earth. Mankind’s cities are dens of technological terror, shattered wastelands haunted by murderous machines. Even rural areas are patrolled by aerial recon drones that are programmed to kill anything larger than a house cat.

Hello, Terminator! And the possibilities go on and on.

The description of the rest of the setting provides all sorts of possibilities for just about anything from sci-fi and beyond. You could run a fantasy game, for example, or space pirates, or palace intrigue, or bodice-ripper romances, fergawdsake. Now, mind you, you'd have to come up with ideas for your own, but I think most of my readers are already able to do that, and used to doing so.

Given that it's a FATE-based system, you literally can play just about any character imaginable and any setting imaginable. You could be a giant, monster-fighting robot, a hard-bitten investigator, an technomancer, whatever. If you can imagine it, and you can tie it to the sprawling sci-fi setting embodied in Nova Praxis, you can play it. So, bottom line, this is a very dynamic setting. There are a lot of fiddly bits that you could develop to make it into your Perfect Game. You could do that a whole bunch of times. The number of plot hooks available in the setting descriptions just about guarantees that.

What about this FATE thing? Why would I play it?

I'm fairly new to FATE system-based games. I was somewhat put off by it, initially, as it's a bit complex, and the terminology and assumptions so different from what I'm used to. I had to tweak my brain to deal with the idea that The Story is what's important, that having fun means everybody being able to tell that story (not just or mainly the GM). Mind you, I'm making sweeping declarations with that sentence. I know that. I know that all rulesets allow for that, provided that the GM/players roll it that way. However, just like some other games I've been intrigued by in the last year or so, like +Joshua Macy's SFX! system and its various permutations (e.g., Zap! or Zounds!) or +Rafael Chandler's Disciple 12 system for Spite, this is a ruleset that aims at a cinematic/narrative aesthetic for the gaming experience.

What that means for the GM and players is a bit more flexibility in applying the ruleset. The rules are more procedural than canon, if you see what I mean. They don't define what you can do, but how you accomplish doing what you want to do. I like that. I like it a lot. But it took me a few read-throughs of these kinds of games to really grok the point of it all. At first, it seemed to nerf the deadlier aspects of other RPGs, making the games more about cool shit than about consequences of doing that cool shit. Like there's nothing in there specifically about wounds and death and hit points and specific rules for magic and that kind of thing. The flexibility of the ruleset in application actually put me off! Where the hell was the crunch?

However, I've come to realize that was a bit more about the failure my imagination to capture what I could do with the system. It was about me and my players figuring out what's cool for us, not about having to adhere to what I've come to associate with story-gamey sorts of things I don't much care for. I think I had it wrong. I could use the FATE system to play any fucking game I wanted to. That's what it's designed for. If you can't have fun with it, then you probably need to figure out why you are no fun to be around.

Oddly enough, I think I arrived at this insight by playing DCC, which is almost the opposite in terms of how it accomplishes the very same thing: Make the characters awesome and make the setting random and gonzo. Oddly enough, they are very similar in the way they "feel" to me. There's a real sense of wide-open space here, a feeling that I could explore a lot of different territory in gaming. Maybe it's that the main influences seem to be about the stories (e.g., Appendix N fiction in DCC and the codification of narrative/cinematic structure in the FATE system), rather than the rules.

As a side note, I'm intrigued that FATE creates a linguistic/cinematic language to describe gaming behaviors. It uses generic game actions and character and setting building options to allow the players and GM to build and do just about anything, as I've said already. It also codifies that stuff into terms that are of professional interest to me, personally. I deal with rhetoric and persuasion, the relations between symbol-systems and power. This system seems to codify, in many ways, how we use archetypes and memes and various aspects of game theory to build conceptual worlds, objects, aspects, and so forth for real people. These people are given a way to think about and embody things found in our Internet-based versions of community and collective identities and so forth. I'm not certain where I want to take it, but I'll be damned if that's not fascinating.

What's this enhanced PDF thing?

You can get Nova Praxis "pay what you want" on RPG Now. However, the enhanced PDF is only $14.99, and it's pretty amazing. This sort of thing may be old news to some of you tablet-slinging veterans of the Nook/iPad wars, but I'm a humble lover of gigantic desktop towers. I've only recently gotten a laptop, even, and that's for work.

Anyway, the enhanced PDF consists of about 270 pages of material, and embedded system of menus and links that's intuitive an easy to use, standard PDF book marks, standard, linked table to contents, a fillable, savable character sheet, among other features. It took me a little bit of time to get used to (I'm only a simple cave man and your advanced technology is puzzling to me.), but now I don't know why everyone's PDFs aren't like this one. It's groovy!

Why should I go out and get this thing?

I don't know. Maybe you shouldn't.

If the idea of playing in the FATE system makes you queasy for whatever reason, then probably you are ill-disposed to begin with. However, the setting itself is a very interesting one for any kind of sci-fi based game. You could use it with rules from other systems pretty easily,  I think. For fifteen bucks, that might be worth it to you.

If you like well-written and elegantly produced games at low, low prices, you should get this.

If you like sci-fi gaming in general, get it.

Fuck it. I'm not going down the entire list for you. Just go check it out. The regular PDF is pay what you want. Pay or don't. If you like it, and if you're intrigued, buy the enhanced PDF. It's very nice.

Spite

Recently, I took part in a little contest, over at +Erik Tenkar's place. The contest asked for the best character death. I wrote the piece not expecting much to come of it. Somehow, I was one of the winners and got a copy of +Rafael Chandler's Spite: The Second Book of Pandemonium. Spite is something new to me. I didn't even know it was a thing. I'm very sorry about that, because the game looks like a LOT of fun. Also, Rafael also says he's going to re-do the game with all of it parts together in one book, probably later this year. That's probably gonna end up on my bookshelf.

So...

I started reading it last week, and pretty much have read (not skimmed) the whole thing already. I never do that. Seriously. Never. Well, at least don't before I try to play it. This book, though, was very enjoyable to read. It's got great layout and illustrations. Some very, very good artists were used to create some really fucked up stuff. The monsters (angels, in fact) are really scary critters. Apparently there's a really thin line between angelic and demonic in this game. The real takeaway from it, to me, and as expressed by the author is that we should not anthropomorphize angels in this game, and that their character is inhuman, by nature. They have their agenda and donotfuckingcareaboutyou. All of this is expressed in a mix of nice, personal prose and well explained rules and examples (though I'd like to see some better, more extended examples of gameplay for some of the mechanics). There are even a few random tables provided in the appendix.

The quickstart concept for this game is a good one (run a session that's expected to end in death, just to get started learning the rules, and play it for real). I could see doing that with just about any system, pushing it to its nuttiest to see how fun it is. Even better, I could see running that as a default "funnel," a la DCC.

The book's organization is somewhat odd to me, because the quickstart is several chapters in, beyond character generation and most of the rule system. Logically, I guess it makes sense. You need a little background first. Also, Rafael is an author who is very, very good at pacing explanations. He's kind of got a teacher vibe, but a good one. Take it from a teacher (me).

Anyway, more about the game.

The game runs on a d12 system, for those not familiar with it. Each roll conists of some number of d12, based on character (or NPC) skills, attributes, etc. This is where it gets interesting (to me), because instead of totaling the dice you roll for high numbers. Highest number wins. If it's a roll against a target number, then you have to get over that target (like DC for d20 rolls in 3rd ed.). If it's an opposed roll, like a offense/defense combat roll, the difference between the rolls, modified, tells you who won and by how much. This rolling system is pretty consistent across all subsystems, with a fiddly bit or two here and there. The mechanic is sufficiently different that I want to try it out, and simple enough that my dumb ass can figure it out. Win/Win.

Subject matter is strangely... familiar. The first place I go when reading it is Dark Heresy. Grimdarkness. Lots and lots of grimdark. Yay! And this time it's about Heaven's War, and you (your characters) are Zealots in the fight. They are humans made... different, changed and enhanced in weird ways, half-breeds, part divine and part mortal. Chargen breaks down to character classes and types. Those are pretty tightly-defined. However, there are also ways to differentiate your character, based on background. It's also from a limited, but very evocative, array of choices. Again, very like Dark Heresy.

Skills are limited and generic. That's probably a strength, and an advantage over Dark Heresy in my mind. Magic consists of a decent array of spells of different types, some very powerful effects, some buffs, and a nice range of potential uses. There really are a ton of them and they're really, really, fucking metal. Yes, the stuff is plucked whole from horror films and heavy metal, but FUCK, YEAH, IT IS!

Now, Spite is somewhat limited in its approach to the game world. What's there is very good, but you can tell you're missing a lot of the story (e.g., what happened in Dread: The First Book of Pandemonium, which the author now calls "Scorn," instead). Now, I've looked for that one online, but neither book seems to be available right now. I got my copy from the author, of course, and he's got them both up later this year, along with other material included, if I don't misremember what he told me.

I'll be happy to pick up the who shebang because I see a lot of potential in the system to provide me with a good many things I like. There's grimdark, naturally, and the desperate nature of the conflict. There's the rule that says if you describe what you're doing in a bitchin' way you get an extra die (hell, yeah). More importantly, it looks like something I could continue to unpack for a while to come. It has the potential to get into a lot of uncharted territory, becoming about something other than the whole Heaven vs. Hell thing.

I'm not saying that's not a cool thing, mind you. It's simply a fact that part of what made me want to step away from the Dark Heresy stuff for a while was feeling sort of trapped in the 40K universe. It's well written, interesting, and all that, yes... But after a while I'd sort of burnt out on it. Probably how are gaming group kind of imploded didn't help either.

Anyway, this game, Spite (and its associated Pandemonium universe) looks like I could do a lot of other stuff with it instead of just what the wrapper suggests I can. Aliens, serial killers, zombies, whatever. Probably not ponies, though. Probably. Well, maybe that would make a horrible sort of sense. Perhaps carnivorous ponies...

But I digress... If you get a chance to pick it up, it's worth a look, especially if you like horror, combat, tense drama, and an appetite to fuck some shit up.  Or die horribly (but awesomely).