More Kickstarter Goodness

This last week I received my rewards from the Traveller Fifth Edition Kickstarter. The T⁵ edition of Traveller has a long and occasionally fraught history, but I find that this game is a wealth of new and intriguing information about the Official Traveller Universe. I also chose to get a hard copy of Marc Miller’s novel Agent of the Imperium, which applies many T⁵ concepts to a story that spans the breadth and history of the Third Imperium.

A familiar knock on Traveller is that the setting, rooted in Golden Age science fiction, feels very out-of-date today. But T⁵ introduces many posthumanist sci fi concepts to the Traveller universe such as consciousness uploading, cloning, geneering, and artificial intelligence. AotI shows how these “new” technologies can be seamlessly integrated into a familiar setting.

The biggest problem with T⁵, though, has been that the system book was a glorious mess. As one giant brick of a book, earlier iterations of the rules were disorganized, lacking examples, and riddled with errors and contradictions.

This latest Kickstarter is a valiant attempt to clean up and reorganize the sprawling rules into a familiar three-book set: Characters and Combat, Starships, and Worlds of Adventures. The result marks a major leap forward. Breaking the material into three separate books makes it much easier to read and find information. Examples now complement many rules. Almost every page has an interesting new idea, twist on an old one, or Easter egg. The books are physically well made, and come in a very nice slipcase.

All that said, while T⁵ has come a long way it still has a long way to go. Errors and typos continue to bedevil this edition, which could have really benefited from additional proofreading and editing. The layout is adequate but the artwork is uneven, ranging from pretty rough to excellent.

But most of all, T⁵ is a big toolset game, and could have learned many lessons from the ultimate toolset game, GURPS. GURPS books always do an excellent job of clearly presenting a wide suite of game options alongside guidance as to how to integrate these rules into different settings. The Traveller Universe spans many different eras and many different technology levels, but T⁵ provides very little guidance as to what rules might not apply to the Third Imperium setting but would apply to the higher-tech Galaxiad setting.

* * * * *

I backed another Reaper Bones Kickstarter, Reaper Miniatures Bones 5: Escape from Pizza Dungeon. I’ve happily backed all of the Bones Kickstarters to date, and they have proven a great value.

This Kickstarter has probably the strongest Core Set of any campaign yet, containing a gruesome giant zombie, a cloaker, a really great warband of kobolds, a dragon wolf, a useful set of spell effects, and a nifty Thing in the Well. And even though I've already got a bunch of skeletal warriors, the grave kings look fantastic.

I grabbed the Dragonfolk option—I am not really sure why so few dragonfolk miniatures are available commercially, given the popularity of this player character races going all the way back to 4th Edition. I also got the fire giant hellbringer and Arakoth, a Colossal spider. I also added the Dungeon Dwellers expansion set, which has a couple of good looking kenku and yet more kobolds.

The folks at Reaper have clearly absorbed the lessons of each past Kickstarter, and each new campaign has improved significantly on the ones before. The first campaign had a lot of confusing add-ons, and each successive campaign has been tighter and more focused. Bones 5 has several small encounter sets that I suspect will be popular, featuring some terrain pieces along with associated miniatures. I grabbed the “Charnel Pit of the Ghoul Queen,” which looks like it will be a fun set piece for the Great Dungeon. The quality of the Reaper Bones figures also improves: the new Bones Black material is clearly superior to softer original material.

The only downside is that I already have a pretty significant backlog of miniatures to paint. I am a painfully slow painter, and really only have opportunities to paint during a January to April window. The rest of the year there is just too much else to do.