Five Parsecs From Home: The New Phone Book's Here!!! The New Phone Book's Here!!!

 No, not really... BUT the hardcover copy of Five Parsecs From Home by Modiphius is!

It's a beautiful looking book, if a bit smaller than we usually have here in the States.  With full color throughout, with pictures that do a great job setting the tone for the games.  As with all rulebooks, there are a couple of nitpicks about the layout and such but overall I'm really pleased with it and I'm looking forward to diving back into it.  Of course that begs the question, what's taken me so long?  There in is the tale...

I ordered the physical copy way back in April, but Modiphius was awesome and sent me the PDF.  It took a little bit to cycle through my gamer ADHD but once I got back to Five Parsecs, I had a blast rolling up my first crew!  The random nature of the process seems like it would just create a chaotic mess, but it all just flowed together seamlessly because all of it was vague enough to act as prompts instead of locking you into anything specific.

So here I was with a crew of six malcontents to hit the spaceways... but how was I going to represent them in the game?  Some of them are pretty straightforward (aka da 'umans) but the more exotic ones were giving me some trouble.  In particular the swift just because how the heck was I going to represent that?!?  In the end, I just took the easy way out; the swift is now a feral... BAM!!!

And the next challenge was terrain... it's always terrain! Argh!!!  I was stressing about having a diverse selection of terrain to choose from so that I could cover any eventuality that the random charts could possibly throw in my direction... except it doesn't work that way.  The world traits table doesn't define the terrain, it gives you random traits associated with that world.  It could be a warzone, a bureaucratic mess, have import restrictions... nothing that defines the terrain.

Whoops!  And this, kids, is why you should always read all of the rules and not just make random assumptions!

With this revelation in mind, I'm setting a course to head back out Five Parsecs as I start assembling my crew so I can finally give this game a spin.  I distributed all their gear and so I've just got to piece them together from my Stargrave kits and then it will be go time!  Progress!  Yes, we have progress!!! Until next time...