Ok, those of you who follow this Critical Kobold's work know that I loves me some sci-fi. Lately I've been in the mood for a light, quick, simple system. Thousand Suns has that covered. I'm tellin' you right off the bat, Thousand Suns rocks out. This game is more fun than a tribble in your jammies. It's been a long time since I've read a rule book that made me desperately want to start playing the game before I've even finished reading it. Thousand Suns made me want to do just that.

(Um, start playing, I mean. Not put a tribble in my pajamas. Just so we're clear.)

     Thousand Suns prompts you to adventure in an "Imperial" sci-fi setting. The idea is that mankind has spread throughout the galaxy, formed some sort of empire or federation or consortium or big-ass republic. Most likely this interstellar empire has now begun to crumble, or at least stagnate. Of course, alien races have been encountered, wars have been fought, star systems colonized and then forgotten about; all the mainstays of classic star faring tales. While the rules lend themselves generically to any background, the ambience and tone of the game reflect this Imperial milieu for your stories. The idea is for your PCs to have a humongous chunk of space to boldly go mucking about in.

Each ability is rated from 1 to 12. (An ability score of 7 is average for a human.) You start with 25 points to divvy up as you'd like amongst your abilities. You're warned that ability scores are not likely to change during the course of a game, so choose your stats wisely, young Jedi. See, you'll pick skills next, and skill scores are based on one of your abilities. So for example, if you plan on choosing lots of science-y skills for your PC, make sure you've got a decent Perception score, since that's what skills requiring brains will be based on.

Now that your stats are set, you need some background to help determine your skills. First, you choose a homeworld. Now, 1kS is a generic rpg toolkit, meaning there are very few pre-fab worlds statted out in the book. But there *is* a simple system of Homeworld Packages, you lucky space dogs! You can really invent your own home planet, heck, even your own star system, if the GM gives you the thumbs-up.

You just decide whether your PC comes from one of the following:

• The Marches. These are planets on the fringes of known space; the most diverse of the Imperial societies, and the most independent-minded. They tend to be of lower tech and rugged, self-reliant culture.

• Wildspace. These include non-human worlds, lost colonies, or primitive societies way the hell far away from the Core worlds. Wildspace worlds can be highly advanced; 'wild' really just means they're outside commonly known Imperial space, not necessarily uncivilized.

Your choice of homeworld will automatically give you certain skills at specific ranks, based on the homeworld's predominant civilization. For example, a PC from a low-population Marches planet receives Survival 2 and Technical Sciences 1, among other talents, because those would be appropriate for that planet.

The biggest determining factor for skills, though, is your Career Package. Starting PCs get to choose three "stages" of careers that they've had in their lifetime. (I'll explain in a minute.) The careers are common intergalactic space jobs, such as soldier, diplomat, trader, barbarian, doctor, athlete, pirate, or tribble.

(Ok, I made that last one up.)

Your career gives you a boatload of skills, naturally geared towards your job tasks. Marines may have tactics and weapons skills, whereas aristocrats will have bureaucracy and socializing talents.

If your homeworld and your career packages double up on skills, you get to add those skill ranks together. Por ejemplo, if your civilized homeworld gave you Science skill at 2, and your profession as a scout gives you Science at 2, you now have Science at level 4.

OK, lemme explain the 'three stages' of careers I mentioned earlier. You get to choose occupations you've had during three periods of your job history. For each stage, you can choose a different career if you want. So it's possible to be a criminal/ trader/ rebel, for instance, in which case you'd get all the skills for all three of those careers. You'd be "novice" level in all three though, since you jumped around to so many careers instead of sticking with one.

To focus your PC's talents more tightly, you could choose to stay with one job for two or for all three legs of your job history, therefore earning "veteran" status, with three levels of, say, a civil servant career under your belt. The benefit of fewer careers is that you get higher ranks in the skills geared towards that one profession. (So, a PC with three levels of soldiering will have a higher skill rank in firing blasters than a PC with only two levels of soldier, and one level of something like athlete.)

If you have a hankerin' to play an alien PC, there are a few races provided in the book, with full descriptions of their physical and cultural traits. You can choose to either be very alien, as in, "What the heck is that ?!" or you can choose to be one of several sub-races of human. Your race will affect your abilities and skills a tad, but it'll be your cultural and philosophical backgrounds that'll make for some interesting social interactions with other species.

Weapons have a static damage value. For ranged weapons, you multiply your degree of success by this damage value to see how much butt-whoopin' you just delivered to your opponent. A laser pistol, f'rinstance, has a damage value of "4". If my Shoot skill is a 14, and I roll and get a nine, then my degree of success is five points (five below the 14 that I needed to roll). I multiply the pistol damage of 4 by my success of five, and so my laser does 20 points of damage to his cylon butt!

An average PC is going to have perhaps 30-40 or so Vitality points, so a solid hit from a high caliber weapon can put a hurtin' on you fast.

I suggest you avoid getting shot. Especially by someone who's good at shooting. Trust me on this one.

Weapons range from the archaic 9mm revolver and 18mm shotguns to the more future-ific blasters, sonic grenades, and pulse rifles. For a sci-fi game, the arms list isn't heavy on super advanced high tech instruments of death; most of the entries are slug throwers and grenades, honestly. Those of you looking for lightsabers and tac nukes will have to design them yourselves.

Characters reduced to zero Vitality will die in a matter of minutes without medical attention. Damage in general heals at a few points a day. If things go really poorly for your PCs wellbeing, there's a rather extensive section of cybernetic limbs and other organs, with explanations of the benefits and drawbacks to each.

A fair selection of space gear is offered to round out your PC: computers, personal force fields, exploration gear, communication rigs, drugs, sensors, survival equipment, disguise kits… all the necessary doodads to get your intergalactic do-gooder out there doing good. The game is simple enough to promote easy importation of gear from other games, too. There's no reason some technological widget from D20 Space, Saga Star Wars, Traveller, or Transhuman Space can't easily be used with your Suns campaign with about three seconds of fiddling. Heck, I noticed a half dozen items lifted almost directly from Star Frontiers in the book.

Vehicles described include hovercraft, ground cars, tanks, gyrocopters, and auto-taxis. It's a nice collection with just about any sort of transport your hero would need to get his hands on, except animals. No horses or dinosaurs or other critters for you to use as mounts. You'll have to come up with some stats for beasts of burden yourself.

Starship types are given good coverage, with over a dozen examples from fighters to attack cruisers with which your PCs can launch themselves across the vastness of space. Interstellar vessels are equipped with the mysterious "D-drive", the FTL technology that lets PCs jet from star system to star system within a few weeks. Starships and spaaaaace combat are treated rather perfunctorily though. Ships are more or less just like any other piece of equipment. There are no lists of ship gadgets other than weaponry. That means there's no fiddling with advanced sensor types, comm gear, upgraded armor components, different engine styles… no rules for modifying ships at all really. They're very much just for tootling around the universe in, and what few stats they have are all geared towards fighting. Those of you who wish to make your starships more personalized parts of the game, such as Han Solo's Millennium Falcon, simply won't have much to work with, sorry. (There's a passage in the book explaining that in Imperial SF, all technology is basically a prop, something for the PCs to use when convenient. This explains the shortage of advanced weapons and starship details in the game.)

The final chapters contain detailed sections on creating worlds and alien races. A few simple charts allow you to design planets in moments, including terrain type, climate, gravity, atmosphere, government and tech levels. More lists help round out your alien races with cool traits, such as low-light vision, pheromone repulsion, acidic saliva, lethargy, or perhaps a prehensile tail. (Sounds cute, eh?)

The idea of the Travelers, a staple of many sci-fi backgrounds, is included as an option for your game. The Travelers were a race (or races) of ancient advanced aliens who blundered about the cosmos building civilizations and seeding planets with new species and whatnot. They all died out or left eons ago, and some of their relics, artifacts, tech, and other goodies can be found littered about on thousands of worlds. This gives you an excuse to invent all sorts of wacky beings for the PCs to encounter, and introduce funky gizmos that no one knows exactly how to use. Dig it.

The authors have designed one whole small example star system and a few xenoforms for you to play with, and to serve as ideas for your own creations. Plop these into your game, or use the as springboards for your own tweaks.

The XP section is brief but practical. PCs should expect to earn only about 2-3 experience points for each session, if they achieve their goals. Role playing well may get you an extra point. XP in 1kS is spent to boost your skills up in rank, or to purchase new skills. You could also buy more Action Points, as long as you choose a new hook to go with each Action Point you buy.

So, let's sum up all this spacey goodness…

The GOOD

The NEUTRAL

In a similar vein, while there's an impressive array of starship stats to use for your game, there are no rules for creating your own. I'm listing this observation under the Neutral section instead of the Evil section only because the authors have promised expanded starship lists and a design system in the forthcoming book, Fighting Ships of the Thousand Suns. I've been burned before with designers promising books that never appear, but this game is just so damn sweet that I'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt and optimistically wait impatiently for that book to appear.

On a personal note, I'm not thrilled with any aliens presented in this book. They're all a bit goofy. The description of one race sounds like walking palm trees, another one like hostile, bloated starfish, and the third like a giant shrimp. It's like the designers came up with these ideas while sitting in a Caribbean-themed restaurant someplace, after a few margaritas. There are also some mutated humans, treated as different races, but I don't find that they do anything for me either. So, the aliens are there if you want to use them, but I'll be inventing my own, thanks.

The EVIL

Ok, the core book has very little to say about robots. In a sci-fi game.

Now, the justification is that robots aren't a popular staple of Imperial sci-fi literature. That genre is mostly about mankind's place in a futuristic world, and not so much about Terminator meets Robocop. I can respect the loyalty to the source inspiration, but they could have thrown us robophiliacs a larger bone than they did. What we get is two (2) examples of robots that –do- exist, and a note that if players really want to create a robot PC, they should just design a PC as normal and say he's a robot.

In the meta-setting, there's mention of Von Neumann's War, where AI units and their robot soldiers attempted to destroy their creator human race ("Exterminate! Exterminaaaaate!"), and so humans are understandably jumpy about playing with robots now. While I'm still not thrilled with the anti-robot facets of the core rules, this does at least set up a gnarly Battlestar Galactica vibe, eh?

Lastly, the naming conventions used by the authors sometimes go squirrely. In their otherwise standard English text, suddenly a jarringly bizarre term is thrown in for no apparent reason. For example, ten types of armor are listed. Most have standard spelling: flight suit, heavy combat armor, survival suit, etc. Then, in the middle, is Ŝteleco armor. Yeah. With a "Ŝ". I don't even know how the hell to say that. What's wrong with a regular "S"? I suppose they're trying to be interesting or add some zing or something, but it's just odd and slightly distracting.

And it's not just spelling; sometimes they throw in an entire word that has no meaning on its own, like the "cirkuo". This is a type of hover car. Now, the rest of the list includes entries for hoverbikes, hovercars, hovertrucks, hovertanks, even a hoverbus. So where the hell did "cirkuo" come from?! Can't we just call it a hoverboat, since it basically just goes on water? Did we need one lone term for this particular hover vehicle? That's just weird, man. And there are several instances of other goofy-for-no-reason words sprinkled throughout the book as well. Like the "kodumulo", which is a computer device containing a single program. Isn't there a more sensical name we coulda' called this thing that actually gives you some vague idea of what it is? I know the silly names don't hurt anything, but again, it's just distracting. Maybe if there were actually a lot more of them, but there's just a random few. Just enough to make their inclusion puzzling.

 And speaking of spelling... while the game itself is solid, the editing, layout, and grammar of the game needs a serious overhaul. It appears in places as though sections were written by someone whose first language isn't English, and they couldn't find someone to give it a proof-reading. Odd turns of phrase, confusing sentences, and syntax errors abound, and small things like randomly bolded and un-bolded headers, inconsistent centering, and variant spellings of the same word will give you pause while reading. Now, none of this makes the game unplayable, it just occasionally makes sections of text confusing and requiring another read-through or two of some passages. I was so interested in the material that in a totally uncharacteristic manner, I overlooked the horrific writing issues, and I hadn't even been drinking any of that gnomish mead. (Well, not much of it.) 

SUMMATION

All in all, I can't say enough good stuff about this game. Give it a look-see and I think you'll be impressed. Just the right amount of mechanics, a dash of setting flavor, and immensely intriguing campaign possibilities.

Now, get moving, boy! There's a whole empire out there waiting to be discovered! Evil overlords don't overthrow themselves, you know! Find yourself a starship, and go to meet your destiny!!

And take this talking palm tree with you. It keeps leaving its kodumulo in my cirkuo.