Filippo Franco
Beam Saber is a mecha roleplaying game actually being funded on Kickstarter. Indeed, it is already practically financed, having already exceeded the threshold halfway through the campaign.
It’s a Forged In The Dark game, that is it uses the system created for Blades In The Dark, highly appreciated roleplaying game financed with over $ 175,000 in 2015 on Kickstarter and published in 2017. Since December of that year it has granted the license to use the system and therefore today it boasts numerous titles that use its mechanics.
The infinity war of Beam Saber
This game revolves around pilots of powerful machines in an endless war that dominates every aspect of their lives. There is a touch of cyberpunk in this dystopian future in which corporations too large to even imagine are constantly in conflict. The game therefore is not to end or change the tide of war, but simply to survive, without too many physical or psychological consequences.
The style of the game and the system are marked by putting action and narration in front, with mechanisms aimed at eliminating preparation and discussion times to concentrate on a dynamic and pressing rhythm. But the focus is not only on fighting. There is a narrative cyclicity that alternates the moments of confrontation with others of elaboration and narration of the characters, their lives and their emotions. The structure of the sessions would like to follow episodes of TV series, with a narrative arc per session within a wider story.
Much more than a simple character
Beam Saber allows you to choose from 10 archetypes to generate your own pilot. It also allows you to build your own fighting machine from scratch, from humanoid robots to vehicles of particular shapes and sizes. The pilots together form a squad, a unit not only narrative but also in fact. The squad has its own character sheet and 8 archetypes to personalize it and provide it with unique possibilities. Moreover the team is part of a faction, which is also regulated by a character sheet.
Each pilot has a classic character sheet, but also a connection sheet, to keep track of relationships with other team members. Improving connections will enhance the effectiveness with which you cooperate in combat but also you will risk having worse emotional consequences in case your companions are overwhelmed by difficulties.
After that, the customization possibilities are almost infinite as the manual also provides indications for creating new squads, factions and regions.
The heart of the rules
The core of Beam Saber is a dice pool mechanic using a few six sided. In this way the players decide what action they want to use (such as Battle, Interface, or Consort) to tackle an obstacle, then the DM sets the roll’s Position; Desperate, Risky, or Controlled. The worse a pilot’s Position, the more dangerous the potential consequences they face! So the DM also determines how much of an Effect their action will have (modified by special abilities, gear, etc.), whether it’s Limited, Standard, or Great.
So the player then rolls a number of dice equal to their rating in the action they have chosen. If they feel they need more dice, they can spend a resource called Stress, ask for an Assist from a squadmate, or ask the DM if they have a devious Collateral Die to offer. With 1-3 you fail with important consequences, with 4-5 you have success with complications, from 6 onwards you have full success.
Through the Flashback mechanism it is also possible to rewind the narration to be prepared for an event, to reduce planning time and focus on pure action.
The world of Beam Saber
The game world is vast, colorful and highly customizable. As I said before, the heart of the game is an endless war waged by factions too large to be stopped. Corporations, aliens, artificial intelligence, there are no limits in creating fronts. So even the war rages on continents, planets, star systems, following the narrative preferences of the game group.
As for the human race, there was an Exodus from a now devastated and plundered Earth. Human beings eventually split into five factions, each of which seeks dominance over the entire species. Earth, on the way to recovery thanks to the abandonment of the human race, has become a coveted trophy to be conquered and put on display to underline hegemony.
To have a personal idea you can freely download a free 76 pages quickstart, the 0.47 version of Beam Saber. Both on the Kickstarter page and on the quickstart there are various contents for users, including elements for Roll20 and indications for following sessions of the game.
Beam Saber 0.50
Courtesy of the author we have been sent a later version of the game, 0.50. It is made up of 357 pages of dense text and tables. It is still almost all to be edited, so I will just evaluate its content.
There is really a lot to read and enjoy. Generally speaking, I really liked the product. The author explains very well what the idea of the game is and its purpose, allowing us to understand why it was designed in a certain way.
The system is not complex and uses mechanics that have always had excellent results, in fact it does not occupy the bulk of the pages, on the contrary. There is a huge boost to the personalization of the drivers, the mecha and the team, which is in general the element I like best.
After that, extensive rules and guidelines are given to cover all the various aspects of the game, not limited to combat and a bit of storytelling between missions, but implementing options such as crafting or app development.
There are already many examples of mecha, appendices with alternative rules, examples of play without a master. And the manual is not yet finished! How many pages will it reach?
Art and layout
My judgment on art and layout is currently suspended. Both the quickstart and the version delivered to us are still without art but few illustrations. I really like Vincent Patrick‘s cover, the black and white illustrations I’ve seen so far a little less. I believe that a game with a nice system and such a setting deserves evocative art, which is inspirational to create stories, vehicles and conflicts. Even the layout is still incomplete and therefore not evaluable. At the moment it is a single column text document with several clear tables but which would benefit from more effective editing and spacing.
All in all, given the size of the project and the good conditions of the system and setting, it would have been appreciable to have a graphic preview of one or two pages to give an idea of the type of result on which we are asked to invest. Lauren McManamon’s presence as editor, which we have already mentioned in our articles about Trophy and The Elephant and Macaw Banner, makes me hope.
What game it will become?
Beam Saber is not finished yet, so making a full judgment is impossible. I see that there is passion and that there is interest in providing indications and advice for every aspect of the game.
In my opinion, a good product will come out. It starts with the Blades in the Dark system, after all. There is attention to detail, abundance of content, extreme versatility of the options.
Versatility is precisely one of the best elements. It is not a game related to the given setting, far from it. It is a game written to be taken and used in any story that needs pilots who are also persons, huge powerful and customizable vehicles and the rules of support to live an interplanetary conflict that lives up to expectations.
My wish is that in a short time when users will come up on the various forums or groups of players to ask “which mecha game do you recommend” or “I have a futuristic war story or setting in mind but I need a simple and cusomizable system to play “many will answer” Beam Saber “.
For those who want to backer
The project is already financed, therefore the game will be a reality starting from April 2021, Kickstarter time zone (therefore “starting from April 2021 with possible delays”). In the image there is a clear table summarizing the costs, indicated in Canadian dollars. The PDF costs around 19 € (less than 5 € for those who are in financial difficulty, hoping that nobody is so cowardly to take advantage of it). The physical copy starts at around € 35, plus various other offers that combine game sessions or the possibility of collaborating in the creation of vehicles or characters.
There are no rewards in stretch goals, which will only go to increase the compensation to those who are working on making the game. Not very captivating and somewhat in contrast with the marketing rules and the usual way on Kickstarter, at least sincere and transparent in the motivations and in the allocation of the funds. It must also be said that the manual is full-bodied and already contains everything that was created for the game. So better than a reduced manual with additions based on stretch goals just to give the impression of giving something.
