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 Reviews - Exquisite Replicas |
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by Lee Valentine
Exquisite Replicas is the newest RPG entry from indie publisher Abstract Nova. Probably best known for their Heaven & Earth roleplaying game, Abstract Nova specializes in imaginative RPGs with highly detailed, creepy, alien or paranormal settings.
Overview Given that the simulacra are perfect to the last detail, even down to memories, most people are unaware that their neighbors and loved ones have been kidnapped and replaced. Invisible alien invaders from Otherside also walk the streets of Earth. The only ones who can see the alien Othersiders and detect their simulacra are a group of human freedom fighters known only as the Anonymous. This group, possessed of altered sensory powers, has banded together to fight off the alien invasion. Given that none of their friends and family can see the invaders, the Anonymous are forced to fight their battles as "missing persons", outcasts from society, trying to stay out of jail and the inevitable padded room in the insane asylum that awaits them if they reveal the reality they perceive to the world at large. The Anonymous hide their identities from the world by wearing masks while engaging in a war against an invisible enemy. Those masks perform a second function, however, because to copy and replace a person, the Surgineers send their servants to obtain a scan of the person's memories and a clear scan of that person's face. Wearing an ornate mask prevents a person from being scanned and copied, and so the disguises of the Anonymous keep them in the fight. I won't go into too great a detail about the nature and kinds of alien invaders featured in Exquisite Replicas, to avoid spoiling surprises for would be players reading this review. I will say that it is possible for the Anonymous, through the use of captured alien technology, to travel from our world to the industrial wastelands, junkyards, and concentration camps that make up Otherside. Sometimes characters may visit Otherside to rescue a kidnapped loved one. At other times they may visit that hellish place just to take the fight to the invaders by making quick commando raids on important targets.
Suspension of Disbelief
Character Creation Basics Skills are handled as a mix between traditional skill-by-skill point buy using the advantages system, and an amorphous super-skill using the occupation system. In short, a character spends a certain number of his occupation points to become a practitioner of a given occupation. Additional occupation points are then spent to improve the character's rank in that occupation. A character can perform any skill thematically associated with that occupation at the same level as the rank of the occupation. So, for example, a rank 3 journalist will have interviewing, writing, research, and street smarts all at rank 3, along with any other skill the GM deems appropriate, whether or not they are listed in the game manual. Points spent on advantages can grant bonuses to occuptional skills (such as increasing your interviewing skill to rank 5 while your other journalist skills are left at rank 3). Alternately, advantage points can be spent to grant access to so-called "extracurricular skills" not typically associated with your character's chosen occupation (such as granting your journalist skill with a firearm). Alternately, they can be used to equip your character with alien-made weapons.
Psychological States of Characters Ranked from 1 (low) to 5 (high), Immorality rates a character's willingness to lie, cheat, steal, and betray people to get what a character wants. Since the Anonymous often live on the fringes of society, being highly Immoral has its survival applications. Given that even loved ones of the Anonymous have often been replaced, it is not surprising that many of them are incredibly Paranoid. High levels of Paranoia can prevent any meaningful social interaction in Exquisite Replicas. In extreme cases, the most paranoid members of the Anonymous never remove their masks, and will not eat food that they haven't personally acquired and prepared. At the same time, spotting the invisible threats and simulacra in the world is not automatic, but highly Paranoid individuals, being ever vigilant, are quite adept at spotting the Otherside invaders. The combat system in Exquisite Replicas lets you know immediately that you are in for deep roleplaying and not merely hack and slash adventuring. In a typical fantasy game, characters casually lop off the head or limbs of anything in their path. A character has to be fairly inured to Violence in Exquisite Replicas before he'll consider killing a doppelganger (a replicated human) and even more callous before he'll kill an actual human.
Mental Impairments & Tragedy Points This system does add some rules complexity that the GM is required to handle, as a variety of things in the game require rolls to increase or decrease Psychological States, and thus to change the Mental Impairments that a character has. Mental Impairments have only one upside: by roleplaying their effects a player gains "Tragedy Points" (read "plot points") that he can spend during play to modify dice rolls to his character's favor. The more elevated your character's Psychological States are, the more Mental Impairments he has, the more Tragedy Points he can bank to save his character from danger. You can guarantee that a highly unstable character will definitely be in regular danger.
Core Mechanics For an unopposed roll (i.e., one where another player or non-player character is not directly involved) the GM determines the difficulty of the task, usually level 1 or level 2, but sometimes as high as level 5. If the number of rolled successes equals or exceeds the difficulty level of the task being attempted, the task attempt is a success. Otherwise it is a failure. The game has a binary success/failure mechanic, and does not have a detailed system for determining the relative level of success. For opposed rolls, each character rolls the number of dice he is due for the task at hand. The one with the higher number of successes wins. Ties can result somewhat frequently, since it's hard to roll lots of successes at one time. In these cases, each side keeps rolling a single d10 looking for the highest roll, as a tie breaker, until someone comes out on top. Again, there is no mechanism for a standoff or tie, or for relative levels of success. The dicing mechanic, while functional, provides for only a very coarse-grained difficulty rating system, with probabilities dropping dramatically from one difficulty rating to the next. As a result, going from difficulty 2 to difficulty 3 produces a strong drop off in the level of expected success. The system is thus somewhat reliant on a Tragedy Point (i.e., plot point) expenditure mechanic and situational modifiers for teamwork to tackle anything above a minimal level of difficulty. Thankfully, most unopposed rolls in the game are of difficulty levels 1 or 2. This is slightly less troublesome with opposed rolls (which roll against each other rather than against a static difficulty number), but may be an area of potential concern for unopposed rolls, particularly ones where a character's occupation doesn't happen to help him (like a lawyer breaking down a door). Very little in the task resolution rules is tied to using a ten-sided die as prescribed by the rules, and so the system's success percentages can be readily altered simply by adjusting the type of die being used (e.g., switching to a d8) if this is a concern for you. There are no tables summarizing sample task difficulties. Further, the difficulty ratings which are provided are not thoroughly explained. This can sometimes make it difficult for the GM to appropriately set task difficulties for unopposed rolls. What the game desperately needed as a GM tool (but failed to supply) was a probability chart showing how likely a character rolling X dice would be to succeed at a task of Y difficulty.
Combat Firearm combat is handled as an unopposed roll against a task difficulty determined by the GM (factoring in distance, movement of the target, etc.). Damage for firearms does not benefit from Strength, and the weapon modifiers of firearms multiplies successes instead of adding to them. So, when just rolling a single success, a melee weapon is more likely to work better for a strong character. However, when multiple successes start appearing, firearms can become extremely lethal weapons in this game. Typical humans in Exquisite Replicas have 20 Health and can sustain 21 damage before dying. Receiving 16 to 20 damage still requires fast medical treatment or death will occur. Othersiders have widely varying Health scores, depending on the nature of the creature in question, but any replicated weapon used on any Othersider does double normal damage. I didn't like the fact that, again, the system was strongly binary (success/fail) in it's application to combat. Damage in the game is calculated based on the quality of the shot, ignoring the difficulty of making the attack. For example, if you roll 5 successes against a difficulty 5 target you inflict the same amount of damage as if you had rolled 5 successes against a difficulty 1 target. Combat in the game can be sudden (in the case of called shots with high damage weapons) or it can be more drawn out, but either way, high damage and various wound penalties involved in the rules system make the game's combat system potentially quite lethal. The only thing that keeps lethality under control is the relative difficulty of rolling multiple successes using the dicing system. Even the methods for handling nominally non-lethal damage are pretty lethal. To add some flash to otherwise violent combats, the game system includes a variety of rules on chases, breaking objects, healing, recovery, and psychological trauma. While this may not be the best rules system you have seen, there's enough meat on the bones for a GM to run the game out of the box without having to "wing" too many things in combat the first time out.
Rules Complexity While parts of Exquisite Replicas are a quite rules heavy game when compared to many other indie RPGs, the onus of the mechanics will fall squarely on the shoulders of the GM. To a player, this game may appear as a light Stat+Skill dice pool mechanic that will be learned in under ten minutes. Particularly when foraying into Otherside, there are many customized rules for every situation which a GM must either internalize or ignore. When adventuring in Otherside, the rule of thumb seems to be "why roll one die with three will do the trick."
Examples & Additional Content The setting in Exquisite Replicas is well-developed and filled with many ideas for plotlines. However, some areas of the game are less fully developed. With the exception of two human NPCs, there are no character examples of any kind in the book. I found this most noteworthy because a large section of the setting background is presented in the form of an "in character" storyline that introduces a number of key NPCs. This practically begged for these NPCs to be "statted out" in game terms, but they just weren't there. Not only will this needle GMs who want to pick up the game and run it without a lot of planning, but such characters would have been great examples to players trying to understand how good attributes and occupational skills needed to be to make competent characters for an Exquisite Replicas campaign. While there is no introductory adventure included with the game, there are certainly plenty enough plot ideas that were written up by the game's authors that a competent GM will have inspiration for where to take his story line in the long run. Typically I don't care if there is an introductory adventure in an RPG core book. However, the setting of Exquisite Replicas is so out-of-the-norm that GMs would have been well-served with the inclusion of an introductory adventure. My fear is that without such an introduction, GMs may simply resort to handing out photocopies and using lengthy exposition to present basic information to players. The game would be much better served by artfully revealing key information one scene at a time.
Art & Layout The cover and the other illustrations in the book were done by Eric Lofgren. The cover artwork features three mask-wearing members of the Anonymous with improvised melee weapons. While the cover does show a scene characteristic of what one might see in an actual game, the scene is not active and not particularly exciting. I worry a bit that the cover will not tell the reader enough about what type of game he's in for; it screams "mugging in an alley" not "stop the alien invaders." The back cover does go into greater detail about the game, but I wish there had been a greater connection between the information on the back cover and the image pictured on the front. The interior artwork, while not always top notch, was generally quite serviceable. None of it detracted from the overall feel of the product, and it often helped set an appropriate tone. Some art panels were even imaginative enough that I expect to see them again if any motion picture of Exquisite Replicas ever gets made. Some of the art panels felt a bit thematically repetitive from section to section, but there were a few standout pieces of artwork that were quite nightmarish.
Appeal to Users of Other Systems By applying some modest effort, a clever GM could convert the campaign setting for Exquisite Replicas to White Wolf's World of Darkness Storytelling System. The examination of the fundamental nature of humanity that goes on in Exquisite Replicas could appeal to some players of the various World of Darkness games even though this game is more thematically aligned with science fiction than the supernatural. I think users of other generic systems such as FUDGE or GURPS could readily convert this game to those systems, as so much of the book is non-rules content regarding the setting.
Adult Content
For GMs Only? At the end of the rulebook there is a fairly rich section dedicated to guiding the GM through the art of running an Exquisite Replicas campaign. This section does not focus on balancing encounters and managing the rules minutiae of the game, but instead focuses on the storytelling aspects the GM will need to master to run a successful campaign. The primer on GMing in Exquisite Replicas is well thought out and well presented, and surpasses GMing advice presented in games published by larger companies.
Conclusions While I found the material in Exquisite Replicas to be thought provoking, sometimes the authors tried to aim for the surreal just because it's surreal. This is particularly true with regards to Otherside, leading the reader to ask himself questions like, "why are there 30-foot tall pig men in this game?" Sometimes there are no answers given by the authors, who seem to want to create a setting as inexplicable, alien, and madness-inducing as possible. The book is presented well. Dark, surreal, and imaginative, with some refinements, the core contents of Exquisite Replicas could make a fine science fiction film. Consider picking up Exquisite Replicas if your group is into indie games. Its creepy vibe, paranoia-inducing themes, and out-of-the-ordinary setting could be a great change of pace for the right group. Having reviewed it, I'm now eager to go back and pick up that copy of Heaven & Earth Third Edition which I have had my eye on for some time.
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Exquisite Replicas