Blast From The Past: Fantastic Worlds - Pulp Action In The Far Reaches Of Space

Have raygun, will travel!

As I’ve mentioned, I love those old serials and pulps involving rockets, rayguns, and all that good stuff. While it’s something of an acquired taste, it seems like several people who got into gaming have the same taste. However, they seem to be few and far between. I find it easier to locate RPGs that involve the setting, so imagine my surprise when I stumbled across this minis game called Fantastic Worlds with some good old pulpy action on the cover.

Using the Pulp 45 game rules, Fantastic Worlds captures the spirit of Rocky Jones: Space Ranger, John Carter Of Mars, and Flash Gordon; allowing for all manner of heroes and villains. This means that the game allows you to replicate many of these different types of settings and characters. There’s characters who are part of an interplanetary police force, people from “modern” Earth who have been transported to strange and alien worlds, aliens from different world, despotic rulers of kingdoms and their minions, and even Amazon warrior women. Oh, and let’s not forget the nobles who ignore their responsibilities to have adventures, as well as mad scientists and their robotic creations. Once you settle on your hero or leader, you get to pick their allies or “supporting cast” meaning your plucky co-pilots, loyal underlings, and so on. After that, there’s your typical grunts and extras that will survive if they’re lucky. That also means that there’s a variety of skills, weapons, and equipment to give to these characters, as well as rules for a few vehicles. Oh, and mounted combat. In case you want to replicate The Hidden Empire, which is an old serial with Singing Cowboys versus Ancient Hidden Empire. I’m not kidding.

Unfortunately, there’s a fair bit of complexity to these characters and equipment. There’s seven main stats, which are going to be modified by the skills, abilities, and equipment that your characters have. Weapons have several range bands, making them vary wildly in terms of effectiveness depends on where your target is. And since this is a d10 system with an unopposed goal of a 10, you better hope that your stats are high enough to make the rules you need to activate some of the abilities or equipment you need. So, you might have problems doing what you want, when you want. To add to complexity, each model is going to have four hit locations (head, torso, arms, and legs), which can take several hits and will effect your stats with each hit. This means that combat is going to drag on for a while, even after you play a few games, and that you’re going to have a lot to remember. All of this also kind of annoys me because it means that I can’t really make character cards using 3x5 cards, like I do for most miniature games I play.

Which brings me to another thing I’ve noticed: this is either a miniatures game that wants to be an RPG or an RPG that wants to be a miniatures game. While they do kind of defray the problems by keeping forces down to 3-7 models per side, there’s still a lot of bookkeeping involved in not only playing but running a campaign, as characters can “level up” to another one of the character types as games go on. It also means that there’s quite a few different scenarios and each one is clearly part of an ongoing story. However, there’s a problem when the situation they’re describing may not match the forces you and your opponent have chosen. For example, one of the scenarios starts right after a regent or king or emperor has been assassinated and the heroes have to try to escape. But, they also provide you with the characters you should use, which is a poor choice for either type of game this one straddles the line between. And, while they do give you ideas for making your own, there’s no hard and fast rules for it. Which feels off. Now, in 45 Adventure/Pulp 45, they do discuss having a GM for your games, but there’s no real exploration for that in the core book.

Oh, that’s right, this game has a source book, Planet X: Terror From Across The Universe. And it’s actually pretty good? The first thing is does is give you some better, hard rules for the various types of common alien races we see in the old stories (except for the inclusion of Greys, which are a more modern invention). After giving you the rules for making your own aliens, they introduce several races that are home to Planet X, so you know what these rules can do, as well as giving the game a more established campaign setting. I don’t know how I feel about that but I don’t hate it. While the flexibility of the game lets you do whatever, having something to look at, to maybe get started with, can help you learn the basics or get someone into the game.

Another thing that this book adds is some better Psychic powers, as well as Psychic character types, and hive alien races, so you can include some more interesting aliens in your games. And things get better when they give you rules to include random alien creatures and monsters. So, if you do want to have a GM, as well as two players, things can get more interesting. 

The last few things the book gives you, aside from new equipment and abilities as you would imagine, is some sample monsters, some interesting scenarios, and campaigns, is a time line of the setting. Which I really liked, because it felt like I was getting two or three different stories with the flavor text in the books.

As much as it may sound that I don’t like this game, I do think it has a place and a use. While it isn’t the raygun gothic game I’ve been looking for, it does have some things going for it. It’s played on a 2x2 board, which are easy to make/build/assemble, and it only needs a handful of models. Since models in this genre have been hard to find (Reaper has perhaps a dozen unique minis in this genre), that isn’t too much of a problem. Personally, I’d like to make a little “Heroic Trio” to go on adventures on strange planets. Even if you don’t have the minis that fit the theme, you can use your fantasy stuff you probably already have, using the Amazons and Tribal groups they name. Even an evil cleirc mini can become a High Priest or Warlord. Just give them some rayguns in their equipment and have at. Also, with the world the way it is these days, you could make this into a solo game with some tweaks, and have some fun on your own. That’s probably what I’m going to do, before too long.

So, if you’re trying not to go out but love this genre, this might be the solo game for you. If you’re looking for a new, smaller project, this could be something to give a try. However, if you’re looking for a skirmish game with rockets and rayguns to play with friends, this isn’t it. That said, I’m going to keep searching for that one. Maybe I’ll find it. Someday.

Let's Review: Rogue Stars

What is it?:

Rogue Stars is a 28mm scale science fiction skirmish game that’s part of Osprey’s “blue book” collection.

The setting:

The setting is a galactic empire that is falling apart, with pirates, mercenaries and others going up against the last few militias and police, while others are defending themselves or perhaps taking advantage of the situation. That’s all that’s really said but you can get some more from the sample groups and persons. For me, the art reminds me of Titan A. E., which is a fun little flick that you might get a kick out of. I enjoy it because it kind of subverts the expectation that humanity will be a power player in galactic affairs.

However, since the system and rules are flexible enough, you can easily make up a setting that fits your models or ideas better. That means I’m using it to play some Raygun Gothic stuff.

 

The system:

Like a lot of systems I’ve been seeing these days, or maybe I’m just reading too many supplements for FrostGrave lately, this one uses a d20 for almost everything. However, it does a lot of things differently than I’ve seen done. To begin, when you want to have a model act, you have to make a roll to see if you get to go. You can roll up to three dice for this but it’s a gamble, as if you fail to make a roll, that gives your opponent a chance to react for each failed roll. And when a model gets to roll for a react, assuming they make their rolls, they get to take their actions before the model that was (is) going to act. While interesting, this is going to screw someone like me, who rolls at or below average. Now, this system is really unique and makes choosing who you want to act (or react) a very important decision, not to mention that you have to choose how many dice to try with. However, it can also mean that you could spend a game with a model that never gets to act or even having your entire force blasted off the board before they get to act. So, yeah, interesting idea but given the variability, or should I say, unreliability of dice rolls, is really going to screw people over.

The random rolls continue, as when you actually hit someone, you have to make another roll to see what kind of damage you do, and then another roll to see where you hit them (because we have hit locations), and then see how badly hurt the place you hit. While this will speed up the more you play, it makes your first few games drag out. Not to mention that there’s a lot of modifiers and tokens that you have to keep track of.

When it comes to making your force, you have a ton of options. There’s almost fifty Traits that models can have, allowing you to make any sort of alien or human. There’s also a ton of weapons, both melee and ranged, equipment, and armor. You can pick up just about any model in your collection and use it in a game. But, that depends on your Theme. There’s ten Themes, giving you a list of Traits you can pick, and what weapons and equipment your models can use. The way these are listed in the book is terribly done and I had to make my own reference sheet, which is why I know how many Traits there are (next up is making a full list of what weapons and equipment each Theme can use, when I get time). I don’t know if this was done for balance, because it really doesn’t feel like it, more like the creator was really focused on making it a THEME, if you get what I mean.

How many minis do I get in my team? Well, you get 200 points to build a force of 4-6 minis, with a minimum of 30 points per minis and a maximum of 70, or so. Unfortunately, this means that your teams are going to have models that do one thing, really. Not doing it the best, just having one thing that they’re going to have a focus because you can’t really give them everything they need to really be good at it. Well, that’s really my feeling on it. I mean, you team would probably be about five minis, which gives you roughly 40 points per model, and the lower end armor that you want is 14 points. Add in a single weapon (which you want more than one, because you’re going to have them dropped or knocked out of hands), and that’s going to be almost half your points for a single model. Of course, you can make one big bad model supported by some cheaper ones, but remember that you don’t know if that big guy is going to be able to act. Ever.

One thing I feel compelled to mention is the lack of rules for vehicles. Personally, I don’t feel the need right now but this the one thing I’ve heard from at least one person everywhere I asked. I mean, yeah, I have some minis on motorcycles that I’d like to use but I don’t think that the games lacking without them.

 

Is it worth it?:

Yes.

Okay, yeah, I kind of made it sound bad but it’s $20 and does work out of the box, so to speak. For the problems it does have, you can modify things easily enough to make it work for what you want. For me, that’s upping the teams to 250 points and maybe modifying the Themes a bit. Not too much work. I do wish that the book had spent a bit more time with an editor and maybe had some more play testing but it’s not too bad. While the creator has mentioned that there’s going to be an expansion (to the point where it’s something of a meme about how it’s coming “soon”), I think moving it up to the hardback section and fixing and expanding things, like Gaslands, this game could be a real success. So, maybe pick it up now, help fix the problems, have some fun, and see what happens.