Diaspora book review

So, let’s get this part out of the way. I am NOT a sci-fi guy.  Never have been, never will. Sure I like some sci-fi things, but once you get into the hard sci-fi stuff you typically lose me.

So when I heard a little over a year ago there was a sci-fi Fate game, I did not really want to have anything to do with it. Then I joined G+ and met people like Brad Murray and others talking about how awesome it was.

I just now got around to reading it all. J

So, obviously it is a Fate game.

You start by doing something that I think would be so awesome to do and lord knows it read well enough. Cluster Creation. Yes folks, you get to create the universe the game will take place in, and then roll to see how the different planets connect to each other.

Brilliant is the word that comes to mind.

You can roll the four fudge dice for the system attributes (technology, environment, and resources) and look at the results.  It goes from +4 to -4 and all in between. For example we will use technology, a +4 gets you a T4 which means that tech has advanced so far it is on the edge of collapse. Earth right now is at -1 which is considered the atomic age, and -4 means they have any tech at all…i.e. the Stone Age.

Just was just 3 of the 9 things you could get, but you get the point.

You roll for all three and voila, you get your worlds. You then have to give each world a few aspects and off you go to character creation.

A lot of the rest is basic Fate stuff, so I won’t go into much of it other than to say there are A LOT of skills available since there are so many different things you can do in this gamel

Then there is the social combat in the game. I have heard for a while how good it is. I am not going to try to explain it, cuz I don’t really understand it after reading it. Let’s just say it is very interesting, but I really need to see it in action.

I also loved how they wrote small examples of the game and how they felt like miniature stories. It was great stuff to read.

The bottom line is that it was a fun read. It is not typically my kind of game. I am not sure I would want to run it though. A bit too crunchy for me with some of hard sci-fi stuff, but definitely want to play.