Game: Bulldogs!
Publisher: Galileo Games
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 24th, February 2005
Reviewer’s Rating: 8/10 [ Really good ]
Total Score: 8
Average Score: 8.00
Bulldogs! is a Sci-Fi RPG which uses the d20 fantasy core set. From the outset this puts Bulldogs! at odds with d20 Future. Bulldogs! hit the shelves first but that’s little assistance when you compare the size and relative new appearance of Galileo Games to that of Wizards of the Coast. It’s fair to say that some gamers will be disappointed that Bulldogs! does not (could not) use d20 Future. It’s also fair to say that the fact Bulldogs! uses d20 fantasy – the most commonly distributed and widely played d20 version – is an advantage.
Bulldogs! is one of those d20 roleplaying games which strains against the d20 licensing rules. You can just feel how much Galileo Games wants to produce a solid and stand alone product. But they can’t. There are no character generation rules here and Bulldogs! isn’t allowed to include them. In fact the Sci-Fi game’s introduction worried me. I was beginning to worry that the Emperor was wearing no clothes. There’s no name for the galaxy in which the game is set. There is a clumsy paragraph about it. You know what; I might never have noticed if it hadn’t been pointed out to me. Instead we have paragraphs about the name Bulldogs! It comes from a favourite Beatles song – we have lyrics from the song. The first gaming group called their characters the Bulldogs. I just don’t care. I certainly don’t care at the start of the book. To be honest (and harsh – to be honest, I’m often harsh) in the early pages of the book I was beginning to suspect there was going to be very little meat to the setting. I could wind up in the nightmare situation of having purchased a write up of some gaming group’s campaign.
My fears were unfounded. Does Bulldogs! have meat? It has enough meat. The campaign setting is broad enough for the flavour of the game. Bulldogs! is an action game. Bulldogs! is about space fights, about fighter craft ducking and dog fighting around asteroids, about bounty hunting aliens, exotic gravity weapons and shoot outs with robot mercenaries. The unnamed galaxy is small and with hyperspace it is perfectly possible to cross it numerous times in the course of an adventure. There are places to hide in this galaxy but in Bulldogs! you’re likely to be found by trouble.
There’s a stand off in the galaxy. Two powerful empires tried and failed to destroy each other. There’s now a cold war like situation where the super powers face each other over a neutral zone. The neutral zone itself, the galactic currency, calendar and truce were all arranged and codified in a treaty. Both sides grudgingly respect this. Two sides and one truce – which is the evil empire. Which side is side of good? There’s no clear side of good. Oh no, not in Bulldogs! The republic founded by the snake-like Saldrallans is perhaps the less sinister. The Saladrallans do not insist on being the dominant race – but that’s because that’s the practical thing to do. It’s easier to stay in control if you don’t force the issue. For the Saladrallans the end always justifies the means. On the other side of the frontier there is the Devalkamanchan Republic. Here we have religious zealots who are determined never to be weak. Thankfully the current thinking, among the current rulers at least, is that breaking the treaty and attacking the Saldrallans would weaken the Devalkamanchan. These religious zealots do insist on being the prime race in their “republic”. They believe their twin gods defeat and slay the gods of any race they conquer.
There are no humans. There’s a race which is human-like and in terms of d20 stats is human but there are no humans. The Arsubaran replace mankind in the galaxy but are more interesting. Arsubaran come in many colours; red, blue or green.
Bulldogs! scores a hit with the race section. The black and white book flicks to colour for great illustrations of the PC suitable in the book. The sampling is just a small fraction of all the races in the galaxy. Let’s put the best bit first; Bulldogs! contains rules for creating your own alien race. This is just perfect. It’s something that both players and GMs will want to do, it encourages and promotes the idea that there are very many races in the Universe, not just those listed in the main rule book and makes life easier for everyone. There are 13 pages for the point based alien creation rules. They work well. Whereas we might expect to see entire supplements dedicated to this the rules here are surprisingly versatile and will produce a wealth of different types of alien race. They should all be suitable for PCs. Another success here is that the aliens here aren’t StarTrek-esq. StarTrek aliens, all too often, are humanoids with quirks. In fact I think there’s been plot to explain why. If we go back to the start of the race section in Bulldogs! we find that the “Human” aliens, the Arsuburan, get the mutli-coloured ball rolling. The Dolom come from a high-gravity planet. Their face can swivel through 360 degrees (I imagine ‘head’ is a better word than ‘face’ but I might be wrong) and have three trunk like legs and three tentacle like arms. Hacragorkan are space orcs, okay, that’s my summary but Bulldogs! describes them as brutish and fond of a good fight. They’re green, a little slow and strong. Yeah, I think I’m right to call them space orcs. The Ken Reeg insist they are a race but many people suspect they’re genetically modified Arsubaran, give or take a few hundred years. These lot are your gamblers, lawyers and rogues. You can play a robot and all that power versus lack of healing which that entails. The Ryjyllians are lion/feline-humanoid aliens; dexterous but not that wise. As touched on earlier, Saldrallans are snake-humanoid aliens with a nasty bite. The Templars are the Devalkmanchans and the evolutionary union of two similar humanoid races. The Tetsuashan are genderless slugs! Urseminites are cute ewok-like aliens, created by genetics and gone horribly wrong. Urseminites are absolute bastards who are only out for themselves.
Bounty Hunter, Engineer, Fighter, Gunner, Medic, Rogue, Space Pilot and Space Pirate; here we have the classes. Many of these look like fighter variants (Bounty Hunter and Space Pirate) but this is an acceptable legacy from D&D d20 (Barbarian and Ranger/Paladin).
Assassin, Infocity Acolyte, Mata Hari and Secret Agent are the prestige classes. The Mata Hari are social manipulators extraordinaire and the Infocity Acolyte is a risk. The Infocity Acolyte is plugged into a computer the size of a planet from which they can get answers to almost any knowledge based questions. GMs could proceed with maximum caution.
Bulldogs! is thorough with Sci-Fi RPG suitable skills and feats. As a style of play Bulldog! lends itself well to the feat model. This game is all about heroics and dramatic actions.
There’s plenty of gear; 50 pages or so. The gear chapter gets straight to the point by listing different types of ammunition. The ammunition includes such items as bolt rounds, mag rounds and minirockets. In the course of a Bulldogs! game there will be many explosions. It’s not all combat though, the Sci-Fi game has basic items like hammers and poles (two RPG standards!) as well as infrared goggles, jump packs, spacer outfits and other hi-tech trappings.
The combat section is updated to handle all the extra twists and turns the genre provides. For example, I pointed out the jump packs in the Gear chapter and so the Combat chapter has rules for attackers diving down from overhead.
There’s combat and then there’s spaceship combat. Bulldogs! has rules for the latter as well. In addition, Bulldogs! has rules for creating your own spaceship. As with the alien races this is the way to go; the emphasis is on creating your own, this helps forge a cosmopolitan galaxy and makes it easy to fulfil that classic fantasy of Sci-Fi RPG – the design of the perfect PC spaceship. By providing some pre-made spacecraft Bulldogs! makes life easy and comfortable too. Busy GMs don’t have to start from scratch and can take these spaceships off the shelf, these spaceships are likely to be common in the galaxy now and GMs have something to compare their own constructs against.
The last chapter in the Sci-Fi RPG is devoted to actually running the game. This is a useful section to have. Here have campaign ideas, plot considerations, the possible role of the military, colonies and party balance.
Bulldogs! finishes with a hefty index and precise character sheet.
Bulldogs! really turns things around. The introduction really had me worried; chunky, clunky and in danger of slipping into amateur enthusiasm. It’s perhaps suitable that by the end of the book that enthusiasm was transferred over to me. I do enjoy my political RPGs and the twist in the tale is that I can see Bulldogs! being easy to treat in this way. Any Cold War situation is already soaked in tension and politics. Create a frontier planet, which is naturally right in the middle of the Cold War, it is the Iron Curtain, and any drama you set there will be rich with political possibilities. Running an action game in Bulldogs! should be as easy as falling off a space log. It’s Bulldogs! long term lastability which holds for the greatest concern. Action games will rocket players up through the character levels. GMs will have to set a careful pace and then cope with increased escalation of threat and danger. At high levels there are no obvious threats to the players without threatening to turn the Cold War into a Hot War and that means messing around with the tension that keeps Bulldogs! interesting.
