Of Pirates and Airships: An RPG Review
I am a rabid fanboy of the steampunk band Abney Park; I've followed them for 6 years, own two signed posters, all of their CD's, and a few shirts. They were my inspiration for my Fanime costume back in 2010, and are one of the few things that have stuck with me through my tumultuous high-school years. So when I heard Abney Park were releasing a Role-Playing Game based on their adventures in a bleak and oppressive future, I jumped for joy. For months I waited on pins and needles, until I finally received an email announcing pre-sale, and that the first 300 people to order would receive their copy signed. The book was released in August, and arrived on my doorstep in the first two weeks of September.
This review will be broken up into three major categories. First, a review of the book itself, it doesn't matter how good your material is, if you can't communicate or entice new buyers, you'll never get anyone to play your game. Second is a review of the rules, because a pretty book won't work with terrible, overly complex, or confusing rules. Last is a review of the content the book gives, and how easy it is to create and play game worlds.
The Book
As is par for the course with Abney Park, the cover is a heavy mix of dark browns and brass, all very warm colors. The Band's flag ship, H.M.S. Ophelia, takes up the lower half of the cover. The top is taken up by the Band's logo, the name of the game, and a credit to Captain Robert Brown himself.
My one complaint is that the dark clouds and heavy use of dark brown can be forbidding, and a bit ugly to look at. I know it's supposed to be like that, but it seems like the kind of thing that would turn off people who didn't know what they were looking for.
The pictures and the overall design of the book are excellent. There are a few hiccups, like a picture of some Imperial Air Navy troops in the beginning. The three, assumed to be an Air Navy Marine, Marine Officer, and Air Navy Officer, are all squat and smashed. Their faces are scrunchy looking, and they are generally creepy. However, this is an exception to the rule. The artists working on this book clearly put in a lot of time and effort. There are schematics behind the writing, little notes that mimic the side bars of D20 books.
There are two errors in the beginning of the book. If this were created by the band itself, I would call those errors the side effects of a novices first outing. However Cubicle 7 is a professional publisher of multiple RPG's, Was the proof reader taking a break and accidentally skipped a couple pages? Is it a printing error that came to be due to a bad typist? Is it just in their Piratey nature?
The book does actually have some small jokes here and there. Things like "When rolling at a handful of dice at a moment of high drama, players are encouraged to shout 'ARRRR!' in a piratical fashion. This has not effect on dice rolls, but can be quite satisfying." That you can't help but chuckle at. It's a joy to read, and not just for the pictures.
I'd give the book itself a B. It has some errors, and sometimes the art gets grubby, but it doesn't detract too much from the quality.
Rules
I just want to get this out here, I love the rules for Airship Pirates. It's an easy system to get new players hooked on, for a casual game with friends, or a bunch of hard core role-players to gather around for. Best of all, it's cheap to play. Anyone who has an abundance of board games has all the materials they need to crew their first airship. That material is more valuable than gold, more powerful than gunpowder, it decides the fate of entire worlds. That material is six sided dice, which Pirates hoards like a small child hoard candy on Halloween night.
There are two kinds of six sided dice in AP, normal dice, which should generally be one color, and "black dice" which don't need to be black but should be a different color. The normal dice represent a single point in things like stats or skills, or damage on a weapon, where as black dice represent an obstacle challenging the player. When a player wants to do something, for instance punching another surly pirate, he has to make a roll. He adds his strength and brawl skills (Ex. 2+4) and rolls the total number as individual dice (6 total= 6 dice). If he rolls a 1 or a 6 on any of the dice, he gets a success. He only needs one success to complete the task, and he gets to reroll any 6, meaning he may roll more than just 6 dice. The player rolls 2 fours, 2 ones, a five, and a three. That means he got two successes, and lands a clean punch on the mans jaw.
Black dice come in when there is something beyond the player's control that could mess up their chances at success. These dice are rolled along with the dice a player normally rolls, but they count as failures. Take the above example, but let's say the player was also rather drunk. As a result, he rolls three black dice as well. He gets 2 ones and a six. Sixes are not re-rolled on black dice, but still count as a failure, meaning he got 3 failures to his 2 successes. That means in the end, the player got a -1 success, likely hurting himself in the process.
There are also fate points for rolling extra dice or creating favorable situations. These are very reminiscent of actions point from D20 games, or the Plot Points in The Serenity RPG. In fact, a lot is similar to The Serenity RPG and at first I was under the impression both had been published by Cubicle 7. While I was mistaken it wouldn't take much conversion to change AP over to a polished version of Serenity. The skills, traits and drawbacks, and ship building, all seem to borrow heavily from Serenity, while adding tweaks that improve overall ease of play.
Skills are divided under backgrounds, which are divided among the three given races. There are the Neobedouins, the Neovictorians, and the Skyfolk. From there there are sub-races, like mutants (Misbegotten), Robots (Automatas), and various class systems. Certain background are exclusive to certain races or sub-races. This means if you want a specific skill set provided by one of the backgrounds, you'll have to select a race that doesn't necessarily seem balanced. The Neovictorians get -1 to fortitude in all incarnations, but the Skyfolk gain +1 Reflex, +1 wisdom, and +1 in two different skills. While it is easily fixed, and only slightly balanced in the Skyfolk's favor (Chuno Ggun, Factory worker, Beast Dancer, ect. aren't available to Skyfolk) It reminds me of Wizards in Third edition Dungeons and Dragons. Sorcerers sounded cool, but then you found out by fourth level wizards could do everything you could do, and better. That is to say, there wasn't really balance there either.
But all that aside, the rules are still pretty solid, and only need little tweaks that can be overall ignored. I give it an A, and that is leaving out a massive amount of good rules the game brings to play, like Crew Schtiks and health ticks.
Content
Is the world Captain Robert built a pulse pounding engine designed to thrill, or is it barren but for a few lonely nerds in the corner? That's always the ultimate question, and the answer is yes. This game won't sell well for a while, I know that from the start. Despite the band's popularity with Steam-Punkers, we're a subculture, and an expensive one at that. The book set me back $50 alone, my costume was made of scrapped bits, and sat pretty far on the "Terrible" side of the spectrum. So I do not see many people picking up and playing this.
However it is so easy to do so! There is an entire section in the back devoted to the Game master, which is par for the course in these sorts of books. However, it provides an example adventure, a map for the adventure, an example of the deck plan of a ship, and a map of the North American Territories. There is also an in depth time-line, that mostly focuses on North America, broad descriptions with in-depth examples of every culture, and all the information you would need to create your own city.
North America is by far the most fleshed out of the settings, and even then it leaves a lot of room for creating your own Sky-cities and tribes of Neobedouins. The 3 Change Cage cities have already been given names and locations, but only one has really been fleshed out in any detail. This allows potential GM's to create their own situations within the cities, instead of having to play based on rigid archetypes.
The history has an entire chapter devoted to it. Turns out the band Abney Park messed up the timeline by preforming some genuinely good deed in the past. This allowed Victor Hypocrates to rise to power, and take over the world while no one was looking. While the information presented in the Timelines chapter again does a lot to flesh out the world, it is in a very 'take it or leave it' fashion. for instance, there have been 3 Emperor Victor Hypocrates since he took over the world, but why couldn't they all just be clones of the original? He did release Uberbeasts that wiped out much of the world's population, but if you're a really good airship pirate you'll never even set foot on the ground. Or you could greatly reduce the number of them, which could make them more scary. Or make them genetically weeded out, rapidly growing smaller with each new generation as their unstable genetic structure better adapts to their environment. In essence, you have all these cool monsters and villains and ideas presented to you, but it's really easy to just use what you like, with very little adjustment needed. And did I mention time travel?
This is just another solid, well explained, and well written part of the book. It is a joy to play, and writing a fun story is easy, with the book helping you along like a good teacher. They stay close enough to make sure the pieces fit, but far enough that you can make your own mistakes, and see what works for you and your friends. I give this section another A-.
Overall
In the end, Abney Park: Airship Pirates has some typos and some strange rules, also a shorter list of equipment than I would like, but it's a solid game. It is easy to pick up and play, even for total beginners, the book is self contained, the content is extensive without railroad the player into using anything a certain way, and players and Gm's will have a lot of fun. For 50$ at abneypark.com, I would say it's worth a look, if you have listened to their music before. Otherwise, go listen to the music, then buy a copy. And if RPG's aren't your thing, then why did you read my whole review?
