Hard Nova ][ (2004)

Politically Incorrect Games

(now Precis Intermedia Games)

Date Reviewed: 1-30-2011

Critical Kobold Rating:   (3 out of 5 Dice)

 

A Galactic Trek Like Fireflies in a Babylon Farscape Far, Far Away!

          Hard Nova ][ is a smooth, generic sci-fi “space opera” rpg, set in a time when humans have become intergalactic movers and shakers, the galaxy is filled with zoomy starships, heroes wield smoldering laser blasters, and freaky aliens socialize alongside mankind.

           This is the second edition of Hard Nova, hence the ][ in the title (which is how cool space cowboys say “two”.) The rulebook is more of a toolbox than a pre-fab game world. It provides mainly broad system material for any space campaign setting, and you can emulate your favorite sci-fi movie or TV show with almost no effort using Hard Nova ][.  However, Game Masters wanting a bit more detail can find some bare-bones setting examples provided as a starting point for creating your own galactic empires. Given the simple and speedy  nature of the mechanics, creating your own campaign background will be easier than bulls-eyeing a womp-rat in your T-16.

          The basic game system is intuitive enough that even a Gungan could grasp it; the entire basic task resolution rules take up two pages. Heck, even role playing newbies can jump right into hyperspace with practically no learning curve, and the game lends itself very well to a one-shot game night. If you little Klingons want a bit more sophistication and detail for your ongoing campaign, however, there’s a separate section which provides more granular “advanced” rules. This division of depth, and the way the advanced and basic rules can be combined as you see fit, make for smooth game play that made me want to plan a session as soon as I finished reading the PDF.

Let’s Make A Starman!

          To create your galactic hero, you first choose your space race. The species options included are:

     a standard human

     a psionic offshoot of a human from the colony on Alpha Centauri

     an insectoid bureaucratic soldier

     a physically strong ape-like race, with a tribal culture

     a bloated humanoid species with advanced engineering and scientific skills

     a formerly warlike, genetically engineered race of nanotech-dependant rebels

     a synthetic life form evolved from sentient robots

          Now that’s a cocktail party guest list, my friends!         

          If that seems like too limited a number of critters to populate your galaxy, creating a new alien race from scratch requires about five minutes or less, so there’s always room for more species in the gene pool!

          You can choose from three character-creation methods, including point-buy, random generation, and the “heroic” model, which basically just allots more skill and ability points for either of the first two methods. Any choice makes for simple PC gen, and can conveniently determine the feel of your game: gritty, pulpy, heroic, or maybe a nice mix. Whatever fluxes your photons.

Your Stats

          Characters have five Abilities, rated from "1" (kinda’ sucks) to "5" (totally bitchin’!) The abilities are Fitness, Awareness, Creativity, Reasoning, and Influence. These should be self-explanatory, and it’s easy to tell in-game which ability will serve you best in whatever situation your little space-monkey finds herself. Need to sweet-talk that Kelcadian princess into letting you access the city’s security grid? Use your Influence. Trying to reconfigure the cascading matrix code to override the tachyon inducer on the shield coils before the particle core goes critical? Try Reasoning. (And good luck with that, Sparky.)

          PCs then have a veritable bevy of Skills to choose from, which incorporate any general knowledge or training they’ve acquired. Skills are rated like abilities, starting at "1" (amateur), but skill ratings can go as high as "8" (can do it blindfolded with your left hand in zero-g freefall.) Each skill your dude has will be based on the most apropos ability score. For example, physical skills, such as Piloting or Firearms, will be based off your Fitness score. Most abilities have about six or so skills associated with them, while Reasoning has about twice that. If you want to feel the Force in your campaign, there are optional psionic skills included, with such party tricks as psychokinesis.

          Your star voyagers are polished off with Gimmicks. This is a catch-all term for traits that aren’t learned or trained, and gimmicks are also lumped into general categories. Humans begin the game with a free Cultural Gimmick, and so for example you can opt for something like having a military rank, or a criminal background, or being multilingual. Most psionic traits are gimmicks rather than skills, as are freaky alien or technological features like having enhanced hearing due to antennae, or having inexhaustible energy due to a mini fusion reactor where your spleen used to be. And speaking of cyborgs, if you really want to spice up the setting with bionic or cybernetic implants, those are gimmicks too. Gimmicks aren’t always beneficial, though. You can just as easily have gimmicks that make you ugly, vulnerable to some type of atmosphere or energy, discriminated against, or even enslaved. Aside from the ones you chose, some gimmicks are required when you choose your race, and others may be picked up during play. (Getting your hand shot off by an irate space pirate may earn you the ‘clumsy’ gimmick, for instance.)

          Lastly, your Health score tells you when something like explosive decompression has turned your scruffy- but- loveable smuggler into a space-corpse. Every PC has five levels of Health, called grades. Grades come in two flavors: fatigue and injury. Fatigue damage will knock you on your encounter-suited butt, however you bounce back pretty rapidly once your opponent stops thumping on you. Injury damage kills you or at least leaves you with nasty phaser burn scars. For reference, a manly punch doles out one fatigue grade of damage, while a stun rifle will floor you with four grades of fatigue. On the more lethal scale of combat, quaint old-fashioned slug throwers like semi-auto 9mm pistols make holes in people for two grades of injury, while blaster pistols will fry you for four injury grades. Vicious black market light sab… uh, I mean, “plasma swords”… lop off limbs while doing 5 injury, with a no-nonsense kind of violence. Armor or personal shields can reduce both types of damage, as can some gimmicks that add rugged toughness to your dude.

          Combat is pretty hard-core in Hard Nova ][. PCs can recover a number of fatigue points of damage equal to their Fitness ability score daily, but injury damage heals your Fitness score in points only on a -weekly- basis. Owch!

     That means that a hero can be killed with two or three hits from a weapon dealing injury-type damage over the course of a single game session! If you want to run a more heroic game, let the PCs have access to good armor, or give them a toughness bonus gimmick that lets them shrug off damage a little. GMs can also always scale back the damage weapons do, or give some injury-spewing energy firearms a “stun” setting that only inflicts fatigue damage points, or whatever other method you like that leaves fewer dead spacers in your game’s wake.

     I like the idea of the "bacta tank", where PCs can pay to float for a day or two in a hospital's vat of bubbly viscous fluid to greatly accelerate healing. Very futuristic, and can save a PC's butt. 

MORE BASIC THAN ADVANCED

          Here’s how the basic game handles task resolution: When a skill is used, you add the skill’s level to the corresponding ability score. This sum is called the Skill Total. You then roll two six-sided dice, and if your roll is under your Skill Total, you succeed in whatever task you were attempting.  As modifiers, the GM may assign penalties or bonuses as another whole d6; a penalty die requires you to sum the two highest numbers rolled on three dice, and a bonus allows you to sum the lowest two results rolled on three dice.

          That’s it. All task resolution, including combat, follows that system. Easier than moisture farming on Dagobah!

         Starship combat works like personal combat. Ships all have speed, handling, and sensor stats, with smaller scout ships being faster and generally zoomier than their lumbering deep-space freighter counterparts, but from a mechanics standpoint, starships are differentiated from each other almost completely by gimmicks. Starship gimmicks represent the bulk of their equipment and abilities, and can include bays for cargo, fighters, or shuttles, cloaking devices, hyperspace engines, artificial intelligence, and free HBO. Starships are given the simple treatment, mostly considered basic vehicles to get from one star sector to another. There are no construction rules; you just slap some gimmicks onto one of the pre-statted ship types, and there’s your personalized starship, however you’d like to picture it.

          All ships, no matter their size or function, have the same five Health grades, but bigger warships generally have stronger structural frames and shields, both of which reduce damage taken. Therefore, for example, even though they can both take the same five grades of damage, a battleship will outlast a fighter in combat, because a fighter’s anti-aircraft machine guns and single small laser gun aren’t going to penetrate the behemoth warship’s defenses easily, if they can at all, whereas the battleship’s massive laser batteries and homing missiles will blow a smaller ship from the star-filled sky pronto because their shields can’t repel firepower of that magnitude. </Ackbar>

MORE ADVANCED THAN BASIC

          The advanced rules aren’t that different from the basic set. Instead of always simply rolling under your Skill Total, you’re now rolling against a Difficulty Number, either determined by your actions or set by the GM. There are no bonus or penalty dice used in the advanced game, rather, you subtract your roll result from your Skill Total, and if the difference between the two (known as the Outcome) is equal to or greater than the Difficulty Number, then you succeed. The effect is that more difficult tasks in the advanced game are going to be harder to succeed at than those same tasks in the basic game, so you’ll need suitably high skill levels to pull off any stunt more complex than a fairly routine activity.

          For example, Pip Caroom, space adventurer, is rolling to safely pilot his damaged, flaming shuttlecraft to a stop on the hanger deck of a space station. The GM thinks this is a “challenging” task, given that the shuttle’s steering controls were crippled by the last chain gun salvo from the pirate frigate, so landing the shuttle without incident gets a Challenging Difficulty of “4”. Pip’s Spacecraft Piloting skill level is five, and his Fitness ability score is three, so his Skill Total is eight. Pip rolls 2d6, and gets a total of five.  Subtracting that rolled five from his Skill Total of eight gives him an Outcome of three; not quite high enough to beat the target Difficulty of 4. Pip’s shuttle slams hard into the deck, bounces, and comes to a shuddering crash against the far bulkhead of the landing bay. Time for Pip’s crew to check for impact damage...

          The advanced game also delves into such goodies as hit location tables, critical hits, modifiers for environment and clever combat tactics, as well as more detailed weapon stats like accuracy. Taking damage also incurs penalties to task checks in the advanced game, since something like a plasma grenade going off in your face will probably distract you from plotting lightspeed jump coordinates.

          That’s about it, as far as system material. Very streamlined.

          The remaining 35 pages or so of the PDF contain helpful odds and ends. There’s an overview of the pre-made cosmos known as the United Sovereign Worlds provided by the authors to get you started on your voyage into the depths of spaaaaace. You’re given descriptions of the USU’s central government, pertinent alien races, some regions of nearby space, and a few simple star system creation tables to expand the USU or draft your own galaxy. A suitably villainous enemy race is detailed for your nefarious use, as well as succinct but perfectly adequate rules for robots. Serviceable equipment, tool, weapon, gadget, and vehicle lists round out the Sovereign Worlds chapter. (By the way, I do know that "USU" is not an accurate acronym for 'United Sovereign Worlds', but there's an in-game rationale for why those initials are used anyway.)

          For ongoing campaigns, there are rules for improving characters through experience points, for upgrading robots and improving starships, and even a system for diceless play. Conversion notes for other Precis games allow you to tweak Hard Nova 2 to mesh with their games from other genres, I assume, but since I’m not familiar with PIG’s other games, I’ll just note that the conversion info’s available without commenting on its usefulness.

          A large chunk of the end of the PDF is a set of four scenarios to get you playing right away, along with a metric monkeyload of really handy game reference pages, such as blank sheets for characters and some for pre-statted NPCs, and several starship sheets with stats for standard types of star-traveling vessels. They even provide a cut-out paper die, in case you’re a poor underprivileged gamer who has no six siders of your own!

The Good

          Hard Nova 2 is a smooth, sleek game, easily adaptable to your idea of awesome space gaming. It’s excellent as a quick-start single-play game, and functional as an ongoing campaign. If you want to model your setting on a popular book, movie or series, simply incorporate the aspects offered in this toolkit that fit your vision and ignore the rest. The choice of basic and advanced rules, and the option to freely mix them, allows GMs to customize the complexity of their game for their campaign needs.

The Neutral

          As is always the case with generic games, some GMs may balk at having to design the entire gaming universe from scratch. Even using the pre-made material given in the PDF, there’s still an awful lot of creation and customization that will have to go into making up a useful region of space or two for your players to cruise around in. For GMs with time constraints or a lack of creative spark, this may be a daunting task. Again, though, I really think Hard Nova can shine at emulating a program you’re already familiar with, so that would take some of the pressure off of inventing 23 alien species yourself. 

The Evil

          There’re no starship construction guidelines. The stats and abilities for starships are explained well enough, and there are rules for upgrading them, but you’re really stuck using the templates given in the reference section of the PDF for standard ships, and adding some gimmicks to make them unique. This is keeping in line with the simplicity of the overall game, but it bugs the tinkerer in me that wants to combine different frames with different shield ratings and engine sizes.

          Also, computers are given no examination at all, which strikes me as odd in a far future setting. There are computer skills, but no detailed rules set regarding computer types, function, security, or hacking. Again, I suppose it’s to keep things simple, but it’s just oddly striking as a missing subject in a technologically advanced setting.

So, Shall We Boldly Go, Or What?

          Hard Nova ][ is a damn cool game. I don’t even need yet another sci-fi game in my rpg library, but I’m still keeping this one. My only regret was not grabbing the hardcopy version when I first saw it at Origins a few years ago, and now only having the PDF copy. (This kobold likes his gaming books the old-fashioned way; on papyrus. This newfangled electronic medium trollcrap just ain’t for me.)

          So, I’m definitely recommending HN2 for your intergalactic gaming needs.

          Engage the hyper-inverter thrust stabilizers, helmsman! Neutronium shields to maximum! We’re going to plot a course right into… that hard nova.

          (Cue cool spacey synthesizer theme music!)

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