James Nicoll Reviews

Stealing from Aaron de Orive, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Number nine: SPI’s Universe, their attempt to do for the SFRPGs market what DragonQuest did for FRPGs.

Universe had some legitimately cool aspects, starting with a 3‑D map of the local stars out to 30 LY (as known in 1980). It offered a wider range of occupations than Traveller, without GDW’s military emphasis. For that matter, the Federation appeared to be democratic. It also had an innovative method of dealing with environments; what a character was acclimated to affected how they handled various climates (Cue arguments over the ship’s thermostat). A modular ship creation system was intended to make ship creation faster, and they included a game called Delta Vee in the box.

Alas. The game seemed to be poorly play tested. It was definitely unbalanced: because they were key components to both the interstellar communications network and FTL drives, psionic characters could easily end up as the pampered members of the ensemble (and we won’t even touch the fact many of them had mind-control, useful for streamlining democracy). And while it was in no way the fault of the designers, SPI’s financial situation – picture Mount Doom after the One Ring was thrown in – meant essentially no support for the game.