12 Games August: firefly RPG

A new month means a new games and this time around we're looking at the Firefly RPG.  I will admit that I already played the Serenity RPG a couple years ago.  They're by the same publishing company, but Firefly uses the newer edition of the rules versus Serenity (Cortex Plus over Cortex).  We've also covered a bit of Cortex Plus when we reviewed the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game, but from everything I've seen with this system is that they've basically retooled a lot of the nuts and bolts between these two games even though they claim to be the same system. With all that out of the way this IS only week one so lets get into my overall first impressions of this book.

To start this book is gorgeous. The art is amazing with the heads of each chapter being a real highlight.  They also include a lot of fluff art that really helps immerse a player in the world if by any chance they hadn't seen the show.  As with any licensed game there's also a fair amount of photos, but in all honestly that doesn't do a lot to impress me as it's both kind of a given and offers nothing fans of the setting hasn't already seen.

The other part that I really love breezing through this book is how they teach players the game.  It's not so much about the actual mechanics (that for week 3), but instead how they present them.  Knowing that this is a book for fans of the Firefly series they actually use the aired episodes of the series as example adventures.  The break down what the lead characters did in key points of each episode and how the mechanics rolled out to let them unfold as they did.  Even better they give examples of how things could have gone different if the dice decided the story should go that way. Then finally they give ways to tie these adventures into new games and more important are written in a way that if you wanted you could even just run through those very episodes with out own crew.  I'm not big on running pre-written adventures, but I do love to steal from them so this is a great treat for me.

Finally the wording and structure of the Firefly RPG is worlds better than the Marvel game.  It feels like they learned a lot from earlier games to figure out how to better get their ideas across to new players.  There isn't nearly as much hoping between several dozen pages just to cross reference rules.
Now on to building up some characters for next week's article.