Dragonstar Starfarer’s Handbook First Look

You probably got a first look before we did, but hey. Beautiful cover, isn’t it? Kind of iffy writing in the opening chapter about the game world, huh? Not bad writing, exactly, but a little dry and stiff. Nice interior art, though, and… hmm, I notice there are no little sidebars with additional story. The info on the races looks complete and interesting… nice interactions there. Then after the color intro chapter and the races, the chapters go Classes, Skills, Feats, Equipment, Combat, Magic, Vehicles. The combat section fleshes out the consequences of firing into a crowd, among other things. Magic seems mostly to cover how wizards use datapads instead of spellbooks, and gives you oodles of spells with names like Refuel, Instant Reboot and Detect Surveillance. Does it make sense to just instantly give magic the tools to deal with technology, or would it be more interesting to have them be at odds somehow, or more difficult to fuse? It may just be that the story is folded into the game text more evenly and picking it all out will take a closer read, but on first glance, it looks like the real character of Dragonstar isn’t going to make itself known for a couple of books yet… which may be a serious misstep, but we’ll see. It looks like a lot of fun stuff, such as cybernetic spellware, won’t surface until the Galaxy Guide hits (FFG has a preview of spellware up at their Dragonstar site).