Full Disclosure: Stellagama Publishing sent me a coupon for a hard copy of Faster Than Light: Nomad at cost after one I bought from Lulu.com was … not right. Otherwise I have received no compensation for this review.
Introduction
Stellagama Publishing’s Faster Than Light: Nomad provides a toolbox for space traveling, star-hopping adventures without the fiddly detail of some other systems in the same genre.
DriveThruRPG sells the core book and a free quickstart.
Basics
In Nomad’s core mechanic, players “throw” two six-sided dice and add the bonus from one of their Skills: A total of 8 or more is a success; a total less than 8 is a failure.
To represent positive and negative factors players roll with dice of Advantage or Disadvantage. To throw with Advantage, players roll all dice and keep the highest two; to throw with Disadvantage, players roll all dice and keep the lowest two.
In other 2d6-based games, players and GMs have to adjust the die roll or the target number to indicate positive and negative influences on the probability of success. This can get a bit arithmetic-intensive. In Nomad, the dice do the math: the player just compares the sum of the two remaining dice and a skill bonus to 8.
Characters
In Nomad characters have seven skills: Combat, Knowledge, Physical, Social, Stealth, Technology, and Vehicles. No player character has a Skill lower than 0, because they are experienced spacers.
Human player characters gain an Archetype and a Talent, each of which grants Advantage or other benefits. Aliens have their own species abilities so they start with no Talents and one less Skill point than humans. (I suspect the game designers wanted to encourage players to choose humans.) Each Archetype has its own standard kit of Equipment.
That’s it. That’s the mechanics of character creation.
Every five experience points a PC gains allows them to increase a Skill, purchase a Talent, gain a Psionic Power (if they’re psionic), or once a lifetime gain a second Archetype. After five such advances the character has surpassed “Legend” and is ready to retire.
Players also get Hero Points, which allow them to reroll a dice roll and keep the better result, force the Referee (GM) to reroll a dice roll and keep the more favorable result for the player, or activate certain Talents.
Combat
Combat in Nomad works like combat in many other games: check for Surprise, roll for Initiative, each character takes turns in Initiative order. All characters have a Stamina score, whittled down (or obliterated) by weapon damage dice. When a character runs out of Stamina, they take a Wound and are out of the fight unless they succeed at a Physical throw. Each additional hit to a Wounded character deals an additional Wound.
After the fight, characters without Wounds regain their Stamina in ten minutes of rest. Each Wounded character rolls on the Triage Table, with one die of Disadvantage for each Wound after the first. Roll too low, or take too much damage at once, and the character dies. Otherwise, the Triage Table determines how long a character’s Wounds will take to heal, from months of medical care with permanent damage to “flesh wounds” that take a day or less. This makes all combat a serious risk, which one might argue is as it should be.
Equipment
The Equipment chapter begins with Technology Ages, Nomad’s answer to Tech Levels in other space games. Each one is stated in plain English, not a number. Historians might cringe at classifying seven millennia of Earth history under “Late Primitive”, but this is a space game.
Nomad has a lean equipment list; no endless variations on the same weapon with minute differences. The same goes for non-violent gear, cybernetics, robots, vehicles, and the products of far advanced “Galactic” and “Cosmic” civilizations.
Spaceships
What is a space game without space ships?
Players and GMs can easily design their own space ships using Nomad’s system. Rather than calculating tonnage like other space systems, the Nomad system starts with a template ship in one of nine size classes. The player must then remove and add features – like the FTL Engine – to suit their needs.
Sections of the rules provide guidance not just on how star travel works but how the economics of star travel works: ship mortgages, operational costs, risks (not just pirates), and ways to make money. If that sounds a little too much like real life, the Referee is free to abstract it all away.
To quote the rules,
Space combat is run as a chase and is played in Turns.
Each key member of a ship’s crew – Captain, Pilot, Gunner, Engineer,
and Sensor Operator – has a short menu of actions they can take in a turn.
At the top of each turn Pilots of each ship roll for Position over each other.
After that the crew of each ship takes their
actions in an unspecified order, usually ending with the Gunner of each
ship firing at each other.
Ships have no “hit points”;
each hit that penetrates Armor damages a specific ship system.
Hits that penetrate far enough can cripple or destroy a ship in one blow.
Space combat in Nomad is short and brutal.
Worlds
World building begins with the Referee populating a blank hex map with stars. Each hex represents a parsec. The Technology Age of an FTL Engine determines the maximum number of parsecs the ship can travel, constraining ship routes.
Instead of randomly generating (or assigning) lots of indirect influences on each planet, Nomad concentrates on a few direct attributes, also in plain English instead of a numeric scale. These attributes suggest the nature of the world, and the Referee can fill out the rest of the planetary record with descriptive text and plot hooks.
Once the Referee sketches out a planet, they can consult the book for sample NPCs, potential social encounters, and possible Patrons. For wilderness travel Nomad also has tables to randomly generate Xenofauna, i.e. alien animals. The process is a little more complicated than most Nomad rules, since each step in creation affects the next. (This reviewer tried to generate six xenofauna at once, and it was kind of a mess.)
License
In addition to character sheets and a blank sector map, the PDF of Nomad comes with an “XD6 System Reference”. This document, comprising most of the PDF’s text, is released under the Creative Commons Attribution License v4.0.
Conclusion
So much is packed into these 277 A5 pages that this reviewer has inevitably left something important out.
Faster Than Light: Nomad has the feel of Classic Traveller but with modern and streamlined rules. One could use them for just about any science fiction game, from near-future cyberpunk to classic far-future space opera. However, Nomad’s sweet spot is in its Early Interstellar Age, where space ships take a week to travel between stars and pirates still ply the inky black. It’s an homage to the first space-based roleplaying game, but one that rebuilds that genre for a modern audience.