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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
You Will Never Forget The City, But The City Will Forget You, 2 Sep 2004
By A Customer
So goes the tagline to this superb roleplaying game from Contested Ground Studios. The tagline sums up the harsh, bleak feel of A/State- the setting is a vast metropolis isolated for a millennia. The City is a place of vastly divergent technology and the worst excesses of human nature: and worse yet. In the mythology of the place it was blasted by an event called The Shift which introduced warps and ripples in reality- shifting the city from where it had once been, and birthing bizarre, twisted creatures of nightmare. Into this urban sprawl that has festered for a thousand years come the player characters. Player characters in A/State are everyday people with the concerns and cares of everyday people everywhere- but they want to make a difference: to bring hope into a place that has given up. More often, though, they'll just want to survive. The game system is tiny- taking up a miniscule 10 pages of the 250 page book (plus a chapter devoted to creating characters, still leaving over 200 pages of marvellous source material). The system is percentile based, fast, fluid and effective. It will also probably not be used often- ultimately A/State would appear to be a game of social and political ineraction, not of violence and destruction (although there is plenty of that too). The majority of the strikingly covered and illustrated book (all the images are computer-generated and bring across the vaguely cyberpunk neo-georgian / victorian setting very well) is devoted to making The City real in a game. Many districts are detailed to a fine degree, featuring the major personalities within them- be they slums, the corporate districts or the chaotic horror of the Contested Grounds. A wealth of information is given on everyday life, politics, crime (organized and otherwise), the highly surreal `Shifted' beings and places and the truly staggering scope of technology: the technology in The City ranges from electrically powered flintlock pistols (`sparklocks') to lasers and magnetic-repeater cannons, nanotechnological analytical engines, television, ekranoplans and more. This is a truly alien, yet unsettlingly familiar world which is deliberately left very ambiguous- any referee could do many things with this excellent game. Whether you wish to concentrate on a `Brazil' or `Equilibrium'-like dystopia, or disturbing investigations into the twists of reality `A/State' has a huge range open to it, including detective-work, social commentary. Roleplaying opportunities abound. Possibly too huge- like many roleplaying games of this ilk `A/State' is a rich envrionment for a referee and players, but it would need a lot of focus and work to create a campaign. At the same time many will find it too dark, or too oppressive- which it may be, superficially. A staggering work worth buying just to read, as a game it will offer hundreds of hours of unique roleplaying experiences- there is almost nothing else like it available (`Over the Edge' and `SLA Industries' are superficially similar). If you like scifi, georgian or victorian crime stories, horror or just want something a bit different- give A/State a try. Fantastic stuff and truly inventive.
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