To put it bluntly, I was disappointed with this product. I have some players who have asked to play in the Nova Praxis setting, and so I've been reading through the main book, plotting out ideas for stories. This has been very frustrating as the main book contradicts itself, has huge exploitable loop holes in the setting, and basically describes a society that is inconsistent with the technology that sustains it. My notes on how to make things make sense keep growing hourly.
Perhaps it was too much to hope that a GM's add-on product would acknowledge and/or attempt to fix some of these flaws, but there is no evidence of that. Instead there is some more background info on the Houses which is useful and adds color, but causes confusion as well, as it fails to answer the one question that I have about every adventure:
why isn't House X handling this itself?
Basically, if you have a shadow war, you need some reason for the houses to involve outsiders. Plausible deniability is fine, but that can only take you so far. When a house can modify identities and change records, you have to wonder why they don't just have shady internal groups of ninjas doing all their dirty work. Why take on the PCs?
And given that the main premise is that the players are minor characters in the shadow wars, why is so much of this book devoted to having them work as (essentially) government agents? These plots are of no practical use to me in this setting.
Other questions I wanted answered that weren't: What are interplanetary ships like? How fast do they go? What weaponry do they carry? Just how many jump gates are there (the main book says both 2 and 'hundreds') and what prevents them from being used as a terrorist weapon? Why doesn't any pre-mimir technology exist in the apostate colonies? Why are vulcan swarms so damn important when eveyone already knows how to build buildings?
|