Next in my series of reviews in the, "Great things come in small packages!" category is: X-plorers by Dave Bezio.
I own the PDF and print versions of X-plorers and let me start by saying, if you own a free version of the game, it's well worth your money to upgrade. This book is gorgeous! Art, layout, editing, everything in the Brave Halfling Publishing edition of this game is excellent and professional. X-plorers' production values are second to none. It scores a perfect 5 out of 5 for style and presentation. And at a petite 39 pages, X-plorers is the epitome of quality over quantity. This is how every RPG should be done.
X-plorers is a science fiction themed space exploration RPG. The game feels like a good balance of science fantasy and space opera and I think it could handle anything from Star Trek to Firefly to Starship Troopers to Star Wars inspired star-faring adventure pretty well.
Characters are defined through four primary attributes that range from 3 to 18 and familiar terms like initiative, armor class, saving throws, and hit points, all work as you'd expect. The four base character classes are good fits for the genre and the skill system looks to be perfect for the OSR feel the game is shooting for.
Basically skills work like old school saving throws. You have target numbers based upon your character class. As you level up the target numbers go down making the skill checks easier to hit. Clean, simple, very old school. It makes the game easy to play, easy to maintain. It's the kind of thing I want at my gaming table.
The rules include space ship and world design, space combat, psionic powers, alien creature and robot design, everything you'd want to see in a scifi RPG with the possible exception of cyber-punk style trimmings, but I feel like that's really a separate genre anyway.
The next time I want to run a SciFi RPG, I will definitely turn to X-plorers. It can easily handle anything a more complex game like Traveller can do with a fraction of the book keeping.
Get X-plorers HERE ... It's awesome!
Regards,
Jeff
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