Blood and Space

Game: Blood and Space
Publisher: RPGObjects
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 20th, January 2003
Reviewer’s Rating: 8/10   [ Really good ]
Total Score: 8
Average Score: 8.00

Blood and Space is all about spaceships. It’s all about building and staffing your spaceship, about equipping it with the best in computers and defences and dodging around planets and gravity wells in a dogfight with rival space pirates. Blood and Space isn’t a game in its own right, although I do feel you could use it to run a tactical wargame campaign in space.

You can run Blood and Space with either the fantasy core rules or D20 Modern and that’s a bonus. Blood and Space does a lot of things right. Heck, Blood and Space does an awful lot of things; there’s a whole host of rules in the supplement.

Blood and Space also distinguish between the nitty-gritty, as scientifically accurate as possible, sci-fi and the go with the flow, high action, space opera. Many Sci-Fi games give you one, the other or a bad mauling of both but Blood and Space gives you both separately.

There are two sets of engines; one hard sci-fi and the other space opera and there are two sets of weapons; one hard sci-fi and the other space opera. You’re left to pick your favourite from the two sub-genres. This works well for me; the supplement does all the hard work and I’m left to cherry-pick.

There’s a big long contents section at the start of the product and that’s just what you want in a PDF. The bookmarks are complete too; expanding lists based on chapters.

I don’t like the resize option though; whenever you jump to a bookmark the page resizes. It moves from Fit to Width to Fit in Window. In my case, it takes a clearly readable page to resize to an unreadable 81% scale. Blood and Space is 118 pages in length and PDFs this long without bookmarks are a nightmare to navigate so despite the resizing, I’m glad they’re there.

There are seventeen new classes, nine basic classes and eight new prestige classes. It’s a little tricky getting all the usual sci-fi suspects into the class and prestige class structure.

For example, both Hotshot pilots and Pilots are basic classes and Marine Commander, Marine NCO and Colonial Marine are all prestige classes. It’s almost as if there should be a class in between the two, perhaps something similar to “Character Concepts” seen in other books.

However, Blood and Space makes the point of not re-inventing the wheel and of trying to keep things as simple as possible. This is a good call and probably rules out too much fiddling with the d20 system to get it to fit careers in the far future.

By and large, these classes are a success; there’s a reason to play every one of them, nothing looks broken and there’s no awkward “really wouldn’t be adventuring” career either (such as the allegedly Grove protecting Druid).

The most obvious failing is the lack of academic prestige classes. There’s no natural progression for Engineers, Doctors or Scientists. It seems that if you want to get ahead in space you need to be a marine or a pilot.

Skills and feats share a chapter together. There are as nearly as many pages of new skills (eight) as there are of feats (seven). The quantity of new skills ensures that space adventures are possible.

You’ll find more than the predictable sci-fi additions here like Computer Use, Repair and Demolitions. Skills like Boarding, Sensor Operations and Navigation (Hyperspace) add a bit of spice and flare. We start to see the first of the genre tagging here; Navigation (Hyperspace) is marked as suitable for Space Opera because in Hard Sci-Fi there is no Hyperspace.

There’s also a nice advantage in setting out a long list of new skills alongside a long list of new character classes; the class skill lists are straight from the start. The heroics of Space Opera lend themselves well to feats but Hard Sci-Fi grit does not.

You’ll see that in the lack of Hard Sci-Fi feats and the quantity of Space Opera feats. It isn’t a problem though as there are enough General feats that are suitable for both. There’s a small set of Tactic feats too.

The equipment chapter is far more than a mere list of equipment. There isn’t a huge list of different weapons, armour and gadgets. I think this might disappoint some of the tech-heads.

Blood and Space takes the approach of listing one of a type of weapon or armour, or sometimes two in the form of both a pistol and a rifle. So rather than inventing different brand names and nuisances for a whole bunch of laser rifles, there is just an IR Laser Rifle and an X-Ray Laser Rifle.

Later on, we find out we can equip spaceships with UV Lasers. This is just enough science; it’s not so much as to make the game a physics lesson but it is enough to keep the Science in Sci-Fi. Although there aren’t long lists of space-age stuff there is enough in each equipment category to warrant a list summary. I think there’s enough to keep shopping interesting.

The highlight of the equipment chapter for me is the attention given to economics. Attention, yes, but again not so much as to turn the game into a school lesson, just enough to keep it interesting. Credits and the role of bartering are explained.

Extra rules, for the likes of Charisma bonuses, when wheeling and dealing, are offered and there’s a big bit on trade too. If you have fond memories of Elite and are looking to Blood and Space to revisit them then you’ll be in luck.

We begin the study on Starships with a sub-section on how to afford one in the first place.

In fact, you can make a whole campaign out of trying to finance your first starship and even then the characters might find themselves with an awkward lease. Something that all sci-fi games need to get right is the rules for spaceship construction.

Blood and Space tries to do this within its straight forward framework and is largely successful. The complexities of Starships are reduced down into five key areas: the hull, the drive, weapons, computers and facilities.

There are lists for each of these things and as with the weapons and armour they’re presented by type rather than some imaginary name – with the exception of the drive.

For example, you might pick between hull design “Military #2” or “Military #3” but your star drive may be between “Pollux” or “Vega”. It’s deceptive. At first glance it doesn’t look as if there is much choice or art to spaceship design but there’s more to it.

Weapon ports are the obvious example; it’s not just a matter of finding a hull with lots of weapon ports but a hull that can support the size of weapons you want.

Then there’s cargo space. It seems like an easy thing to do without to begin with but when you add facilities like medical centres, gymnasiums or gun turrets you’ll need a hull able to carry a lot.

You’ll want medical centres and gymnasium on a large vessel too and not just gun turrets. There are two types of damage a ship’s crew can receive, physical and morale. Both are bad. The medical centre heals the first and the gymnasium (and other similar recreational perks) heals the second.

I was really pleased to see a whole section for computers. Computers must be important in a starship and have played key roles in sci-fi ever since Orac stole the show in Blake’s 7, if not before. The computer rules in Blood and Space are a stab in the right direction but don’t quite work for me. In short, a computer can run as many programs as it has an Intelligence modifier.

Programs include viruses, anti-viruses, targeting, navigation, knowledge bases, etc. What about life support? Is that a freebie? Can one program do both anti-virus and navigation?

Surely you’re doomed unless you build a +2 computer and spend the first slot on anti-virus protection. Can you have more than one computer in a spacecraft: one for navigation and the other for targeting? I couldn’t find out. As I started to read the computer rules I was immediately inspired – so the ground rules are right; they just need more work.

Crews are important. Crews have something to do in Blood and Space. The masses of unnamed crew that might be found in the large spacecraft are broken down into job categories. You have the helm, science, medical, engineering, marines, damage control, flight and weapons crew.

The crew also has different levels of experience, everything through raw recruits, to experienced crew and to legendary crews. You can issue different sets of orders to the crew and how successfully they carry their orders out and how much babysitting they need from PCs (or named NPCs) depends on their experience.

You might tell your engineers to put “emergency powers to shields” – and that’s a sample order in Blood and Space that comes with game rules for doing just that. You might set your marines off to board and capture an enemy vessel or have your fighter pilots escort your big starship through dangerous space. Since boarding is possible then crew versus crew combat is possible.

The rules for this just about work; they’re not skirmishing rules but a further abstraction. There’s an example of crew combat that really does help see how the authors imagine the system working. The crew can gain experience (mostly through beating things up) and demand wages.

The last chapter describes starship combat. There’s a little muddle over maps with squares, hexes or octagons. A square has four sides and four corners and an octagon eight. So on page 94 where the supplement is considering how the rules for spaceship manoeuvrability are affected by your choice of map and when we’re told a ship can come about 360 degrees by turning through eight points on a square map – we’re not being lied to.

A ship could make the turn in four moves as well though. Really though I shouldn’t start with that nit-pick. The spacecraft combat rules do work. Blood and Space sticks with its goal of not introducing confusing rules. Space ship combat is modelled on normal combat and it is really easy to follow. From this strong base added extras like dodging mines (or blasting through them), guided weapons and complexities of combat in Hyperspace tag on nicely.

Blood and Space concludes with some sample starships – further proof that there is flexibility in the design system – which are nicely presented on special space ship character sheets.

You’ll recognise the illustrations though as they’ve been used elsewhere in the supplement. We get a blank starship character sheet (easy to print off) of our own too.

Blood and Space works. It’s rules for designing, staffing and fighting in space ships of all sizes work. The crew rules add an important element that seems all too often forgotten about and this addition comes without too much complexity. Including both Hard Sci-Fi and Space Opera but keeping them as separate options throughout the download also works. The inclusion of basic and prestige classes along with skills and feats ensures that Blood and Space is the only added extra you’ll need on top of one set of d20 rules to play in space.