I've been a fan of Ubiquity powered games since discovering Hollow Earth Expedition and Leagues of Adventure. The simply d2 dicepool system that it employs and the innovative "take the average" mechanic makes for fast and smooth gameplay without loosing granularity in the mechanics. Initially I was skeptical about using a game that powered pulp adventures so perfectly for horror but the excellent Leagues of Gothic Horror put paid to that fear and I've been impressed by the versatility of the system.

Quantum Black was initially not a game that I was particularly interested in and I didn't back the original Kickstarter. I backed it's first expansion (Dark Designs) partly out of a desire for completionism of Ubiquity games and partly because I thought it would be useful for modern gear, etc for when I regularly hack HEX into different eras. On reading the corebook though I was really impressed by both the mechanical tweaks to allow for horror to really affect the characters and for the world itself and I now find myself really looking forward to running the game.

The setting is near future and provides a way to give missions to players (they all work for the shadowy Quantum Black organisation) without giving them legal authority or carte blanche to go in guns blazing. Horror is often about setting up tension within the players and this sense of needing to complete a mission, stop the horrors and their minions and yet avoid detection by the authorities or upset their employers does that before the group even know what it is they are supposed to be investigating. It also lends itself to both one shots and also episodic campaign play without needing to railroad players which is definitely a positive in my book.

The revised version of Quantum Black contains the same content as the original release, but in a leaner, cleaner layout which is signigicantly better to read on screen, and to my eyes at least, looks much better.

The game itself is the first game licensing Exile Games' Ubiquity Roleplaying System to be set in the modern era, and offers a fine array of gear and tech to live up to that. Characters will need it if they are to survive the horrors the concept of the game will pit them against.

In the vein of beloved games like Beyond the Supernatural, and Delta Green, Quantum Black posits that the things that go bump in the night are not just stories. The conceit of the game has characters working for Quantum Integrated Technologies, and they may draw from a variety of skill sets to earn their paycheques, be that in invesitgative, combat, or thaumaturgical capacities.

The game revises and expands on the Horror and Sanity mechanics present in Hollow Earth Expedition and Leagues of Gothic Horror, to make it a focal point of a visceral horror game, without assuming or requiring that characters will fall prey to it as a core part of play. Characters will be strongly affected by what they experience and do, but may prove to be able to tough it out in the end.

Quantum Black will enable GMs looking to provide a very fast-paced game dealing with uncovering conspiracies, horrors, and getting in the way of plots and creatures familiar to Lovecraft fans. Ubiquity is quick to pick up, flexible and powerful in play, and in this game will let players enjoy sessions which feel like (among other things... such as The Thing) the X-files, Millennium, or with some alteration of dates, Stranger Things.

Quantum Black is the first modern-era game using the Ubiquity Roleplaying System to see release. The core book includes the standard rules found in any Ubiquity game, and has its own adaptations of the magic and sanity rules. Being a game focused mainly on a framework of dangerous investigation and combat action, it has a large amount of modern gear which might be of interest to people looking to expand their resources for building their own settings. Those familiar with the X-files, or more specifically with games like Beyond the Supernatural will feel at home in this setting as described, and find Ubiquity a good tool to use for fast action and representing the growing grip of terror on the characters.

Quantum Black's approach to magic is uses procedures such as found in Hollow Earth Expedition's "Secrets of the Surface World," and Leagues of Adventure's "Leagues of Gothic Horror," but applies it during GM-preparation for spell design. This is both clever and useful and will likely be of great use in other games, such as All for One: Regime Diabolique. Numerous example spells are provided. Unlike other magic systems provided so far, apart from that seen in Desolation, Quantum Black's comes with a mysterious cost to practitioners that serves to aid in the understanding and implementation of its genre.

The Horror mechanic likewise allows characters to experience strong reactions to the strange things they discover in their investigations, but allows for greater mental durability than found in Hollow Earth Expedition and Leagues of Gothic Horror, as befits the high-action genre this game is going for. Characters will still experience an uncomfortable decline of sanity and capability, but will not have to work around the harsher limits found in games like Call of Cthulhu where combat action may be considered to be a player error.

The art is consistent throughout and people will like it or not in the way that people do. The layout needed more work. The writing has a conversational tone and is presented in short sections, so reading is quick and generally quick to understand. Overall, however, the book has an unfinished look (unjustified text, typographical errors, blank spots for unassigned art). I find that reading the physical book (hardcover) gives a better impact visually than the PDF, but again that is a purely subjective response.

The content is solid, and using the lead-in of working for Quantum Black would make one-shots and introductions to newcomers very easy in much the same way as starting out being trapped inside the Hollow Earth works for HEX (Hollow Earth Expedition). Growing out from that point to re-skin the setting in other ways is likewise as easy as it is in any other Ubiquity game.

Quite disappointed with this one. Cons: There is nothing, really nothing in the Setting which hasn't been done before (better). This is your straight people fight the Cthulhu-Mythos fare with absolutely nothing new. The pagecount is as high as here, because there is a tonload of white, unused space in the book. Zillions of "This will be covered in another book" references. Things which i consider quite essential for the game, like the other types of magic player characters can use. Lots of typos. And i mean REALLY a lot of them. There are sentences that are only understandable after reading them a second or third time. Whole paragraphs that seem to be written by a non-native speaker. The illustrations are horrible and rather sparse. Ok, this one is highly subjectiv, but they just don't fit the genre, i think. The price is way too high for a lazy product like this.

Pros: Ubiquity is a very good system, so the second star is just for the system alone. It is a good (and by this point, the only) introduction of Ubiquity into the modern era (i know of).