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A First Look At ... Frostbyte Books' M-Space, Part 8


Alex Greene

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And so we come to it at last. The final chapter of Frostbyte Books' M-Space, and the Appendices. I'm not going to review the index, merely point out that the index is bookmarked, so if you want to get to a particular place in the PDF in a hurry, go right to the back of the book, locate your bookmark, and click.

So the final chapter of M-Space is devoted to Life Forms - the equivalent of Traveller's Animal Encounters, and Mythras' Bestiary / Creatures / Monsters.

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You know, once I'm done with reviewing Frostbyte Books' material, I am going to miss these delightful illustrations.

The Life Forms chapter is only six pages long, and it covers some non-sentient beasties and one sentient alien species, the Grept.

The Reptore are illustrated on page 146. To save you going back sixty pages, here it is.

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These fearsome predators are used for "Stay out of the long grass!" scenarios. They do seem very nasty.

Next are Deep-Sea Gobblers, primitive aquatic life forms the size of orca, who are on the verge of developing a sentient civilisation. So they could be classified as a sentient species, maybe.

They are followed by the Woog, a species of literal scroungers, foragers basically, with a talent for hiding. They can be found on several worlds, and the speculation is that they find their way into Starships which then spread them about on the worlds where they touch down.

This is an illustration of a Woog (page 187).

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Next are the Lava Swamp Morac, and these creatures and occasional riding beasts are illustrated on page 84. I don't think I poached the pic from 84, so here it is.

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Lastly, there are the psionic Grept. And we've already seen a picture of one.

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Grept politics is based around psionic ability. They have a strict caste system, and there's a story hook to get characters involved in Grept politics.

And that's the last chapter of the M-Space Core Rulebook.

Appendices

There are five Appendices, labelled A through E. Each is short, and covers something related to some earlier chapter in the core rulebook.

Appendix A is a useful Starship design walkthrough, to help the readers who might find the whole process daunting.

The Appendix guides you through the procedure of creating a small Starship called an Explorer, for around 4 people - a small player character party. The narrator uses the rules on page 101 to add quirks and features to the slightly old Explorer ship, called the Aajege (Gesundheit!).

Would you like me to create a few future blog posts devoted to creating a bunch of Starships and/or alien species? Please send feedback. I could do with the walkthroughs myself.

And so to Appendix B, which is an example of Starship combat, supplied by Colin Brett, with a handy link to his website. The protagonists are the Gamma Star, the generic space fuzz, and the Speeding Blade, the poirates arrr.

Right. The stage s set, so FIIIIGHT!

Enter Captain Kurt Intolerance, and dashing swashbuckler Sasha Reeves. You might be wondering whom I have put my money on ...

The action is both narrative and crunchy. The Appendix includes Bridge dialogues on both ships. Though I don't think you need to say "Aye aye" when "Aye" will do. I'll have to dig up one of my old contacts to confirm the protocol. Ex-Navy. Sweet. Keen sense of humour.

The action pans out over several admittedly tense pages. Who wins? Who ends up screaming in fury and vowing vengeance? Read on. I'm not going to spoil it for you ...

So Appendix C is one page long, and it's got some additional Careers for you to look at. These are Assassin, Entertainer, Law Enforcement, Noble, Scientist, and Soldier.

Appendix D introduces the Skills Pyramid and Expert Characters. These also expand the character generation options.

Finally, Appendix E expands upon the Extended Conflicts section with some sample Extended Conflicts - Quicksand, Asteroid Field, and Rickety Bridge.

Fin

And then that's it. Page 229 has some Acknowledgements, and a fine bunch of people they are too - they're you, basically. BRP Central are given top billing. Without you, M-Space 1.2 would not have come about, and Frostbyte Books might not have survived much past M-Space v 1.0.

There are adverts for The Triton Incident (and, by extension, Elevation) and M-Space Companion, and then the Index.

And with that, my review of M-Space Core Rulebook ... is done.

Thanks to everyone who's stuck with me to this point. I want to come back to M-Space, starting with the next post, called Speculations, about the kinds of settings and scenarios M-Space can support, while also looking at supplements already on the market.

And so, before bowing out of the core rulebook, one last look at the full M-Space wraparound book cover.

Let's go ... out there.

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Edited by Alex Greene

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