# Ephemereis 2.0: A Brief Review tags: #thoughts #game/rpg/ephemeris ![[Ephemeris 2 (cover).jpg|400]] ## Transparency In the interests of transparency, I must tell you that I received this game for free when the author announced that the second edition was going up for sale soon and he was looking for people who were interested in getting a copy.  I made no promises to review or even particularly write about this product in return for receiving a PDF. As originally offered, I could have chosen to receive an EPUB version just as easily. No money has changed hands. In no way have my journalistic responsibilities been compromised. Which might not be a great state of affairs, because this is going to be a rough one, folks. You know me. Kindness is not my nature. I've been around the RPG industry since the 90s. I'm not exactly known for holding back on my opinion, and I literally live in an RPG library with things that range from being published last week to the early 70's.^[And some before if we include wargames.] I have some measure of understanding, not only of the current state of the RPG industry, but the historical state of the RPG industry, such as it is. I've earned a few dollars from it myself. I know it's a rough go. Likewise, my taste in RPG design is not a mystery. I've written about it for years in many contexts, and specifically in this digital garden at great length. I prefer narrative-focused, fiction-first, mechanics-light RPG design, and I don't think I'm alone in that given the current sales figures for the industry. I wanted to make sure that everything was on the table before I got started here, because we need to talk. ## Ephemeris 2.0: What Is It? Physically, it's a 342-page, 8.5 by 11 layout. Straightforward text without a single piece of art. Single column with paragraphs that are indented rather than separated by white space. As design and layout goes, it's a blunt instrument which will remind you more of early '80s book design in the genre than it will anything else. It eschews anything like decoration or structured layout. The actual chapter subsections are simply all caps, not bold or italic, can occur anywhere on the page and are centered. The amount of structure and formatting is actually less than that of RPGs and war games which came straight off of a typewriter to a mimeograph. Tables are purely left justified within their cells with very little concern for wrap or even bolding the handful of table headers that exist. All the tables are single-line cell separated, regardless of content. Inside the book, looking beyond the formatting specifically, what you have is the equivalent of a fantasy heartbreaker for a kitchen sink fantasy/sci-fi mash-up if the only game that you've ever played is **[[Dungeons and Dragons]]** and you can't imagine getting along without the appointments of 4d6 rolled character stats, which are converted into the actual values of -4 to +4 as attributes, but if you needed both Common Sense and Intelligence to be actual stats, here you go. Look, it is what it is. According to the introduction to this new edition, the changes that were made were to make the game more playable, more user-friendly, and less harsh so that characters might survive out of the lower levels. Remember *[D&D heartbreaker](https://cannibalhalflinggaming.com/2022/10/26/the-meaning-of-heartbreaker/)*; of course, it's class and level based. For some reason, there was also the compulsion to go from a D6 based system to one that uses all the polyhedrals. I suppose this should have been my first warning. ## Seriously, What's in There? Kind of a mess. Let's start by looking at the table of contents. I think you'll see what I mean. ![[Ephemeris 2 - ToC.jpg]] I wanted to make sure that I got the entire width of the section of the TOC because this is the only thing on the page; it doesn't reach halfway down. The whole thing is offset to the left. The only thing it lists are chapters and not subsections, which themselves might be necessary for fast reference, as if you were looking up the stats on a specific species. There is no index, not that you probably expected one. If you wanted to know what my primary issue with this game was, beyond the mechanics which we will talk about in a little bit, it is incredibly presented simply by looking at the table of contents. - Chapter 1: Attributes - Chapter 2: Species - Chapter 3: Character Classes So far, so good. - Chapter 4: Skills - Chapter 5: Goods - Chapter 6: Spells and Transferences - Chapter 7: Gaming Basics This is where the *"no goddamn bit of sense"* kicks in. Aside from immediately noticing that using actual numbers instead of the spelled-out numbers makes the formatting of the chapters a whole lot more consistent and more readable, observe how we go back and forth between talking about mechanics and talking about things which are beyond the scope of something you might need for character creation, like goods? In fact, you will note there is absolutely no direct discussion of how to create a character in this system given in the table of contents. That's because there is no actual discussion of how to create a character in a step-by-step fashion in this book. There are bits and pieces of it that you can glean as you go through. But there's absolutely no consistent, structured, well-presented way to just create your character. Likewise, you get down to chapter 7 before the author sees fit to actually talk about the mechanics that he's been dumping on you straight to the face for the six previous chapters. Should the mechanical resolution system have been one of the first two chapters? If not the first chapter? Which would introduce the idea of attributes and skills in a very succinct way before showing you how they are used to resolve conflicts? Yes. Yes, it should have. Without a question. ### Attributes Is there an actual table with a list of attributes and what they represent? No, we can't have that. In fact, we have a list of the available classes and their general stats (not stat requirements but rather a means of generating their stat values) with the abbreviated stats along the top. Make that a page before we see the actual list of attributes and what they mean. Did I mention there's a Sanity stat? There's a Sanity stat. As a result, there is obviously a set of mechanics for determining when you start going a little cuckoo or, in this case, a little bit of tiptoeing around things in a way that makes reference worse by using the phrase *"begin to suffer from a mental illness."* Are these mechanics broken out into a section specifically talking about them under Gaming Basics? No. That would make sense. We can't have that. Instead, they are tucked away without particular note underneath the discussion of Sanity as an attribute. This is not the only place in these rules where that sort of organizational failure occurs. Also the discussion of species modifiers, which is a pretty classic mechanical construct. Various species get a modifier to their stats because they are physically different from the human baseline. Fine, perfectly sensible. So of course we get a list of all 19 species and their modifiers right here in the attribute section. Do we know what these species are or why they would have these particular modifications? No, absolutely not. Species are next chapter, and none of the species have names which are at all evocative of who and what they are except humans, which are obvious, and maybe Culthans.^[They live in the dark and are insane. Vaguely Cthulhoid. Sans cults, which would have been neat.] This is immediately followed by a discussion of maximum attributes and another messy table, which simply presents the fact that some species have a couple of points difference up or down from baseline humanity for their maximum stat. This table isn't in the species chapter where you would expect it. It's in the attribute chapter, which you see before you know anything about the species. At the end of the chapter there is a brief bit on raising attributes, which happens at fifth level and every five levels after that. Should this be something that lives in its own mechanical subsection of the Mechanics chapter? Possibly something devoted to speaking specifically about character advancement in general? Absolutely. But it's here. ### Species The species chapter may be the high point of this entire text, quite frankly. While there's nothing utterly groundbreaking in here, there is a definite *love* of this setting being portrayed indirectly by a discussion of each of the species, which is more than just cursory. The author clearly hits his stride here. Each species has a discussion of who they are, a bit on their history, a discussion of their philosophical point of view, a bit on their language, which is often fairly inspired, and any sort of special powers they may have. Frankly, if you were to cut out the species chapter, give it a serious format repolishing, and drop in some art, it would probably stand alone as a lightweight sci-fi setting inspiration text. Definitely the sort of thing that narrative gamers would drop a couple of dollars on if you throw in a couple of tables for random generation. Of course, it wouldn't be **Ephemeris** unless it consistently made reference to rules and mechanics which haven't been introduced yet. Here we are. ### Classes Once you make it through the species you get down to character classes, which are just about exactly what you expect. If you are familiar with classic **D&D**, you will look at the experience table which goes up to level 20 and feel excessively comfortable. Experience tops out at 100,000 when you receive your fourth ability increase. Not only that, you will receive an attack and a defense bonus based on your class and level conveyed by what is probably the worst formatted table in the book. ![[Ephemeris 2 - Class Bonuses.png]] Where does the book tell you how combat rolls are done? No, not in a section called *"Combat Rolls,"* that would be silly. Instead, it's right here before the detailed listing of the classes. There are 13 classes, and they consist of exactly what you would expect for a fantasy/sci-fi heartbreaker: - Bandit - Bounty Hunter - Cyber Wizard - Diplomat - Explorer - Law Enforcer - Medic - Miner - Pirate - Scientist - Soldier/Mercenary - Trader All are perfectly in line with exactly what you think it is. There is one thing that is a little unusual: - Nanist To quote the background: > [!quote] The Nanist > > The Nanist is someone who specializes in the use of nanotechnology, but this is somewhat of a misstatement. > > The Nanist's blood is actually infused with nanos, and they are able to transfer these small machines to others or to inanimate objects. > > Oftentimes this skill is used for healing, but it can be used for much more than this. > > A brief look at the Nanist Transferences will show a player what these characters are capable of. They may not have as many attack options as a Cyber Wizard, but they can offer great defense to any group and they can offer all kinds of aid in any combat situation. So the Nanist is a cleric by any other name, but I'm going to let it slide here because at least it's *interesting*. ### Skills I suppose we *have* to talk about skills now. Skill systems are one of my least favorite things which exist within RPG design, and it's because they never work quite right. There are always skills which are absolutely out of scale with every other skill, and combining that with the necessity of certain skills to be in pretty much every character in order to be combat capable given most of these designs, your flexibility goes out the window, creativity becomes something for other people. This one's no different, frankly. There's too many skills with too much mess in the whole thing. It's formatted poorly. You might think that the skills marked as needing training before they can be used would be skills which require having someone as a contact or some sort of narrative connection to you in order to provide specialized training that not just anyone can have. No. Skills that require training are those which require you to have at least one point in the skill before you can even attempt them. Don't be trying to apply first aid to someone who just had a serious cut by applying pressure and a bandage unless you have at least a point in first aid. Don't be trying to actually use a computer beyond the scope of an extremely minimal application, despite existing within a civilization which is absolutely immersed in computers, unless you have a point stuck in computerese. Definitely don't be trying any science out there. Seriously, I hate skill systems. ### Goods Does this feel awkwardly crammed in right here? Absolutely. In theory, I believe it's supposed to be here because it's stuff that you might want to buy at the beginning of the game. It's your equipment list. Does it make any sense for your gear to be ahead of spells and transferences? Not really. If anything, spells and transferences should have been right there with cyber wizards and nanists. But definitely weren't. Perhaps not shockingly, this is the longest section in the book. You've got your hacking programs. You've got your nanotech enhancements. You've got your cybernetics. You've got a ridiculous list and another terrible table of weapons. Then you've got a huge pile of general equipment which has descriptions but the costs seem to be pretty much entirely arbitrary and a bit ridiculous. It's just a bunch of stuff. Tucked into this list of a bunch of stuff, you have contact poisons which are given Greek letter designations, prices, damage, and endurance dice. Do you get individual descriptions of each of the poisons? Absolutely not. Do their names give any sort of interesting hook? It's just the Greek letters, dude. Is this effectively half a page or more that's completely wasted? Yes, yes it is. Then let us not forget there is a section of ships. Are the ships particularly interesting? Not really. There are only a few mechanically descriptive bits regarding each of them, mainly describing whether they have ablative hull, force shielding, or no armor at all. Their attack or defense bonus and the range of their sensors. The health of the ship and their jump capability. Speed and maneuverability. The speeds are listed in kilometers an hour, and they are all multiples of 100,000, except for the battlecruiser, which is 250,000. Clearly, acceleration doesn't matter, and there's some sort of reason for a top speed. But, why are you asking these questions? You get a maneuverability rating. Feel proud. Gear sections are like skill sections in RPGs. For the most part, they are generally useless. The longer they are, the more useless they are. Everything needs to have increasingly finely defined differentials in order to justify their space on the page. I don't think this really brings anything to the table that you need for the game, frankly. ### Spells & Transferrences It's a **D&D** spell list. That's it. Some of the names and descriptions have been teched up a bit, but that's it. I'll just show you a representative example page. ![[Ephemeris 2 - Spells.png]] Nanist Transferences are mainly just buffs or debuffs, but still cleric spells under the hood. ### Gaming Basics I'm looking for a straightforward discussion of the mechanics and a simplified summary of them to start with, so that you can begin playing. I'm so sorry. Instead, we're going to talk about running a game for half a page, which is probably not going to be important to you if you have any familiarity with RPGs at all, and if you have no familiarity with RPGs, this is not a game for you to get started in. Not least reason being that the next thing we launch into talking about is campaigns — how to structure a campaign, what the concept of a campaign is. You get a good half page of that. Next up, world building. #### World Building We don't actually talk about anything *regarding* the worlds in this implicit setting. Again, that would be too easy. Instead, we just say that some GMs like to make things detailed and some will just gloss over the details. Think about what you want to do. #### Gravity And thence into talking about gravity. I want you to note all of this discussion is phrased as prose not as directive text. We get a list of the gravities of the home worlds of various species and then some discussion of how being in a different gravity affects dice rolls. For every half a G higher than what the character is used to, they suffer a -2 penalty to Agility, and if Agility hits 0, then they make an Endurance check followed by a Fitness check. And if both fail, they take 1d6 damage. #### Planetary Systems There's a section on planetary systems here that doesn't really say much except *"people live in some pretty wacky places; they're cool."* #### Alternate Atmoapheres Then talks about atmospheres which are hostile, which basically just force an endurance check. But unlike the check for being exposed to high gravity, which has a fixed challenge score, the atmosphere endurance check is rolled against 4d12. Why? Good question. #### Vacuum How about vacuum? Well, this has an entirely different resolution where you subtract your Endurance score from 50, and that's the amount of damage you take every second. Toxic atmospheres are rolled against every minute. Vacuum is ruled against every seconds. Sure, whatever. #### Movement There's a movement section in here that talks about how ground movement is an eighth of your agility score every second unless you are a member of a flying species, in which case the GM is encouraged to adjust it. Because it's all completely up to the GM. #### Rewards You get a discussion of rewards and experience, which isn't particularly interesting in part, because it specifically calls out that you should be careful about what gear you give to a character which would unbalance things based on their level. This flies directly in the face of what players actually *want* in a game like this, which is to be able to get their hands on plasma assault rifles at level two because it helps balance the scales of agenetic power between them and the GM. *"Hey, here's a beautiful piece of gear, something that would make your life immensely easier. So I'm going to make sure that you can't have it until it won't make as much of a difference to you."* Philosophically, this is bad GM advice in general but specifically for science fiction. It's terrible. It's one of the reasons that level systems should be kept as far away from science fiction narratives as possible. It violates the core precepts. #### Experience and Levels We also get a bit on experience, which boils down to *"The GM will give it out whenever they feel like."* #### Credits We get a brief bit on credits which finally tells you how many you should have when you finish character generation. It's 5d12, by the way, multiplied by 100. Unless you are one of several classes which get something different. #### Attribute Checks Finally, at long last, on page 312, after wading through about 6 billion references to *attribute checks*, we finally get a section which defines *attribute checks*. It is a subsection of the Gaming Basics chapter, so of course it doesn't have an entry on the Table of Contents, but here it is finally at long last. There are *three different kinds* of attribute checks. And all three have different mechanical resolution methods and implications. Of course, they're all named the same thing. It wouldn't do to have them differentiated by name. *Skill checks* (a term I am making up from whole cloth because it's not here in the text) are 1d20 plus the skill modifier versus a challenge score, which is a set value. Roll under and it's successful; roll over and it's failure. Compare and contrast with *magic checks* (a term I am making up from whole cloth because it's not here in the text), which is 1d20 plus their intelligence modifier and their level compared to the attribute roll of their opponent, along with an additional 1d20, plus their level and their attribute modifier as called for in the spell or transference. For the record, that is straight out of the book, and I think it's gobbledygook. What I think it means is that it's essentially 1d20 plus level plus modifier for both caster and target with the highest winning. I don't know why it couldn't be written that way, but here we are. Compare and contrast with the *base attribute check* (a term I am making up from whole cloth because it's not here in the text) where you basically just try to roll 2d12 underneath your attribute (which remember runs 3 to 24). The last line in this particular subsection makes me laugh the most. > It's important that the player and especially the gamemaster knows exactly which type of check is being made. #### Encounters Having finally talked about the actual core mechanic of this entire game system in the middle of a section without it being specifically called out or referenced, we go back to talking about general GM guidance in the form of encounters. Nothing useful is in here. #### Reaction Checks There is a bit following which talks about reaction checks. If your players meet a character and you haven't figured out how they should feel about them already, you can roll a reaction check — it looks exactly like you expect. #### Initiative The combat and resolution mechanics don't deserve getting broken out into their own chapter, clearly. But at least we get a whole page talking about initiative, which is a little bit interesting. Well, for basic initiative, that part's kind of boring. 3d6 and your agility bonus the highest goes first and everybody counts down from there, with ties happening simultaneously. You've seen this kind of initiative system. You know how it goes. The interesting part is for spells and transferences. Because the time that it takes to cast a spell effectively is subtracted from your initiative, but you're considered to start casting it at your initiative roll. It might be that your spell takes so long that it rolls over into the next initiative phase. That's fine. It's kind of cool. The whole time that you're waiting for it to go off, you are casting that spell and there can be some side effects from interruption. Of all the mechanical bits in this game so far, this is the most interesting. They won't be talked about here, of course, but pages away. But they exist. It's not particularly cutting edge, but at least it provides a bit of texture. #### Combat Finally, down here on page 315 of 342, we finally get down to subsection Combat. We finally find out how long a combat round is. It's 10 seconds. That kind of explains why void checks are made every 10 seconds, but it complicates hostile atmosphere checks, which go a minute because that means they would need to be done every six combat rounds. Okay, let's not try to make coherent mechanical sense out of this. What is the core combat mechanic? There's been so much buildup, it has to be something that uses multiple polyhedral dice, right? It couldn't just be a bog-standard d20 resolution roll, right? It's a bog-standard d20 plus stat mod plus class/level mod versus a d20 plus defense mod plus agility bonus. That's it. That's the combat resolution core. I will give it that *damage* is straight in a comparative way which I was not expecting given that intro playing up the presence of the polyhedral as I was fully expecting to drop a fistful of gems and have to add up the pile. Shockingly, no. Instead, compare your attack roll to the defense roll, and if you have rolled higher, then just multiply the difference by the weapon's damage factor. Any fractional damage rounds up. That's it. That's the damage resolution mechanic. I have to admit I'm a little bit impressed. Is it a great damage resolution mechanic? Not really. It depends on combat roll outputs being relatively close in order to be consistent on a regular basis, but it's fast and it's easy to figure out. It's got one multiplication, then you apply and go. I don't hate it. I'm a little bit surprised that they didn't go for the *Arduin Grimoire* version of **D&D** attack phases, which adjusts the initiative by the attack speed of your weapon, since they do that for spellcasting. I'd kind of like to see that put in, frankly. Does this system need any more complication? Not really. Would it be interesting nonetheless? Yes. There's a brief discussion of why we don't fire guns inside of spaceships and space stations which doesn't really come to much. #### Critical Hits Following that, we talk about critical hits. Why we didn't talk about critical hits immediately after damage beats me. Here it is: If you beat the defender by 20 points, then you've scored a crit. Roll on the crit table. It's mostly a damage multiplier, though you could get *head removed* if you roll a 2 on 2d6. #### Combat Effects on Spells and Transferences Following that little joy, we talk about combat effects on spells and transferences, which is what happens when you get interrupted by someone poking you as you're casting. It's a concentration check. You lose concentration. Roll on the bad thing table. You get the idea. Why this is not next to damage or part of the damage discussion, but instead follows critical hits and a discussion of why not to fire guns indoors. I have no idea. #### Grappling and Unarmed Combat There's a reason that [grappling rules are the most inside joke of the TTRPG world](https://www.reddit.com/r/RPGdesign/comments/15e9vng/oh_god_i_have_to_write_some_grappling_rules/). There are no good rules for grappling. If you feel like you need to specifically put in rules to cover grappling combat, you have failed to understand abstraction at the mechanical level. I wish there was an easier way to put it, but it's true. Nobody likes grappling rules. Nobody wants grappling rules. But since they're here, it's effectively just the same combat mechanics as were discussed earlier with everything else. The only outstanding note is that bare-handed combat has a damage factor of 0.25. Effectively, for every four points that you beat the opponent in a very literal sense, you do one point of damage. But you knew it was coming. The slightly modified rules for grabbing another character. The worst part of grappling. The least clear. It's a strength versus agility test, just like you expect. The idea that you could grab somebody and hold on to them without being stronger than them? Don't think about that. Doesn't happen. Can't exist. Once you've been grappled and you want to break away, it's a strength attribute check. If you've got somebody grabbed and you want to do damage to them, then it's the usual strength combat check. But the DF is 0.33. So, for every three points you exceed their defense roll, you do a point of damage. Then there's a paragraph which, paraphrased, says, *"Hey, you could also have martial arts, which would let them make skill checks, but that would be entirely up to you."* Let's point something out here. Back on page 24, with the discussion of the Althani in the Species section, there are literally multiple pages talking about an Althani martial art and specific moves within it. It's a little bit over a full page devoted just to that. If you are playing an Althani and get down to this part of the book where it says, *"Hey, the probable reason that you took that species is entirely optional, the GM could just ignore it out of hand,"* I think you would be perfectly justified in taking your pizza and going home #### Healing Nothing at all exciting here. 1 point a day when active, 1d6/day when bed resting, magic is magic. #### Genetic Manipulation You're probably wondering why there is roughly half a page about genetic manipulation, which can be summed up by saying it's extremely expensive and you are probably not going to make the stat roll that is necessary to come away with a positive effect. So, don't mess around with it. I certainly wonder why it's there. It would have been better not to introduce it at all, quite frankly, if this is how it was going to get dealt with. What I see on the page is just a big stick for a GM to beat players with. Why? ### Hyperspace Remember all of that talk at the beginning of the book about world-building and how there's not a lot of it and it's up to the GM? Yeah, ignore all that. This chapter is literally about all of the most important bits of this particular science fiction setting and all of the mechanics that are involved with it. Apparently, hyperspace is incredibly dangerous to get into and out of. Let's look at this. Jumping into hyperspace requires a hyperspatial mechanics skill check. Jumping out of hyperspace and returning to normal space requires another hyperspace mechanics skill check. The basic challenge score is 10. Your hyperspatial mechanics skill will never and can never be higher than three. Hyperspatial mechanics is an intelligence skill, so add that modifier as well. Let's assume you start as a trader, which gives you a max of four points in hyperspatial mechanics. Your intelligence is going to be higher than average. So, let's say that you have a plus two modifier from intelligence. Base skill is going to be 4 plus 2, so you get 6, plus 1d20 versus 10. Three outcomes can be a failure. Keep in mind this is with maxed out skill and a decent intelligence. Three out of twenty jumps are going to end poorly. We calculate that from the difference between what you rolled and what you needed. The CS is 10. You rolled 1, plus 4, plus 2. Three under, you just failed to make the transition. Fair enough, now you can try it again. That's worst case if you are pretty heavily specialized in making hyperspace transitions in an ideal situation. You want to jump out of an actual orbit, that'll kick it up another 10 CS. One out of 20 attempted transitions from an orbit, being excellently trained and skilled, you explode. Everybody dies. You want to jump into orbit, that's another 10. Want to jump further than the range of your hyperspace drive? The CS goes up on a per light year basis. Have you merely damaged your hyperspace engines? Not necessarily better. You can be trapped forever in hyperspace on just a failure of 5 to 8 points. If you blew your first attempt to exit and try again to receive another failure, what I'm telling you is that hyperspace is so deadly and threatening under anything other than the most ideal conditions with the most focused training that no one would ever discover anything anywhere else in the galaxy. There would be no exploration. There would be no new planetary discoveries. Nobody would go to war because they'd like their fleet to actually show up. You may think that I've gone on about this longer than I should have, but when you are dealing with a multi-species interstellar science fiction setting, travel is one of those things that really is hugely important to get right and to understand why you've failed when you don't get it right. Oh yeah, did I mention that hyperspace causes insanity? Jump more than ten light years and you start having to make sanity checks. Yes, you can add Geller fields to your ship in order to reduce the effects on sanity. Did I mention that you can run into hyperspatial eddies of relatively arbitrary difficulty that, if you can't pilot your way out of them, you're lost forever in the warp? And if you happen to run into one and you are fighting to get out of it, every time that you try to get out makes it two points harder until you are simply unable to. Frankly, this conception of hyperspace is brutally deadly on every front and mechanically not particularly interesting beyond the bits on how fast you can go in it. If every time you got in your car and drove outside of your hometown you had a non-zero chance of simply exploding, if you have to make a turn more aggressively than you usually do you might burst into flame, and every time you got on the highway there was a good chance you might simply never be able to exit the highway system again, you probably wouldn't go anywhere. This is bad world building. That's all it is. ### Cyberspace Because what we really needed was some cyberpunk, which wouldn't normally be a problem. I love cyberpunk. But right up front we run into the fact that computers effectively get a character generation, including sanity. No, I'm not talking about artificial intelligences; those are a separate section. I mean all computers. Back in the gear section, there was a chunk for hacking programs. You saw this coming. It's basically just like every other combat in this game. It's your traditional Gibsonian cyberspace, with all that entails. You've seen it. You've done it. Yes, if you die in cyberspace, you can die in real life. Worse, you can actually just accrue brain damage. ### Creatures It's your monster manual. When I say that, I am not using that as a shortcut term. I mean that the format of a particular creature listed in this text follows all of the formatting expectations of the **D&D Monster Manual**. ![[Ephemeris 2 - Arnish.png]] Beyond the formatting, this section is a bit of a disappointment. Creature lists are an opportunity to really communicate how you see the universe and the things in it to a reader. Just like the species list, the creatures list gives you an opportunity to put things in front of people and make them deal with the situations that are implied. Aside from being very short, half of the creatures here live in hyperspace, a place you don't want to go and have a fight anyway. Of the remaining, several live in space, which just makes them kind of brutal but also dependent on you being in a ship you care about in space. What this should have been is a series of example planets with a few members of that ecology picked out on each, giving the author an opportunity to demonstrate the world-building elements that he talked about earlier in the text, while giving players and new GMs some places they could throw down and experience. I really hate lost opportunities, especially when it comes to indie RPGs. You are already working in the hole by not having a real publisher and not having the money to sink into layout and design. Lean heavily on the stuff that you *can* do. ### Gaming Ideas It's just a bunch of story seeds. Not even particularly interesting ones, truth be told. Go to your local library and flip through the science fiction books on display. Go to Netflix and flip through the science fiction movies you can watch right now. This kind of short seed list is simply not interesting in an era of easy mass communication. It'd be different if each one of them cited some media inspirations and talked about how they are twisting the game idea away from the inspirational media. It just needs to bring more to the table than *"Here's a bunch of short ideas."* It's been done before and better. Let's not do it again. ## Exunt Okay, so here's the deal - I feel a *little* bit bad about this. Not because I think I've said anything out of line, incorrect, invalid, or simply wrong. I don't even feel bad because I've had to be generally negative about a product that was simply given to me. I'm an asshole. I accept these things. It's one of the side effects of having a lot of experience and understanding of expertise in a field. If you can't be honest, you can't be anything. I feel bad because I can see that there *is* the underlying substrate of a game worth playing in here, and it just doesn't reach high enough to hit that level. It's hindered by absolutely execrable layout and structure. Content like that should no longer be something that sees the light of day in the modern era. There's no excuse for it. We have 10,000 examples of good layout, of good structure, of good, well-designed technical documentation for playing games, and this fails to meet the bar on all of it. Beyond the issues of layout and structure, there is the obvious problem of a mechanical system that is overly complicated for what it needs to or wants to achieve while being poorly presented. There's a germ of a decent mechanical resolution core in the middle of all that. There really is, but you would have to burn off everything outside of that core to turn it into something neat and polished. The interesting parts are literally the species list. There is a lot of implied setting, which come up in the course of putting all of those species in the same pit, which has a lot of promise. But there's so much other garbage that you have to deal with in order to get to that meat, and so much of it is going to require much more heavy lifting that I can't really justify telling anybody that they need to pick up this book just for those interesting species. Ironically, I was looking through my collection and I have a copy of **Ephemeris 1.0** and could take the opportunity to go look at what was in that original book and when it was published. In 2009, the author clearly used Microsoft Word to write and export the original text. Ironically, it looked *better* than the export I have in my hands right now. The font was larger, it made better use of white space, there was more use of italics and bold for emphasis in good ways and there were even some amateurish but effective illustrations for the species. Sure, the system was a little bit different, but almost all the text of the things around it are *exactly* the same. The order in which things are introduced and poorly structured is exactly the same. That was 14 years ago. **Ephemeris 2.0** will soon be up on Amazon. At a price point of $10, I'm sure that it will also be [up on Drivethru RPG](https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/63664/Ephemeris?manufacturers_id=2805) sometime very soon thereafter in PDF only. It's not worth $10. I hate to say it, but it's not worth $10.  Instead, what you can do, and what I would advise that you do, is take advantage of the current sale on the first edition of the game, which is almost identical, except you can get it for $1.25. That's a far more reasonable price point for what you get. Feel free to pick up a couple of the other things that are down and on deep discount, because they are likely mineable for the game you really want to play. What games would I suggest instead of this one? - **[[Tiny Frontiers Revised|Tiny Frontiers: Revised]]** - **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]** - **[[5150 - New Beginnings|5150: New Beginnings]]** - **[[Those Dark Places|Pressure]]** - **[Fireteam](https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/374993/FIRETEAM--Rules-Light-Military-Science-Fiction-Roleplaying)** Frankly, all of them are better organized, better structured, and have a better core mechanic. **Tiny Frontiers** is really what this game wants to be. That would be my vote. I appreciate having the opportunity to sit down and do an in-depth review of this upcoming product, though I'm sure the author may regret providing me that opportunity. If so, think of it this way: all of these criticisms are solvable. They aren't inherent to the idea. The product is salvageable. There is a good game to be had in here. There is a good product to be had in here. It's just not this one. It's certainly possible to draw one out. Don't stop trying to just because you didn't this time.