Ok, so here is the last (for a while) review of the various Flying Mice products I have received thus far, or at least the last one until they send me more! BTW, Clash, send me more! Hah!

The game in question is FTL Now, by Clash Bowley, Albert Bailey and John Snead (the same John Snead who did Blue Rose? Somehow I suspect it to be a different John Snead, given this game's utter lack of PC craptacularity).  The company is Flying Mice Games, and I'm reviewing the print edition.

First of all, since the actual mechanics of this game are identical to Cold Space, I am simply going to refer you to my review of that game from a couple of weeks ago, if you want to hear about the mechanics, their good spots, and their various kinks..

Indeed, FTL Now is a sequel of sorts to Cold Space, set in the same universe, but picking up where Cold Space left off.  Cold Space was all about the cold war in space, and its timeline ends in 1990 with the collapse of the Soviet Union.  The basic premise of the game is that its an alternate history, where Faster Than Light travel was discovered around 1950, and from there history progressed parallel to ours.. except much more spacey. That is to say, the Cold War and all its major events still happened, only the cold war was also fought in outer space.  FTL Now continues on that vein, where by 1990 mankind is spread out all over space up to 20 light years away (a voyage that takes weeks, so its not exactly star-wars speeds we're talking about here, but much faster than actual modern day physics could hope), with dozens of extra-solar colonies, not to mention the ones on the Moon, Mars, and the various asteroids and moons of our solar system.

The book's production values are good, the book is a good sturdy palladiumesque softcover, the sort of thing that I can bet will last for years even under heavy use (as indeed, my Robotech books have lasted), with a very pretty full colour cover that's a collage of different doctored photographs supposedly showing scenes from the setting.  The interior is relatively well laid-out, all black and white with some nice photographic doctoring (I'd love to know who the very sexy chick in the alien jungle on p.29 is) and some drawings, as well as some very neat maps of the different planetary colonies.   I mean, I know its very geeky, but there's nothing like maps of different planets in a hard sci-fi game to make me salivate.

The feel of the setting is very Travelleresque, with a kind of hard feel to it, relatively low tech for sci-fi, none of the artificial gravity nonsense, no advanced alien races (there's a single intelligent alien species found that are basically at the level of cavemen as far as development when humanity finds them and promptly starts to exploit them), no lightsabres; but lots of travelling around as military, or space merchants, or pirates, or spies, or reporters, or just about anything else you could imagine fitting into a good game of Traveller.  The character creation system is even a little Travelleresque, with your character developing skills based on how many years of prior history you give him. The older you are, the more skilled you are, but, well, the older you are.

Now, how does the alternate history go? Throughout the nineties, other than technology, things go pretty well like they did in our world. Clinton was still president, still had the stupid "scandal" with the dress, still led the US through the best economic boom it ever had, etc. etc.  Hootie and the Blowfish were presumably never tried for their crimes against humanity, everyone presumably still watched "Friends", though the show may have been set on Mars in this setting, we're not sure.  People were all travelling around in flying cars, though, and vacationing on the moon or on Alpha Centauri.

The point where history diverges, and where things get slightly silly, is on September 11th. In this setting, September 11th still happened, but instead of terrorists ramming planes into New York's skyline, terrorists rammed a fucking comet into, well, New York.

I don't know if its a case of it being "too soon" (probably about 20 or 30 years too soon, I'd bet), or that it all just seems a bit too contrived, but here is also where I feel that FTL Now becomes a game that is less appealing to me than Cold Space.  It stretches my suspension of disbelief into a wafer-thin margin, if not snapping it altogether. It just seems cheesy, and not something I'm sure I'd be able to play with a straight face, or ask my players to buy into.

At least, the consequences are sufficiently grave.  Hundreds of thousands of people die instantly, and possibly billions die in the next couple of years.  In this setting, instead of the rest of the world showing an initial outpouring of support to the United States, you have the Oikumene (the colonies of earth in space) showing an initial outpouring of support to the whole world. And instead of George Bush singlehandedly fucking that up and turning America into a pariah in the world stage, you have Earth as a whole singlehandedly fucking that up, and turning resentful and highly isolationist.  This means that if you play FTL now after 2001 (and the game includes details on a potential future timeline up to around 2040), you have an isolationist, wounded and profoundly backwards planet Earth with a latent hostility toward the prosperous and growing diaspora of humanity in space.

At least, I'll admit, this has a lot of roleplay potential. It creates a setting that could be fascinating for social plotlines, as the PCs play earthlings trying to survive on Earth, or going out into space and discovering a very different mentality than what they were taught about the Oikumene, or spacers who are dealing with being essentially cut off from their homeworld, looking ever more outward rather than backwards to the Earth for guidance; perhaps with a party from the Oikumene having to visit Earth and confronting the misery and xenophobia of their mother world. I could even see an eventual RPG completing a trilogy for this game/setting where you move the action forward a few hundred years and find a peaceful and prosperous Oikumene having to face a war with not an evil alien menace, but with a Terran government that has rebuilt itself and positioned itself as highly hostile toward all the colonies.

The problem is that it all springs from what feels to me like some serious Cheese. Lots of roleplay potential (survivors on earth, refugees from the disaster trying to adjust to life in space, spacers trying to deal with the problems from said massive influx of refugees, etc etc.), but still Cheese.

The die-off on Earth, by the way,  is caused mainly by initial impact, the tsunamis and earthquakes that follow when the Ring of Fire goes nuts following the impact, the perpetual winter lasting a couple of years, along with the onset of a new ice age.  Asia, Europe, and North America are devastated.  This means that in this future timeline the big world power that emerges is, curiously enough, South America, as Hugo Chavez manages to fulfill his dream of a Bolivarean South American alliance, that weather through the disaster with the least amount of casualties, and end up the most prosperous continent in a very fucked up world.

At least in that sense the game is very accurate: pretty much the only fucking way Hugo Chavez could possibly fulfill his ambitions or South America could become a world power is if the earth was hit by an extinction-level event.

As with Cold Space, the game includes some really great rules for rapid NPC creation, some very complete (perhaps too complete) skill listings, and it has some expanded details on Starships and Starship travel to fit the larger scope and more advanced tech of the post- Coldwar setting.

You also get to see all of the maps and planetary details of the moon, mars, and extrasolar colonies with new material from what ends up being added or changing since 1990, as well as a bunch of newer colonies that are completely novel additions, places that humanity reaches since the end of the Cold War.  Lots of good detail on how the ex-soviet space colonies change after the fall of the USSR (some of them modernize relatively well, like some of the Eastern Bloc did, some of them go all to hell, like the various "-stans" and other states did on earth, and a few even end up staying old-style Soviet when a group of hardline Soviets flee to space and continue to operate a hardline Communist state from a colony called "Refuge" that had specifically been hidden for just such an occasion). In all, we're talking some 66 pages of very cool setting material.

Finally, you get a bunch of cool optional rules to toolkit the game to be as crunchy or non-crunchy as you want it to be, and a good reference chart of all of humanity's space holdings.

In all, I still like FTL Now, and I can't deny that it has the same great quality of the other Flying Mice games I've read/reviewed. It has a lot less of the James Bond aspect that Cold Space has, but a lot more of the Traveller stuff, and the fact that you can now have small ships doing merchant runs and that kind of thing make it an even better game for a "rogue trader" kind of game. There's lots of possibilities for exploration, trading, war, or political intrigue. And I even get why they chose to make 9-11 be the way it was in this game, its part of that whole "our own history, but different" vibe, only it feels to me like its somewhat over the top.
If you can't get past the cheesyness of that premise, then you might have a problem with the game.  Even so, if you like Cold Space, or you like everything else I've said about the game setting, its still a game that's well worth buying for idea mining, or to change the details of the timeline to suit your tastes.  Hell, even just changing the actual date of said disaster could have been enough to make it way less implausible-feeling. So there's a lot of ways you can fix this particular detail of the game if you wanted to, and the game and setting itself make it worth the effort.

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Castello Natural Virgin G-line + Comoy's English Mixture
 

I left this same comment on your Xanga site:

The John Snead in the credits is indeed the same John Snead who wrote Blue Rose, and I think he did a fantastic job on FTL Now. I don't know Blue Rose at all - perhaps he was writing it to a specification and not to his own tastes? I know I gave him his head on FTL Now, aside from mandating the comet impact on New York on 9/11 2001, and there's nothing PC about it.

I'll be sending you StarCluster 2 next, along with the Big Book o' Tech and the Big Book o' Social Stuff.

-clash

So the physical quality is okay? I'm kinda reluctant ordering from lulu.com, as I've had some bad experiences with print-on-demand businesses in the past. And if it ain't hard-copy, it won't get used

I've seen it, and it looks good. My only complain is that the maps' grayscale is a bit messed up (quite possibly, they're colour maps originally).

Quote from: JongWKI've seen it, and it looks good. My only complain is that the maps' grayscale is a bit messed up (quite possibly, they're colour maps originally).

Exactly, Jong. They just didn't translate as well as I hoped.

Sosthenes, Lulu's cover and binding is superior. It does remind me of Palladium's covers, which last forever. After almost three years of heavy use, the covers of Blood Games and StarCluster 2 are almost as nice as when I got them.

-clash

The games certainly look like they'd be sturdy, as sturdy as my trusty old Palladium books, certainly sturdier than most of the stupid ultrapretty-hardcover game books you get today, that are all falling apart within a couple of months of dedicated use.

Fuck why can't gaming companies go back to softcover?! FUCKING COLLECTORS how I hate them... :rant:

RPGPundit

Hi Pundit!

StarCluster 2, The Big Book o' Tech, and the Big Book o' Social Stuff are now winging toward you via howler monkey express. Enjoy!

-clash