Review: Uncharted Worlds

Powered by The Apocalypse has a special place in my heart, I sadly don’t get to play it as much as I’d like (the versions that include sex moves are right off the table for my usual group). I’m also really into Sci-fi, dipping my toes into Fantasy every once and while but mainly I want to run games with ships, lasers, explosions, trading, fleet battles and more explosions. So when on Drivethrurpg I encountered Uncharted Worlds, I got very excited. In the span of about 2 hours I had bought, downloaded and read the whole book; needless to say I think I’m in love.

First off, I love how the player characters are created. Instead of picking a playbook from a list, players create their own playbook by picking two careers and one origin. For each (careers and origins) there is a table of 10 to choose from, so there are hundreds of combinations. From this set you will start with 4 moves, this might be moves unique to your career, a stat boost and some of these might be unique items like an exploration vehicle for example.

To create a game the book suggests that you sit down with the players and figure out the details of your game. The big one is to figure out the style of game, Firefly, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar, etc from here you can move onto designing the factions of the world. These factions will divide up the world between themselves so the characters will always be bumping up against them. The characters are also in debt to these factions; which can be increased to use moves or used by the MC to guide the story in an effort to lower the characters debt.

Items in the game all use a Class system, the higher the class the more tags your item can have. If your the sneaky type, you might want a Concealed Silenced Pistol which would be a Class 2 weapon. You can put some purchases in reserve by carrying trade goods; then selling them and buying new ones, each time you do this the item moves up a class.

Some people have complained about the lack of MC moves that really leverage the debt, I’m not sure I can agree. If you want the a new move there is nothing stopping you making another.

In the end I have to say this book reads brilliantly and the game feels great. Can’t wait to get a group around the table. It has an active Google+ Community and a supplement in the form of Far Beyond Humanity; so there is more goodness to come.

tl;dr game feels and reads awesome, I haven’t run or played it yet but I’m dying to.

Updated: I’ve both played and run the game now – its as good as I thought, but the faction system doesn’t play well.