For those not familiar with Fate, as I was when I first picked up this book, the game works off the idea of Aspects and fate points. Where other games might have classes or attributes to describe a character, Fate uses Aspects. Aspects are descriptions of a character, object, place, or situation. So a character might have “Tough as Nails” as an Aspect while a building might have “On Fire”. A player can invoke these Aspects by spending a fate point to gain a bonus to their rolls (assuming they can come up with an appropriate description of their action that includes that Aspect). They can also invoke them to Compel their opponents to do or not do something as appropriate to their Aspects. So a “Greedy” character could be Compelled to take a bribe. The player would give their fate token to the player of that character. This is a handy tool both for the players and the GM (or Referee in Diaspora) to guide the plot. A character can always turn down a Compel but must pay the other player a fate token in return. Thus it is in the player’s interest to play up the downsides of their Aspects to accumulate more fate tokens for later in the story.
The Fate system does have other more familiar properties. There are stress tracks which are roughly equivalent to hit points in other games. Diaspora uses three of these in normal play: Health, Composure (to cover mental health), and Wealth (to cover how stressed a character’s finances are). There is also a skill system which acts a bonus to a character's rolls. These “skills” include a few ideas that would be attributes in other games, like Stamina or Agility. Skill levels in Diaspora range from 1 to 5 (where 1 would be mildly skilled and 5 is a master of that skill) and are added to Fate dice rolls plus any equipment or Aspect bonuses. Lastly there are stunts which “break” the rules in a minor way (like feats in D&D). They can grant bonuses, special equipment, or alternative uses for skills.
If there is one (minor) gripe I have with the system, it is with the need for special dice. Fate (or Fudge) dice are six sided dice which a plus sign on two sides, a minus sign on two others and blank on the remaining faces. You typically roll four of them yielding a total of -4 to +4. I like that the system discourages you from rolling for unimportant tasks and is relatively bare of penalties to rolls (the exception is an unskilled penalty of -1 in Diaspora). In general penalties are handled by using Aspects as bonuses to opposed rolls (your opponent might invoke a bonus due to that limp you have on his defense roll against your brawling attack) or as Compels. Aspects only give a +2 bonus but you can stack them (Burning Cripples are easier to kill). The bias towards positives may have only psychological effects on an outcome but I think it makes the game more cinematic and fun.
Where Diaspora really differs from other Fate games is in its setting and how it approaches it. As I mentioned before it is a hard sci-fi setting which means that there are as few “miracles” as possible. By this I mean that physics and the rest of science works essentially as we understand it today. There are no light sabers or psionic powers, spaceships don’t land on planets and must consume lots of fuel, travel between planets takes months and there is no artificial gravity.
The one “miracle” is a faster than light drive in the form of slipdrive. Essentially a form of jumpdrive that can only be activated at certain points directly above or below a star (relative to the ecliptic plane in which planets orbit). Travel is instantaneous (neglecting the weeks or months it took to reach the jump point or slipknot) but you can only reach a certain number of other systems in this way. So travel is slow and involves passing through a number star systems along the way.
The other major aspect of the setting is that at some point humanity spread across space and was separated from Earth. At this point Earth is essentially forgotten or at best a legend. So much time has passed, so many civilizations have risen and fallen, that the history of mankind is lost. Hence the name Diaspora.
While it might sound like there is a well-defined setting, the above paragraphs are almost literally the only firm parts of the universe. The game assumes that the players (including the Referee) will collaboratively build their own cluster of systems linked via slipsteams. To this end the book provides guidelines of how to generate a series of star systems and then link them together. It recommends allowing each player detail one or two systems in a couple of paragraphs and then work out the story of the cluster together based on the combinations.
Character creation has a similar element of collaborative storytelling. You go through five phases of your character’s life, coming up with a short paragraph describing each part and assigning a pair of Aspects at each step. One phase requires you to include the player to your right’s character in a momentous point in your life and another phase requires you to give your side of the story of another character’s momentous event.
In my experience these sorts of linkages between characters really help to make a group feel like a team. The collaborative world building should do the same for investment in the game as a whole.
Diaspora also provides a number of minigames, subsystems built off of the Fate system for dealing with specialized situations. These include space combat, social combat, and platoon combat. While platoon combat resembles much the same models as used in other RPG wargame abstractions where a group of troops or vehicles is abstracted as one unit, the other systems are more imaginative.
Space combat deals with positioning very abstracting. Rather than keep track of relative velocities in three dimensional space (a daunting challenge for any system), Diaspora reduces the space to a linear track covering speed and distance. Each turn the ships via for position and adjust their speed. This determines where they end up on a nine band chart. Ships that fall off the edge of the chart either escape or are left behind.
Social combat is equally interesting in its abstraction. In this case a social combat is depicted in a map where positions might indicate locations where certain activity can take place (like the back room of a scum filled bar) or a social position (such where a certain character is in love with another). Guidelines are given for providing a time constraint (for example, you have 9 months to get elected president and each turn is one month) and for building your maps. The action focuses on using social skills to move others about the social map or to keep them from moving. Characters in social combat can even attack each other’s Composure, perhaps tainting them in scandal and knocking them out of the fight.
The final part of the book talks about the game as whole: how to build adventures and how to use the cluster generation to build stories and motivation. It also goes into expanding the system, such including alien races and psionics. Simple rules are presented for building new weapons, armor, and starships.
While the rules are well presented overall and there are many examples, one area the book suffers from is organization. There are several sections of the book that seem somewhat out of order. Specifically there is a section on building staff blasters in chapter 8 which uses the equipment building section at the end of chapter 9. Perhaps it was just me but it felt a bit jarring.
In the end the game is very well presented, in a tone that invites tinkering and experimenting with the rules. The minimalist background and mini-vignettes encourages you to jump in and begin creating worlds and stories of your own. The rules are simple and should be easy to teach to others which should make it useful to introducing others to the hobby. On a final note, I really look forward to running a Diaspora game myself.
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