project hail mary - recommendation
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The Good
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProjectHailMary/comments/1i1dp0q/project_hail_mary_fan_art_by_crystal_scott_posted/Ultimately, we had a good time with Nova!
It's good if you're after a combat-heavy one-shot where you don't have to think too hard. Things are very intuitive - if you've played other ttrpg's before.
It was a very quick power-fantasy one shot, very rules light and easy to learn. I found it very bite sized and satisfying, but I don't necessarily know that I'd play a whole campaign of it.
The worldbuilding is so so detailed, so there's a lot to build stories from. We found it a little hard to understand at times (the sun exploded? huh? how does the science make sense for that?) but were ultimately able to brush it away as 'weird science' and 'rule of cool supernatural bullshit'.
The Weird
We did have some problems with balancing. It's not a big deal: first because they're going to fix it in the next update, and second because we all had a fun time anyway - it didn't significantly alter the experience.
But essentially, here's the problem:
You've got your basic sparksuits: the Pyre (single target melee damage), the Warden (defender tank), and a scout one, and a AOE one. And they're all different and cool, but pretty standard, right?
But then the later sparksuits are weirder. The 'Drifter' is a gunslinging mech. Cool, if a little too strong compared to the others. The 'Pox' spark works by infecting enemies. Okay, sure. But then another literally controls the dead, and the 'Sanguinis' spark can somehow control literal blood (how? and also aren't these suits Transformer-sized? that's so much blood!). It can also literally 'turn into bats' and another one drags people to literal hell. Hell is not mentioned again anywhere else in the book! The implications have me reeling - we learn hell is real in the context of a specific ability, and that's it?
You're really not meant to think too hard about it, I guess.
I'm not dissing the themes: fuck yeah vampire robot, you know? It's a power fantasy. Except all of them are stronger than the basic sparksuits I mentioned before, and especially the Drifter. They plow through enemies. It's like the designers made the original standard ones in line with the rest of the enemies in the game - as if those are the ones they used for testing, and for balancing abilities, and for the 'basic' experience of the game.
And then they thought 'oh, this would be cool!' and made the new ones afterwards, and were maybe more focused on making it cool instead of making it balanced.
Just speculation. Like I said: not a big deal, had fun anyway.
The Unfortunate
I will say: this maybe isn't the game to start with if you've never played a ttrpg before. It could get very easily overwhelming for the GM, and it does tend to assume you know how these games work.
The distances in the game are a little funky. There's four ranges: Close, Near, Far, and Beyond, and your abilities describe the ranges they can be used at.
The tricky thing is, though, is that the ranges don't come with map-equivalents. And this would be fine if it was theatre of the mind, or if it were a non-combat focused game - which the game seems to assume it will be. But unfortunately, the combat is the main focus of the game, and more than a few of the Spark abilities are difficult to track in theatre of the mind alone: for example, how some of the Sparks 'tag' enemies in different ways, and can affect them in later turns if certain conditions arise.
The game loosely describes the distances of these ranges - Close, Near, Far, etc - but the descriptions are not specific. It's up to the GM, more or less, how far away things are.
This would seem to allow for a more creative style of play, but what actually happens is the players asking the GM two or three times every turn 'How far away is this guy from me?' Rather than being creative and flexible, it just puts more mental effort on the GM. It seems that more specific measurements would be valuable here, especially since the combat is the main interaction of the game.
The other thing is that ability 'checks' don't really come up in regular play unless you're stretching it. There's three main abilities, which purportedly cover three kinds of actions: Sun, Moon, and Shade. Sun is aggressive and emotional, Moon is subtle and quick, and Shade is measured and methodical. Which is all well and good. And you're meant to ask for ability checks only when there's an element of risk to the described action. Okay, also fair enough.
But what you get when you put all this together is that... the checks don't really come up. In combat, there's already set abilities that describe their effects, and out of it, there's often uncertainty, but very rarely risk. When you make a check, the mechanics work via rolling a dice pool + take the highest result. But the three main abilities of the game, and we made... maybe two, three checks total over four hours of play? You could have taken it out and we wouldn't have noticed: not exactly ideal in a core mechanic.
Asking for checks only when there's risk is, we think, the problem. Better to ask for it when there's uncertainty, instead.
But! All that doesn't matter, actually, because at the end of the day I had a good time playing this game. I got to think of a cool concept for a mech, and fight hell-enemies in a world of constant darkness. With my friends!
It's a power fantasy. You're really not meant to think too hard about it, I guess.
Session Summary
The story so far...
The Gamma continent has been left dark after the explosion of the sun. Of the twelve scattered 'Solar Well' cities left on the globe, three exist here: Solis #7, Solis #8, and Solis #9. A decade ago, however, #7's sunwell went dark. The next thing anybody knew, an army of the maddened inhabitants tore through #9, flooding #8 with the refugees of the incursion. The refugees told stories of cannibalism, of an army of the darkness-infected dead.
Ten years later, Solis #8 - the unending city - has been forced to adapt to the greater population.. The city's Sparks are all in use for scavenging runs as the city desperately expands. Recent intel has uncovered an agricultural facility in a nearby valley that could be re-activated for orchard use.
Three mechs were sent out on this mission.
CALLSIGN: "BROADSIDE"
SPARKSUIT: DRIFTER
PILOT NAME: Barry 'Bazza' Chestnut
A retrofitted construction mech with a very old and clunky design, and a metric shit-ton of ordinance attached. Its pilot usually works in construction and defence on the coastal side of the city, and has experience taking out threats in the dark with calculated solar-powered missiles.
CALLSIGN: "PHEONIX"
SPARKSUIT: PYRE
PILOT NAME: Wheat
A mech that assimilates the memories of its previous pilots, leading to it having a seperate personality.
Modern design, fluid and fast. It has a new pilot today: a young agricultural worker with a terminal diagnosis named Wheat who is happy to be along for the ride, and to be something bigger than herself.
CALLSIGN: "SEPSIS"
SPARKSUIT: SANGUINIS
PILOT NAME: Elijah Sanguinis
The 'Sepsis' Spark uses weird science to manipulate blood into armor and weaponry. The pilot comes from a family of pilots. He started piloting at an illegally young age, but which his family allowed due to the power they wielded in the city government. He is broody and battle-worn, having seen it all, and come away dour and intense.
Art by Fan Chen on Behance.net
The City
The city has been expanded down into old abandoned mine tunnels, where Elijah and Barry have worked to create housing for the city's new inhabitants.
The city's agricultural warehouses have been hurriedly expanded, where solar pipes run through the roofs, bringing sunlight to cropland, but where new and strange infectious disease and pests run rampant. The ocean is warmly lit for a short distance, and out to sea a great shard of sun is slowly disintegrating, so that the sand that washes up is faintly luminous under the black water.
The city has eight great highways that allow the light from the sunshard to spill out into the dark, like a lantern - and is octagonal in design, in reference to its numerical designation.
The Mission
The hastily assembled crew meets for the mission briefing: Barry is an experienced construction worker, but is new to military procedure. They are broad and hairy, with a warm welcoming energy, but they think methodically about the mission as it is presented.
Elijah is an old hand at this, and very dour and brooding. They propose a game to make it more fun: first to five kills. Pheonix's new pilot, Wheat, is a frail young girl with long white hair, who seems shy and jovial, making a few jokes to try and lift her teammates spirits, and laughing that she 'won't be around long'. She flinches from the idea of such a grim game, but Elijah laughs that he'll get his motivation where he can.
After the team learns of the mission. Elijah tries to persuade them to use the mine tunnels to get to the drop point, but is outvoted. They wince, saying they get motion sick - a comment that confuses Wheat.
The Mechs
Wheat enters Pheonix from the spine, unplugging her limbs from her four prosthetics, and plugging them into the mech's harness. An orange oxygen-liquid fills the pilots' cockpit. Barry enters Broadside from the front, with a primitive AI reaching down to help them up, and then essentially strapping into what was once a cargo-loader. Elijah performs a small prayer ritual, before plugging the tubes of blood that surround their body into the tubes of the machine, allowing it to siphon life-force from Elijah himself, and merge it with solar energy.
The Landing
After the team enters their mechs, they are launched from the solar cannons to the drop site.
The three massive robots shoot across the sky like comets, and fall back to earth at the location with great drama. Sepsis - Elijah - is motion sick after the landing, and tries to take a moment to himself to recover. He mutters that he, of all his family, is the only one who has trouble with the cannon.
He is not given the chance to recover, however, as now the ever-eager Pheonix is present - and their mech-spirit has memories of fights with Sepsis that her pilot, Wheat, does not. Pheonix teases Sepsis about his motion sickness, and laughs that his father never had this problem, implying Phoenix having served with older generations of the Sanguinis mechs - despite their pilot being brand-new.
Broadside lands last and hardest, shaking the ground.
The Journey
The team crawl through mines, and through overgrown tangled briar-fields, and are confronted by Hellions - flame weilding raiders who have claimed this place as their own.
Along the way, they meet the mysterious Crow - an envoy of an alien culture, one adapted for life in the darkness. This mysterious envoy gives them intel on the location of some enemies, and dissapears.
Along the way, Broadside is slow and thorough, scanning their surroundings for enemies and pitfalls. Pheonix takes the lead, eager for danger, talking a mile a minute. They reference their pilot in the third person, passing on jokes their pilot wants to tell the others. Sepsis becomes extra dour after Pheonix accidentally beats them to five kills - a game that Pheonix finds themselves less enthused by at the moment, due to the tender feelings of their current pilot, but which they profess to have enjoyed in the past.
The team faces resistance up until the gates of the final facility, where a great crowd of Hellions awaits.
The Final Battle
Broadside smokes the doors and many of the raiders with intense and overwhelming firepower, which is at times so powerful their pedes deploy extra bracing bolts into the ground to keep them in place as they fire. Pheonix dispatches many of the weaker ones by speeding into close range, and letting the rockets on their legs carry them around like a figure-skater, as their heels transform into lethal spinning blades. Sepsis lets loose with a sword made of blood, and with powerful draining effects that weaken their enemies.
However, the numbers prove too much. A Hellion releases a well-timed blast with a flamethrower that takes down both Sepsis and Phoenix. Sepsis is able to respond instinctively, and the iron in their blood hardens as they go Nova, encasing them inside an impervious metal coffin.
Phoenix goes Nova in an explosive, blinding flash of fire, and takes a Hellion down with her.
Broadside comes to the rescue, and rains hellfire down on all that remains, reducing it to ash. In the rubble, Sepsis climbs free of their coffin, back from the dead and battered, but whole.
Phoenix's mech, however, shows that the operator has gone dark. The Spark is intact, but their pilot has died - and that this happens every time they go 'Nova' more or less. Sepsis comforts Broadside as they cradle the gunmetal-grey mech in their arms. It flickers with life briefly, like the embers of a fire flaring as the ash is turned over, and creaks out "She... had fun." Broadside records this, heartbroken, and deactivates their comms.
For Sepsis, however, this is not the first pilot they've met from Phoenix, and they are familiar with the situation: that while Phoenix will be reborn again with the memories of this pilot, Wheat herself is dead and gone - like all the rest - and without a pilot the mech cannot be reactivated right now.
Completing the Mission
Sepsis and Broadside continue deeper into the facility, and Broadside is able to re-ignite the facility to get it running again.
As Broadside does this, Sepsis notices a strange dead Spark in the corner, and is able to determine it went Nova, and that no-one revived it. It has a strange sideways eight on its chassis - an infinity symbol. Their commmanders report that this seems to be an Infinity Guard engine, and order the team to return with it and the Phoenix Spark intact.
And as the ship pulls away, the Novas on board, the team spots the mysterious envoy from before - Crow - running into the now-empty facility...
(TBC?)
