My Review of Justifiers - Das Abenteuerspiel for #RPGaMonth

My Review of Justifiers - Das Abenteuerspiel for #RPGaMonth

This month, February, I am reading an older game from 2010 called Justifiers - Das Abenteuerspiel. Some may remember that there was a Science Fiction game called Justifiers released at the end of the eighties.

Part 1

Markus Heitz whose name is very prominent on the cover is a successful German fantasy novelist who was an avid player of said game. When the opportunity presented itself he bought the rights to the setting and wrote two great novels in the Justifiers universe. Moreover, he was the editor of a series of about 10 book from other authors in the same cosm.

So in 2010 a new German edition of the Justifiers game was released by Ulisses Spiele (which may be more known for the new Torg - Eternity nowadays) and that is what I am reading right now.

It is a 300 something page hardcover in DinA5 format, i.e. about half US letter format. It starts with a 20 pages short story by Heitz which puts you right into the world.

The setting itself is a very grim Sci Fi world in 3042 AD where large corporations are in control of complete planets. Since not everything such a corporation does is legal or achievable without violence  they employ a special kind of soldiers, called Justifiers. The rpg is about squad level military actions done by those Justifiers who are more often than not half-man half-animal characters. These products of genectical engineering of animal DNA into humans are called Betas and they get some of their characteristics from the type of animal like Cat, Armadillo or Bison.

Part 2

Pages 52 to 156 contain the chapters on Rules and Character Creation. The rules part is rather short, only 34 pages and of those eight pages dwell on explaining what a pen & paper is and the obligatory text example of a group playing the game.

The rules are rather simple. Each character has three attributes Physical, Mental and Spiritual and subordinate to the attribute there is a number of skills. Physical skills are athletics, ranged and close combat, survival and resistance. Mental skills are computer usage, stealth and some more. Spiritual skills include intuition, perception and so forth. In total there 15 skills. Skill checks are done by combining the attribute and skill value and taking the corresponding number of d6 into the dice pool. Modifiers can increase or decrease the number of dice. Each 5 or 6 in a roll gives one success point and you need a certain amount of successes to achieve what you had in mind.

Combat is as you would expect, but with very few hit points. Some things are special nevertheless:

1. at the beginning of a fight each player gets a roll and with a success all players get the complete stats of the enemy
2. initiative is done by going clockwise round the table, rotating the starting player like in a traditional card game.
3. characters never die from hits instead become unconscious in the worst case.
4. besides the standard actions in a combat like move, defend, attack. There are also certain special actions depending on the scene which are prepare by the GM and for which special action cards are dealt.

The last point is a bit puzzling. The idea is that you run premade scenarios which will already include such special action cards, but one could imagine preparing such before the game in other cases as GM. To add a certain action feeling each character has fate points that work in the usual way.

I have not played this game, but I played another game called John Sinclair from the same author with similar rules (without the special cards) and must say that it generally works very fine. Combats are fast and fun.

The next chapter is about character creation. Character creation starts by picking a race, i.e. the type of animal that was used to enhance the human dna. The rules has 10 such beta types: armadillo,  bison, polar bear, fox, cat, rhino, chimpanese, tiger, racoon and wolf. Each type has certain specialities. Armadillos have body armor, bison charcters are strong etc. Interestingly the book also shows images beta types that  are known from the novels but for which there aren’t rules like a badger beta. Next you pick the specialization of the character within the squad like pilot, field medic, technician, weapon expert. Specialization gives certain perks/advantages, equipment and skill points. Next you distribute points to the attributes and certain skills. Furthermore, you get a number of adventure points to buy additional advantages or equipment.

Since the characters play in military squadron each player has a rank and a number of mission points that she or he must fulfil before be allowed to leave the corporation and became a free person. The mightier the beta type the more of these points are necessary to become free. The main thing is: if a character isn’t free he or she isn’t allowed to keep what the find on a mission other than to buy it with adventure points.

At the end we get 10 example characters. One for each beta type.

Part 3

The last part of the book offers the rules for playing as a group, i.e. the creation of the spaceship and the game mechanics for flying and fighting said ship. The rules are similar to what is described in the second part.

Next, there is a section about the exploration mode. This is a more boardgame-like system where you do a squarecrawl instead of a hexcrawl. Players a given certain cards and they make special skill checks based on the effects of the cards.

Finally, the last third is a complete scenario for the characters on the world "Holz-11" which offers a mission with a mix of the explorative board-game like mode and the more normal rpg mode.

I will not go into details because to be honest I have only skimmed through the scenario. Why?

To a certain extend my interest in the game ceased to continue after I had understood the rules and the boardgame-like aspects didn't go so well in reading it. So, be warned: playing might be totally different and what reads strange might actually be much fun on the table, but for me it made the impression of moreorless repetetive die rolling mechanics without much story or suspension. I have played a monster hunter companion game with similar mechanics called John Sinclair and the rpg part will ceratinly be fun, but as in John Sinclair I fully expect a certain balancing problem. The be good at the squarecrawling you need a character who is specialised on certain things, but then he or sche sucks at fighting and vice versa. I would expect that a certain part of the party are always a bit bored because they can't do meaningful contributions.

Outlook

It seems that Markus Heitz who owns the rights to the game thinks about Jusitifiers in a similar way now. Last Saturday he announced a new edition of Justifiers (in English) in cooperation with Clockwork publishing (makers of the new Space 1889) which shall be kickstarted this year and will use the mechanics of the German RPG Splittermond. The reason for the change of system are that the old system seemed to be a bit dull and also easily unbalanced for him.

Thus, no need to care too much about Justifiers - Das Abenteuerspiel in the future as a new and different edition is on its way.