This is pretty glorious. Basically, everywhere Alexander Dumas might have mentioned counties, strike those and put in star systems instead. It's got lines like "The Vatican system was first explored by Star Pope Andromeda II when a catastrophic engine failure stranded her ship in the system." If this kind of thing works for you, then you'll be delighted to know that this book does it really well, really consistently. (If it doesn't, well, there'll be another book along in due season.) For some of us, this as very much as wanted and lovable as very different works like Mindjammer (which I just got done praising again earlier this morning).
There's also some neat game mechanics in here. This Fate riff uses six aspects, stunts, and nothing else. If you've seen the stuff Rob Donoghue's been doing with TinyFate and the like...yup, same kind of thing. I won't go on at length - you can check it out yourself. I will note that I love every permutation on the idea behind this example stunt:
Master of Disguise: Because I am a master of disguise with a knack for being in the right place at the right time, once per session I can join a scene already in progress, having posed as a minor character.
...because it so perfectly adapts a whole bunch of great dramatic/comedic moments to game play, and the game really supports it rather than making you struggle to get through unwarranted barriers.
As you'd expect, swordplay gets extra attention. Swordplay stunts combine four elements - appearance, edge (special tricks), main hand, and off-hand - into a single package. All Rocketeers have a swordplay stunt that models how they fight. For instance:
Subtle: Invoking your fencing aspect to create an advantage based on misdirection grants +3 instead of +2.
Perfect Footwork: When you succeed with style on defense, you may create a situation aspect with a free invocation instead of gaining a boost.
Small Sword: Gain +1 to attack an enemy who has already acted in the round.
Cloak: Gain +1 to create an advantage when you obfuscate your weapon.
(That's from the Rocketeer-version writeup of Aramis.)
Since there aren't skills to spend milestone advances on, you use milestones to add an additional entry to an element of your character's swordplay stunt.
As is of course necessary for Dumas-type action, there's fun handling of conspiracies:
In Three Rocketeers, conspiracies are modeled with aspects—alliance, goal, and weakness—and approaches—Influence, Might, Power, Reach, Resources, and Secrecy.
And there's a great adventure, and just loads for fun. I've said "fun" quite a few times in this post. Well, what can I say? This is a really fun book.
(Reposted from my Google+ stream, at https://plus.google.com/u/0/107122403431806926287/posts/bHTpiNEhSCr )
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