Saturday, October 12, 2013

Serenity RPG - First Reading

For whatever reason I got a bug that I needed the Serenity RPG.  More on the bug in a moment.

Unfortunately Paizo seems to have half the books in stock and seems to be in no rush to get the other half back in stock.  I happened to be on Amazon buying a different book when I decided to look around.  Yeah.  My seven dollar purchase turned into more.

I did my first read through of the rules tonight.  Mind you, it wasn't scouring the rules so I knew everything there was to know about the game.  What struck me immediately was how closely they resembled the rules for Savage Worlds.   I would almost say Serenity is Savage Worlds in Space with Licensed Characters.  This isn't a bad thing because the Savage Worlds rules are fun and flexible and it's nice that they're similar in nature so that knowing one gives you a leg up on the other.

A few things got old quick.  Quotes from the movie litter the book.  References to Firefly episodes are scattered throughout the text.  The writing style tries for the vernacular of the series/movie.  It's like they were trying to make SURE that you knew this was a Licensed book by using as much as they could.  Given that they probably paid quite a bit for that licensing I can't say as I blame them.  Yes, I just did the same here.

I'm on the fence about this now that I own everything.  They do provide pre-gens for the Characters as well as pre-gens for characters, if you get my drift.  If anything I could see running this as an RPG at a convention using the Characters but I don't know how it would hold up for a campaign.  Trying to stay as close as possible to the canon means it's very possible to come up with characters even more useless than a bard in a core group.  Someone is going to want to be Inara and it just may be the 50 year old guy.  Creepy but true.

The bug.  The reason this all came about was someone asking about the game and minis in a forum.  It doesn't seem like there's a good set of Character minis out there.  There's some attempts but I haven't seen The Crew and the singles I saw weren't of the greatest quality.  This is where the bug comes in.

I've been meaning to try sculpting.  I took some classes at ReaperCon when I still went and I've got extensive notes and pictures.  It's something that I've almost done many times.  Now I've got a project with detailed artwork I didn't have to provide.  I'm not sure when I'll start and now that I've read the rules I'm not feeling the push to do it immediately.  We'll see how things go with creative leanings.  If a miracle occurs and I turn out good figs then I can decide if I want to start a "Space Cowboy" line in my store to go along with the rules.  That's really a pipe dream but I'm not ruling it out.  I won't pay to have others sculpt them but if I can do it myself it's a possibility.