Pulse en una miniatura para ir a Google Books.
Cargando... The Galactos Barrier (Amazing Engine System, Am5)por Colin McComb
Ninguno Cargando...
Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Pertenece a las seriesAmazing Engine (5)
No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
Debates activosNinguno
Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSin géneros ValoraciónPromedio: No hay valoraciones.¿Eres tú?Conviértete en un Autor de LibraryThing. |
The "music"-based magic system--advertised as "a magic system that marches to that proverbial different drummer"--is rules-wise a fairly standard magic system; worse, even in setting, there's nothing musical about the magic except the names. Much is made of the Galactos Barrier (usable by mages specializing in law; I mean "Harmonians") and the Power of Entropy (for specialists in chaos; I mean "Discordians"), but what fun is having one spell that is incredibly massively more powerful than the rest (the penultimate spells can kill 1d6 organic beings or teleport other; these ultimate spells destroy a planet) balanced by the fact that the caster effectively looses all ability to cast spells permanently?
Somewhat confusingly, the book never states it in that terms. The caster merely loses 85 (out of a possible 100) points in the prime casting attribute for casting the spell. (It's fatal if the character doesn't have an 85, a very high attribute in any case.) A note says that it can be rebuilt through experience; elsewhere it comes out to 85 * 4 = 340 XP. With the game suggesting 25 experience points for a very successful session, that's going to take a long time to rebuild.
I found some of the details a bit frustrating. A couple times it mentions a war between the magical group where planets were destroyed and "thousands" were killed. That's weird, especially when the book rarely is clear on the population issue. If there are planets with merely thousands, shouldn't they be backwaters/frontiers, usually secondary (politically, socially, and culturally) to the planets with billions of people? There's a Dyson sphere that's seems to be tossed in; it's said to be a major exporter of food, but none of these planets seem to have populations that couldn't be supported by a small continent's worth of produce.
The world failed to awaken in me interest or passion. It felt generic and ordinary, just another decaying space empire, with some magic tacked on the side. Nothing made me want to write up a character or start up a campaign here, and if I were starting up a science fiction campaign, I don't even know that I would raid it for inspiration.