Review: Seized

Seized: A Sea Captain’s Adventures Battling Soundrels and Pirates While Recovering Stolen Ships in the World’s Most Troubled Waters — with a subtitle like that, do I really need to say more?

This is in fact a first-person account of an honest captain’s dealings with the seamier side of the modern shipping business. In some ports around the world, people abuse local law and make fraudulent claims against ships. The crew (and owner) often have little recourse. Captain Max hated the idea of his ship being stolen by a bogus claim, and managed to get it out of port. He was later called on to do the same.

At other times in his career, he acts as a ship broker, again dealing with locals who may not have quite the same respect for law as he does. In fact, he even uses the law as a weapon in one case.

As a book, I found Seized well-written and interesting. As a gamer, I immediately wanted to make use of it in a game. Surely the players’s spaceship should dock at an outlaw port! And Captain Max might have made a Climb roll or two, but typically he solved problems with his wide array of contacts, his ability to judge people, and his broad knowledge of ships.

It’s the last one that makes me reconsider game scenarios based on Seized. While any reasonable game doesn’t require a player to have the same knowledge as his character, there’s a difference between not knowing what a MacGregor hatch cover is, and knowing that your character knows about their pros and cons of one, and how they may impact his actions. Without sea-going experience, I think it would just be too hard to have a game that revolved around the intricacies of JB Weld.

But again, that sort of thing works fine in a book. Hardberger always explains things so us landlubbers can understand. And the events in the book are always dramatic, because there is always a very real chance of failure (indeed, he recounts stories when things did not end up going well).

Another issue with game scenarios is that I’d been running a Diaspora game, where a spaceship visits a small number of ports. Many of the outlaw ports in Seized can get away with it because a ship may only visit once even if all goes well. In a smaller cluster, ports have a much greater interest in ships returning — there won’t always be another sucker.

A recommended read, and even if I can’t easily duplicate Captain Max’s adventures, there probably will be corrupt judges in one of my future games.

Diaspora Campaign

I’ve been intrigued by the RPG Diaspora, a grittier take on FATE than the pulp Spirit of the Century. I began running a game earlier this year. Material from the campaign is now on my web site, including the cluster the players created in the first session, characters, and Rob Helm’s writeups of the next two sessions.

At some point I want to write up a review of the game, but in general I’m pretty happy with this version of the FATE rule system. The authors obviously began with Spirit of the Century, but tuned it for a more realistic feel, which also happens to play faster. A number of areas have been streamlined. I do have a nagging suspicion that had I not seen Spirit of the Century first, the rules would have been a big confusing.