The next game in the awards is River of Heaven, written by John Ossoway
and published by D101 Games.
Set in the 28th century, it’s about the ongoing story of
humanities struggle to find their place amongst the stars. The system is not far removed from BRP, with
options to generate characters using points based generation as well as random
generation, and a wealth of character options, special abilities, enhancements
and other goodies to take on the merry jaunt through the stars.
The book is mostly about the rules of the universe, there are separate
sections for characters, weapons, enhancements, vehicles and starships, so many
that you would not be likely to need to make a rule up for any given
situation. With so much space devoted to
the rules of the game, you’d expect that comparatively little would be given
over to the background of the world that the characters find themselves
in. However, this game makes sure that you have absolutely
everything you need, from NPC stats to vehicle build rules, to the nature of
what worlds are out there, where you’ll find them and what you’ll find on them.
While it’s good to have all the information that you need for a
universe to hand, beyond a few pages of adventure hooks, there wasn’t any part
of it that hinted at a bigger picture, nothing that drew the judges in to want
to play in that world. For the
experienced GM’s, the amount of information and background presented made it
very easy to build games and make them compelling, but for the beginners,
something to get them into the game beyond the few pages of plot hooks would
have been very appreciated.
In a recurring theme through most of this years entries, there isn’t
much in the way of artwork in the book, layout is excellent and the binding of
the books is very good, but most of the pages are taken up in large amounts of
text. Given the way the book is
presented, indicating that you can and will find absolutely anything out there,
the lack of visual specifics doesn’t hamper the feel of the setting as much as some
thought it might.
And with that, to the Judges comments
The writings good, there’s plenty of atmosphere here but it has the
feel of a menu driven universe rather than a living breathing construct...
Liked a lot of the ideas presented, there’s the feel of Iain M Banks
culture to it and it wouldn’t take much work to make a good campaign...
It’s presented very much like a working universe, rather than something
where space ships and ray guns are special things, it feels like you need to
work for your place in the game, rather than being something special, and that
by itself makes it stand out from other games...