Thousand Suns

Ok I believe the other reviewer has covered most everything about TS. I will just give my impressions of the game in general; The game sets out to be very generic and universe neutral (which it does well), there is at the back of the book the basis for a Meta-plot setting which is very adaptable or can just be dropped by anyone looking to do their own setting. I like the basis of the game and is a great alternative to say Traveler or Space Opera by FGU, I just wish they would have put everythin in one book, instead we have to wait for Starship creation and Vehicle creation rules all they had to do was run the book to 300 pages and it would have been able to include even sample aliens and NPC/Creature stats which are not included, you have to design your own, which is odd considering there are no design rules for animals. IMO it is a good start but needs some expansions, the dice mechanics are quite simple and there are a few typos, but not many, their website has a free download errata sheet, 2 pages, not allot of errata though. All in all, a good non-traveller rpg.

James Maliszewski's "Thousand Suns" RPG is a game for which I've been waiting a long time, and I didn't even realize it. Some of my passions as a teenager were the novels of Isaac Asimov, H. Beam Piper and Pournelle/Niven, and; roleplaying games such as "Traveller" (for sci-fi) and Steve Jackson's "The Fantasy Trip" (a very accessible alternative at the time to D & D). At the time, Traveller seemed like a good way to mix the RPG experience with the grand Imperial Space Navies of the books I loved, but for some reason it never completely clicked for me. Too much number crunching, and the atmosphere of the game didn't feel right unless you were playing in the Imperium setting. SPI's "Universe" could have been a contender, but it was a little too dry with virtually no atmosphere, and SPI died soon after in any case. For me, it seemed that nearly 30 years passed with no real hope of finding the right SF RPG. "Thousand Suns" has changed all that. It's like they got into my head! The rules, using their own 12° game mechanics (as opposed to something like D20) are lightweight and very accessible. It's extremely easy to quickly create some characters with great depth and background. Where "Thousand Suns" really shines, though, is how it handles the setting of the game. In some ways it's very minimal, allowing the GM to superimpose nearly any "Imperial SF" style setting (established or their own) into the game. At the same time, it's not generic. Maliszewski gives the reader just enough structure and resources that the game is definitely geared toward establishing the atmosphere I was looking for. He does define a "Meta Setting" with its own history, organizations, aliens and so on (a good one at that, sort of a "Best of All Worlds" approach), but the reader won't feel compelled to use it word for word. It's simply a great set of resources. As I said, Character Creation is fast and novel, gameplay is as well. The rules aren't exceptionally crunchy, definitely "role" as opposed to "roll". The only thing that feels a little too light are guidelines and rules for World Creation and Starship Construction. Admittedly, I bring my Traveller expectations to this game, so I was looking for a little more depth in these sections; at least on par with the detail and options made available for Characters. The good news is that some of this should be remedied very soon by Rogue Games' follow-up books, "Pilot's Guide to the Core Worlds" and "Fighting Ships of the Thousand Suns". They should flesh out the details a little deeper. Nevertheless, what's there now is enough, so I don't want to imply that "Thousand Suns" isn't a complete game. A few small criticisms I must mention. The book really needed better reference sections. The Table of Contents is chapter titles only, and there is no Index. Also, the editing should have been a little tighter. Section and Topic headers are hard to distinguish, and there are a small number of typos and omissions that require a