Mark Rein·Hagen's Exile by Asimo

An RPG History Lesson

posted by Asimo Original SA post

Mark Rein·Hagen's Exile

Part One: An RPG history lesson

It's been a while since I've done an F&F review, and like my prior few I'm going to go into the history of roleplaying games. Before, this involved reviewing games and supplements from the early 80's that most people have long since forgotten, but this time we'll be traveling into the exciting 90's! There's just one small problem... the game I'm going to be talking about never actually got released .

To explain a bit, we'll need to give some history of White Wolf and Mark Rein·Hagen. Forgive me if this is incomplete, since I'm going off memory and what little remains on the web these days. Rein·Hagen and Jonathan Tweet (and later, Lisa Stevens) founded Lion Rampart in 1987, where they co-wrote and produced Ars Magica , a well-received game with several interesting game mechanics, such as players controlling multiple characters. Still, Lion Rampart struggled a bit like a lot of small RPG companies tend to and merged with Stewart Wieck's White Wolf Magazine , forming White Wolf Game Studio in 1990.

The company still struggled for a bit until they released some small game that started a certain game line that apparently had some modest success.

In 1998, after the World of Darkness was well-established, Rein·Hagen began work on a sci-fi RPG titled Exile . Here's where it... gets a bit strange. He actually started a non-profit organization called the Null Foundation to own the rights. To be honest I'm not... entirely sure what the point of it was, but at the time there was a bit of financial trouble at White Wolf and less than a year later Rein·Hagen left the company and took Exile and the Null Foundation with him*.
_{*If anyone does have more information/gossip about what was going on behind the scenes, please feel free to elaborate.}

An interesting thing about the Null Foundation is that it had a rather large web presence for when it came out. For the kids in the audience here, 1996 was the era where you were probably connecting through dual-up to America Online or Compuserve, and the Google search engine wouldn't be released for another two years. So it was a pretty prominent presence! Of course, considering this was almost twenty years ago there's not much sign of it left, but archive.org still has a copy of the Null Foundation website if you want to give it look. In addition, the company had an official MUSH to RP in the setting (a text-based chat server, somewhere between a MUD and IRC chat), and in what's most important for this review, they actually put playtest rules up on their site to freely download.

For various reasons that are mostly lost to history, the Exile RPG never actually got released. My suspicion is that Rein·Hagen had big expectations that were impossible to meet, considering the website notes they were looking for partners for a "computer-generated animated series", there's constant mentions about a Null Cosm implying that they were hoping for a WoD-style success, and other such... poor business decisions. Despite the RPG never getting a release, the Null Foundation eventually got folded into Rein·Hagen's new company "Atomaton, Inc" and in 2001 they released Z-G (as in, "zero gravity"), a game very loosely based on the concepts and setting.

Specifically, a " collectible action figure game " which let you snap pieces onto the figures and collect... power cards and stuff to use them in not-quite-miniature gameplay.



Honestly, it wasn't a horrible idea... but considering it came out after the initial CCG rush when stores were already loaded with unsold merchandise it just didn't have a prayer. Not helping matters was the rise of collectible miniature games like Mage Knight that offered much more value for the money. To the best of my knowledge the company only ever released the initial two figures and the card booster pack, and Atomaton finally folded in 2003.

So what the hell was Exile?
Luckily, archive.org makes this part easy. Quoting the website...
... or to put it simpler, something akin to Transhuman Space crossed with Vampire: The Masquerade 's politics and aesthetics. There's also a fair bit of, well, anime throw in there as well. For example, the only art that was ever released for Exile (and Z-G) was by Joshua Gabriel Timbrook, perhaps best known here for the iconic splat characters in the first and second edition WoD games. I personally rather liked his work, but in some ways it was a poor fit for the WoD. Unfortunately, a lot of Exile's art has been lost to the barren craters of Geocities and its fallen free web hosting ilk, but a few pieces survive off archive.org.

To put it charitably, it's clear Rein·Hagen was going for what could be described as-
... yeah, pretty much pure 90's technofetish , showing a bit more of that WoD influence. This will get even more obvious once we get into the game itself.


_{(These were huge images on an 800x600 CRT display, really)}

You said something about a playtest draft?


As mentioned earlier, the Null Foundation had a fairly large web presence for the era, and they tried to take advantage of this by offloading editing and playtesting allowing fans access to the development process. I'm not sure how many iterations there were, but it wasn't... many, and they would have been lost to the aether if not for archive.org. If you want to get a look, go ahead and give the html draft a look. There's only one problem... the playtest drafts there are woefully incomplete. Luckily for you, I found a dusty CD-R when I was throwing things out bravely archived a PDF version of a different draft that has more of the setting information and rules in it, and I'm going to attempt to go through all these available sources and give as complete an overlook as I can manage.

Of course, it's important to keep in mind that the Exile playtest drafts can only be charitably be called a "complete game", and I'm pretty sure they're not actually playable as written. But this isn't a game review and it's something more of a history lesson, and as one of the handful of people who remembers this thing even existed I'm going to do my best here!

Too Many Goddamn Words

posted by Asimo Original SA post

Mark Rein·Hagen's Exile

Part Two: Too many goddamn



Where we left off, I was talking about how Exile almost came about and the weird history of its development at White Wolf and the Null Foundation. Today, we'll be going through the playtest documents and looking at what was actually look at the setting information and introductory materials. When I quote the material, I'll try and mention whether it's from the HTML playtest stuff on archive.org or from the PDF draft.
Well we're off to a good start, since this isn't really true. There's some setting information in that draft! And a lot more in the HTML draft too. Even some introductory fiction, as pretty typical for White Wolf books... despite the claims in the prospectus that Null-F was trying to avoid doing Another Vampire, there's still some similarities here.

We open with a form letter...
Makes sense really; the game wouldn't be called "Exile" if the characters weren't... exiled. The letter goes into some detail on how long the newly-Exile has until they're forcibly relocated, and there's mention of resources being set aside to make the "transition" simpler... but it's abundantly clear that this is going to be a one-way trip.

The draft goes on with a second letter from a presumably sympathetic source, noting that the setting information is done in-character as a "Manifesto" for characters who are newly Exiled. There's some differences between the drafts here, but the idea is gotten across simply enough. The first is that "Trinary" is effectively a paradise, and you've been kicked out of it. And...
... regardless of that, it's also a totalitarian dictatorship where thoughtcrime is taken quite seriously, and deportation to the hostile depths of space is the gentle punishment.

Like most White Wolf games, that there's a fuckload of jargon that you're expected to internalize before RPing. The drafts diverge a bit here... the HTML draft starts with the glossary, and for the sake of sanity I'll drop it here first before we delve into the rest.
Got all that? No? Sorry. Especially since the PDF draft has a different and slightly more useful list. For brevity I'll omit the ones that are already in the other draft.
... Yeah, there's almost no overlap between the two. I think the PDF draft is a later iteration, which makes some sense; there's a lot of terms that come up often (like "ulster") that don't show up in the earlier glossary. On the other hand it has a lot less setting information... well, anyway, try and remember both of these when I quote other sections I guess!

In addition to the glossary, the PDF draft goes into some terminology on the robots and computers of the setting, giving them a few paragraphs of explanation. Artifex are robotic servants, specifically the sentient sorts. The text helpfully goes on to mention that their lives are horrible and they struggle to find some sort of unique identity. Lodes are essentially the AI computers, complicated enough that only the Hegemony can create them. They come in seven grades, with the seventh being almost as intelligent as humanity. Cules are hard drives and memory banks, but in spaaaace.

Next time: Something that's more than just copy-pastes of dumb jargon!

The Great Syndics

posted by Asimo Original SA post

Mark Rein·Hagen's Exile

•Part Three: The Great Splats Syndics•



It should probably go without saying that a late 90's game being developed by White Wolf staffers divides the important players of the setting into high school cliques character classes specific political groups with their own goals and special stats and powers. Why should Exile be any different? While the HTML draft has a lot more setting information presented before this, I'm starting with the Syndics here. It's probably more interesting than some of the rest, and it helps give a good idea of the sort of themes we'll be looking at here. The three we'll cover here are the exotics , basically genetically engineered or alien subraces, while the rest we'll get into later are there careers for people who don't have scrambled DNA. They're all considered "Syndics" in character generation though.

•Androgynes•
Short version: they're the Toreador, but genetically engineered to intersex or sexless. They originated as a sex slave race for the elite in Diadar society and were only liberated a few centuries ago. They soon joined mainstream society, and focused heavily on charisma, manipulation, and appearance the social fields, and "they have excelled, earning renown as arbitrators, diplomats and performers."
Naturally, as ~beautiful socialites~ they're also a bunch of treacherous backstabbers and spies, but aside from a bit of distrust nobody really minds because they make such beautiful works of at. Oh yeah, they also have limited shapechanging and addictive pheromones.
I've mentioned I find it rather hilarious that this setting was eventually twisted into a collectible action figure game aimed at kids, right? Well. Moving on...

•Sark Saron•
Only mentioned in the PDF, so maybe excised in the later setting drafts? In any case,
Uplifted lizard-people. They're big and strong and work in mercenary groups. They're driven by the "need to survive", and it's mention they've survived multiple genocide attempts in the past through sheer stubbornness. They also have a drive for self-sacrifice towards their family and kin that "borders on martyrdom". They also have little influence in or interest in politics, and have a "strong devour the weak" sort of ethic, as a passive demeanor or injury can awaken their predatory instincts. But they have earned the respect of even rabid anti-exotics due to being violent and scary their renowned ferocity.

Overall, a pretty race.

•Starborn (Reisir)•
They've evolved/been genetically engineered to handle space and low gravity pretty well. This works out good for them considering most of the setting takes place in space and all, so they have access to large amounts of orbital mining and other lucrative enterprises that give them wealth and influence in excess of their small numbers. While they handle space well, they need gravity harnesses and ulsters to handle normal planetary gravity. They have low fertility and a weak immune system, and often live nomadic lifestyles.

Yeah, there's some overlap with Mass Effect's Quarians there, but there's still a few differences. For one thing, everyone in the setting gets fetishwear space gimpsuits they almost never take off!

Anyway, they're initially descended from a single lineage and tend to consider each other family, and have a procedure that can change most human races into Starborn if you wanted to be a pearl-skinned space kid. For some reason they also have wide rage of speech, and...
... they're probably really weird to talk to. They also have "peerless tactical skills", as demonstrated when the alien Bak’Sakusa species attempted to wipe them out, which went rather poorly for them. The Reisir seem to hold no grudge for it, but the Bak’Sakusa definitely do.

Next time: More Syndics! Do you want a job?

More Great Syndics

posted by Asimo Original SA post

Mark Rein·Hagen's Exile

•Part Four: Yet More Great Syndics•



When we left off before, we were talking about the Syndics , the major factions and power blocs in the setting that also convenient double as player character groups. This time we'll be going into the careers, the Syndics that focus around who you're working with rather than what you are.

•The Armada•
The space navy. Rather than a force of enlisted volunteers, they're almost more like a social caste; entire families are born into the Armada and become soldiers or officers when they become of age, repeating the process throughout the centuries. They have an aristocratic white man's burden expectation of honor, politeness, and efficiency, and many Hegemonic positions are held by Armada members. They aren't often Exiles but they still have a great deal of interaction with them by virtue of being found at the edge of Hegemonic space, defending its borders.

The fleets of the Armada are focused around the (four or seven, depending on the draft) Dreadnoughts, massive vessels capable of smashing entire planets to rubble or destabilizing a star. While effectively invulnerable, the ability to construct these dreadnoughts has been lost to history, and is one of the few overt signs of the creeping decline of the Hegemony. They also employ numerous smaller ships, and these are the ones most often seen in the Grange as the Dreadnoughts themselves are usually pressed into service against the alien Horde instead. The public doctrine is that the war will be over shortly and the aliens are outmatched, but it's been running for over seventy years now and the Exiles know that it's effectively a stalemate. But the resources and matériel surplus being fed into the Armada is one of the things that keeps the Grange supplied and economically sound...

The drafts actually take different routes with the enemies the Armada are fighting. The html draft focuses more on the Horde being "barbarians" and aliens who are resisting the Hegemony from outside, while the PDF draft offers some other threats...

•The Vanguard•
If the Armada is the space navy, the Vanguard are the space marines. ... er, not in the WH40K sense, but there's still a bit of that in there too. Still, while the Armada is elegant and calculating and probably all talk with sinister British accents, the Vanguard is aggressive and emotional. They're the ones who do the fighting planetside, with the equivalents of modern infantry and armored vehicles, often landed through dropships.

They have a bit of a rivalry with the Armada, thinking them effete ivory-tower sorts while the legions of the Vanguard does all the actual work. They have less political power due to being recruits rather than hereditary officers in close with the Hegemony leadership. But the Armada has the ships, and everyone knows it'd probably be the Vanguard putting dissidents against the wall, so everyone plays nice. Mostly.

•The Diplomatic Service (The Interior Ministry)•
They're the space spies and secret police, one part James Bond and three parts KGB. In addition to the overt diplomatic services with the Grange governments, factions within the Hegemony, and outside races, they also take a very active role in Hegemony affairs and effectively function as a shadow government. The Diplomatic Service organizes coups, presents propaganda, arranges pogroms of undesirables (like most of our Exile PCs), and otherwise engages in large scale social engineering and terror programs in order to preserve the status quo of the Hegemony. They're arguably the most powerful Syndic simply due to the political clout they can call to bear in other to make the other Syndics do what they want, and their unlucky enemies get "vanished" into secret prisons or shallow graves rather than the relatively gentle punishment of exile.

•Bak' Sakusa•
Space barbarians! ... We'll politely ignore the connotations of rampaging oriental hordes.

A millennium ago, five fanatical and feuding tribes were exiled from the Hegemony, thrown onto a planet at the edge of known space with the expectation that they'd kill each other and keep their problems out of Hegemon politics. This almost worked as planned, as the families murdered each other for centuries... until eventually and finally they were united under a single warlord, and became Bak’ Sakusa, the “Five Families”.
Having internal peace didn't make them not dicks , though. And yes, yet more questionably rapey material. Their aggressive culture has only gotten more focused in their centuries of exile, and while they focus on challenges of art and sport among their own kind, but go right back to aggressive conquest with outside groups, with conquered peoples being turned into literal slave labor. They've long since broken away from their planet of exile and are building their own empire to try and match the Hegemony; it was only the unified effort of the other Syndics that kept the Grange from getting overrun. They have the largest military force of any Syndic except the Armada and Vanguard, and the Diplomatic Service quietly suspects their production capacity will outpace the Hegemony in only a few years.

The only saving grace is that they're nominally still members of the Hegemony, and haven't blatantly tried attacking the core worlds. This is small consolation to the Exiles in the Grange of course, and basically the Bak' Sakusa are assholes who nobody really likes. But they're available as a PC option!

Next Time: Even more Syndics! There's a lot more of these than I remembered...

The Rest of the Syndics

posted by Asimo Original SA post

Mark Rein·Hagen's Exile

•Part Five: The rest of the Syndics•



Like I mentioned before, there's sure a lot of these. It's probably for the best anyway... Exile looked like it could have been a rather big setting, encompassing a large region of space, so it's good to have a lot of character options. And a lot of factions to cause trouble with...

•Common Weal•
Mentioned but not given a writeup in the HTML draft, the Common Weal are, well, space nobility. The Pactum Weal was the original treaty made millennium ago that brought the assorted Syndics together into the Hegemony, and they take great advantage of being one of the "old" power groups. While the actual population of the Syndic stretches all the social strata, in theory everyone under it is part of a massive interconnected noble family, even the serfs and paupers in the street. Not that this does much for them beyond an insufferable ego. Of course the actual "Aristos" live in isolated worlds to themselves, mingling with the common people only on rare occasions. Even within the Hegemony politics and innuendo are still weapons, and a public blunder can quickly sink the fortunes of Aristo. Also...
Ah, White Wolf Null Foundation. In any case, you can probably figure out how the rest of this goes. Arrogant, aristocratic, and somewhat inbred... there's a lot of connections between them and the leadership of the Armada as well. Their greatest secret is that they harbor a small population of Virago - individuals who received extensive treatments to become effectively immortal. This is in flagrant violation of Hegemony law, and it's only their political clout and closeness to the Armada that keeps them from falling under suspicion. Although it's quite possible many of the other Syndics are controlled behind the scenes by the Virgao as well, and help deflect suspicion...

•Pax Republica•
If the Hegemony is an ancient oligarchy, the Republicans were and are the rebels who attempted to shake the foundations of civilization and rebuild it in a better form. While they didn't really succeed the plot was effective enough at its main goals; the immortals who ran the Hegemony were executed and the Hegemonic Council was forced to pass laws that banned anti-aging treatments. While the revolution gained them a great deal of respect from the underclass, it didn't last very long... toppled within a few years by a new revolution, and again, in bloody purges. Eventually, the Republica that remained in control became a corrupt ruling class themselves, and while they have traditions of equality there's a lingering hypocritical power-mongering controlling bent in the leadership of the Republica. While they're still a strong power in the Hegemony, most of the other Syndics consider them dangerous and murderous idealists.

•The Consortium•
Too big to fail investment banking... in space! Instead of being cunning and greedy sorts (see the Cartel in a moment for that...), the Consortium are typically precise and calculating, working together in careful organization rather than risking individuality, sort of high frequency trading in social form. Part of this is their closeness to the Artifex, the intelligent machinery ubiquitous to the Hegemony, but also because almost all of the Consortium is staffed by engineered clone lines. There are still individual variations, but the different lines and families are created with specific traits desirable to their intended business function, and every member of the Syndic is implanted with a Super Ego lode in their forehead, a gem-like device that shares their experiences and memories with their peers, allowing for rapid and unified response.

Despite this, there's still a lingering drive for individuality. The dress codes and regulations in Consortium regions are strict, but members often go out of their way to adopt unique appearances and demeanors when off duty, and tend to follow chaotic fashion trends and hedonistic hobbies.

•The Cartel (Versa Componae)•
One part Ferengi, one part La Cosa Nostra. Another major financial Syndic, but a far smaller and far less... reputable one. While theoretically honorable, this really only applies to other members of the Cartel; people in other Syndics can be cheated, threatened, and murdered as necessary. Their focus is more shipping as opposed to the Consortium's banking and construction, except it's heavily supplemented by ferrying contraband to and from the Grange, as well as the typical protection rackets and assassination schemes an organized crime group tends to get involved with. Mostly still a political power in the Hegemony due to the pretenses of "legitimate business"... as well as infiltrating most of the other Syndics behind the scene, giving them a spy network second only to the Diplomatic Service.

•Zae Zarandt•
Space monks, with non-deific meditation as religious philosophy. Considered eccentric by most of the other Syndics, the Zae Zarandt welcome new acolytes... though few actually make it through the torturous physical trials of Zae-Dun, their martial meditative art. They also forsake personal wealth, the use of drugs and intoxic-
... Well, anyway. They also avoid the use of technology wherever possible, with many only ever using ships to travel infrequently, or grudgingly making use of an Ulster to survive on a station. Due to their reclusive and meditative habits, the Zae Zarandt are actually well-respected by the other Syndics, if mostly because they don't pose any appreciable political risk. Adherents are spread across the Hegemony and the Grange, and it's not clear if there's any real leadership at all.

•Voidians•
Creepy cultists obsessed with the darkness of empty space. The religion dates back almost into prehistory, during the initial diaspora of humanity into the cosmos. The specifics have changed over time, but it's almost entirely made up of people who've spent the majority of their lives in space, regardless of origin and profession. A worrying number of the Armada follow their esoteric dogma, for example.

Rather than being overtly religious, the Voidians hide their spiritualism in scientific terms, with strange math and unusual quantum physics equations that point to "stellar threads", lines of space-time that twist connect the stars and create an elaborate three-dimensional megastructure that the adherents consult for navigation... and prophecy. They believe that attempting to perceive the truth only distorts it further, and terrible secret of space the mysteries of the Void will be forever unknown. They consider Suns to be gods or angels, and black holes to be demons, giving reverence to both as they hold ceremonies in open space, garbed in ceremonial Ulsters.

They have little direct political power as a group, but it's nearly impossible to work within the grange without meeting adherents. Something about working in the far reaches of space seems to draw people to their way of thinking...

•Trancers•
A small and recently formed Syndic, less than a decade old, that incensed the Hegemony enough that the entire movement was outlawed and Exiled. Maybe they just didn't like space ravers? The Trancers inspired people to question the doctrines of the Hegemony, and some suspect they've done more to push the idea of rebellion more than the centuries-old purges of the Pax Republica ever did. They hope that through hedonism and spiritualism that people will be inspired, and that humanity will reach a new Renaissance that shatters the status quo.

A few Trancers remain on Diadar, but the ones in the Grange were into it before it was cool. As an almost purely Exile movement, the Trancers have no power in the Hegemony but are a major cultural force within the Grange, even if they have few actual allies outside a few sympathetic members of the Pax Republica and Cartel. And yeah, this is pretty much pure peak-90's Anarch-style White Wolf non-faction, but it actually kinda fits into Exile well especially considering the Hegemony's relatively tight control on culture and information.

Next time : We're done with the Syndics! But there's a whole lot of other setting information to go!

The World(s) of Exile

posted by Asimo Original SA post

Mark Rein·Hagen's Exile

•Part Six: The world(s) of Exile•



While the Syndics are a major part of the setting, defining the political blocs that influence the Hegemony and the Grange as well the origin and skill sets of player characters, it obviously takes a lot more than that to make a setting. Unfortunately, there's a lot of differences between the drafts here, but I'll try and put forth something presentable and coherent. Also note the quotes from the drafts in this review have a lot of spelling errors... which, you know, makes sense. I've only edited them where there were words stuck together or it's otherwise difficult to read.

•The Pactum Weal•
As mentioned earlier, the Pactum Weal is essentially the foundation of the Hegemony. It covers a lot of space, a lot of people, and has existed in a roughly consistent form for thousands of years now. Almost all the Syndics that founded it have since changed, disbanded, or been destroyed over the millennium, and it's likely the current Syndics will die before the Hegemony does.

•The Hegemony•
The center of the setting... in a very literal sense, even if the actual game takes place on its edges. In theory the Hegemony is a Republic; the government is run by a council of Hegemons, with each member world appointing a single Hegemon, and each Hegemon having a single vote. In practice since worlds are almost invariably owned and run by Syndics, the council is more like a collection of political parties that tend to vote in unison. War between worlds and Syndics within the Hegemony is allowed, but only as long as it's local and doesn't stabilize the stability of the Hegemony itself.

Almost all the Hegemons are individuals of fantastic wealth, personal power, and political might, as befitting someone who controls the entire population of a planet. 1700 years ago, the Hegemony adopted a policy that required Hegemons to relocate to Diadar in order to separate them from their people, bathe them in the opulence of the capital, and ensure their loyalty to the Syndics and the Hegemony.

•Diadar•
Named after the hero Jhakob Diados, the founder of the current Hegemony. It's amazing. And you're not allowed there anymore. Sucks to be you.

•The Virago•
For most of the Hegemony's life, the richest and most powerful were effectively immortal due to now-outlawed technology. While officially every last Virago was executed, several still survive and continue to subtly influence the Syndics behind the scenes. The most powerful and cunning have lived for a millennium or more... which presents a certain problem. The anti-aging treatments are quite effective but not quite perfect , and the surviving Virago are getting very old, a little senile, and very, very desperate.

•Cognates•
Clone "families" within Trinary. Some have hundreds or even thousands of members derived from the genetic materials and memories of a single individual, and many survive for centuries at a time. The process is of questionable legality, but having a clone line is how many of the wealthy achieve effective immortality while circumventing the anti-Virago laws. It's possible for individual clones to achieve legal independence, either voluntarily, or... you know, through that Exile thing.

•The Godhead•
The absolutely immense computational network at the heart of the Hegemony. The entire bureaucracy does all its work through the Godhead's systems; almost every network in the Hegemony runs through the Godehead; the entirety of mankind's history, media, and knowledge lies within its databases; and even the memories of thousands of the greatest heroes and scholars have been uploaded into its cores to guide it.

The name isn't entirely White Wolf melodramatic terminology. The Godhead is sapient .

Not in the way a human would recognize, mind you. It has thousands of individually intelligent cores, each in instantaneous sync. But it has a single will , and through it the Hegemony is run, regulated, overseen, and controlled. Even the Syndics probably do not quite realize the full scope of its information control, as the only individuals who ever communicate directly with it are Solons , the most advanced and intelligent Artifex.

•Citizenship•
Service guarantees citizenship. The majority of people within the Hegemony are not technically citizens and lack assorted legal rights such as "cannot be summarily executed by the authorities for no reason at all". Slavery is legal as well, though slaves are almost invariably pulled from the underclasses or the Grange. Naturally, citizenship is a rather coveted sort of position.

•Exile•
On the downside, if a citizen fucks up really bad the authorities could do this instead of the execution thing. It can happen to non-citizens who only fuck up a tiny bit, or who get unlucky enough to piss off the wrong sort of person.



•Space Travel and Null Space•
Thousands of years ago, the Hegemony sealed its borders through the destruction of thousands of stars, blockading the rest with the massive fleets of the Armada. Only their Star Spires were capable of traversing the lightless gap, and the Grange - the worlds outside the Hegemony's borders - were mostly ignored. But then fifty years ago, someone had to go and invent a new means of FTL. The Grange was no longer a place full of nothing but barbarians and Exiles, and a new Diaspora of humanity has begun.

While jump drives are not exactly the most unique sort of setting conceit, traveling between the stars with an "Icarus Drive" is a unique type of... harrowing, seeing how it's works through literally plunging into stars. However, FTL requires slipping through Null Space , the cracks between the stars that exist somewhere outside of space and time. In some ways it's as much a spiritual experience as a physical one, and only human pilots can successfully stardive. Even with Hegemony technology, Artifex and other automated systems cannot successfully complete the journey.

While stardiving is the quick route, there's more traditional sorts of travel as well. Ion drives, Toroidal Fusion Thrusters, and other sorts of engines are commonly used in the Grange, and they can reach relativistic speeds in only a few hours. These aren't really practical for anything more than in-system travel, or short jaunts of a few light years.

Combat in space happens on fairly "realistic" levels, typically with high powered lasers at rather long distances since ion weapons are too easily deflected by magnetic fields and even the best railguns have too long a travel time hundreds of kilometers out. The usual tactic is that the weaker ship attempts to get close in order to maximize the power of its weapons or to try and find the angles where the enemy can't bring most of their weapons to bear, while the strong ship attempts to keep their distance. All ships typically mount magnetic shields in order to deflect debris, but warships can be found with far more potent variants that can absorb and deflect energy weapons as well. Of course, these also tend to contain the heat of the engines inside them too...

•The Ulster•
The super space fetishwear suits that everyone in the setting has by necessity. They come in all sorts of models and variants, and many ships and stations don't even bother with life support systems in order to save power and supplies; it's rare for an Exile to get the chance to take theirs off unless they get the chance to go planetside. Naturally, most Exiles heavily modify theirs in functional (maneuvering jets, additional limbs, built-in medial tools, etc) and cosmetic (paint, lights, different shapes and colors) ways. Ulsters can theoretically be worn indefinitely, but can have negative health consequences (like "sloughing off your skin") if worn for more than a few years at a stretch.

•Way Stations•
The centers of civilization and commerce in the void. Millions of Exiles a year pass through them (a large number... but pretty small in comparison to the trillions that live within the Hegemony). The setting would probably take place on or around one of these, and how wealthy and well-maintained they are varies quite a bit with how close they are to the Hegemony's borders.
Newly Exiled often have little in the way of support, and even less in the way of experience. Most of the ports closest to the Hegemoony are set up to exploit these victims as heavily as possible; only a little over a quarter of Exiles survive their first year.

•The Freeworlds•
Not everyone in Exile is forced into it. Sometimes groups of colonists accept it voluntarily, trading away the benefits of Hegemony life and Syndic membership in order to have freedom or speech or religion on their own private utopia. Freeworld groups are often wealthy and well equipped, and not against co-oping any local population into their particular government.

Of course, the majority of such colonies typically collapse into feudalism or violent anarchy within a few decades, and often have their fertile and promising worlds recolonized by a later group. The few Freeworlds that survive are usually the ones with colony groups that focused on escaping the Hegemony in desperation rather than following some untenable political ideal.

•Indigenous Cultures•
While the Exiles of the Hegemony are a large population of the Grange, there are groups and civilizations out there from the first Diaspora. Rovers are nomads that travel around a system, mining or scavenging what they need. Naturals are groups that have forsaken Artifex and other advanced technology, while some (intentionally or involuntarily) live in pre-modern agrarian societies. Mysterians are groups devoted to religious worship, of "mainstream" faiths or more... exotic sorts, such as worshiping Artifex or ecstatic cults focused around local hallucinogens.

•The Anathama•
Mysterious and hostile... things that exist beyond the Grange. Not human, and more important, never were human. Possibly not even native to this universe. They're not officially acknowledged by the Hegemony, but because they were mentioned as rumor in the corebook we can safely assume they're real and will probably try to murder the PCs.

•The Rest•
There's a... lot of detail in the HTML draft about the sort of lives Exiles lead, little customs and terminology, assorted Exile holidays and popular entertaining, ways to select a crew and maintain a ship, and other things that I'm not quiiiite sure how to translate for a review here since much of it's done in conversational tone and often only up a sentence or two long. In any case there's a lot more than I really have room for here, but I figure if you're interested in the game you can just check that out yourself, and if you're not then there's no reason to just copy-paste walls of text here. Sorry.

Next time : Rules! There are actually some, really!

The Rules of Exile

posted by Asimo Original SA post

Mark Rein·Hagen's Exile

•Part Seven: The Rules of Exile•



Interestingly, while the HTML draft has a lot more in the way of setting material and fluff, it doesn't actually have any rules beyond a brief section of equipment with stats. The PDF draft on the other hand has summarized playtest rules, but the setting material is much briefer and stated in direct OOC phrasing. I get the suspicion that they were actually different potential parts of the same final book; a lot of White Wolf games have the first half be IC-style setting description and the rest be stating things in frank terms to the players and GMs, and this seems to fit the pattern. The only trick that comes in is that the two seem to be from different stages of development, with a few changed or contradictory pieces of information. Ah well.

In any case, every quote here will obviously be from the PDF draft.

•The Game System•
Good news! Exile doesn't use the Storyteller system! Thank fucking god, it was still a bit of a wreck in 1997. The default assumption is that characters succeed automatically on most tasks. For tasks ("challenges") where a roll is necessary you still get to put those piles of d10's to the task... but thankfully, as d100's instead. You need to roll under the target number, usually the trait in question, but the higher the roll is without exceeding the target number the better you succeed in what I shall dub the "Price is Right" mechanic. Since Null-f inherited White Wolf's hatred of intuitive probability, particularly complex challenges may require you to roll against two (or more!) different traits. If you only succeed at one roll, the success is halved (or thirded, or what have you). If you lack the appropriate skill, the target number is your base stat times ten, and the game master narrator by assign a 10-30% penalty to difficult rolls.

Also,
That seems like an unnecessary detail, but whatever.

In any case, when you succeed you take the "tens" digit of the roll and have that many success points , giving people with higher traits much better successes as well as better chances. If you get exactly the target number you get a critical success and can roll again, combining the total success points (if any extra; the second roll can't harm you). You can burn success points to...
Rolling 00 is a "Null", which represents unprobable luck. The narrator basically gets to describe something that is "memorable", "quirky, odd, and definitely strange", basically giving open excuse to make shit up. If you roll below your Exhaustion or Malaise score (we'll get to this in a moment) you get a critical failure, with the narrator encouraged to make your life difficult and painful pending mentions of botch charts that don't actually appear in this draft.

Overall, these basic mechanic aren't... that bad? A little more complex than they need to be, but at the same time they seem to be a lot simpler than Storyteller and have a wide range of potential results without being too difficult to interpret. I'm not really sure the game needs that range of results, but I've certainly seen worse.

•Exhaustion and Malaise•
Exhaustion comes from physical fatigue and harm; if it reaches 10 you pass out, and it goes away as you rest. Malaise comes from metal stress and fatigue, or when you use your Memes (... we'll get to those a bit later); if it reaches 10 you basically have a mental collapse, and it's removed by meditation, carousing, and other cathartic activities.

• Character Generation •

•The Troupe•
In other words, the party. Basically it goes into a little detail about how the group should be connected in some thematic way, either by Syndic, by Family (or Cognate...), by background. Pretty obvious stuff, but good to reiterate I guess?

•Character conception•
Finally, chargen. To begin with, you need to pick through a few different things. An origin (a family outcast, an orphan, the clone of a hero, etc.), a background (an aristocrat, a bureaucrat, a famous celebrity, etc.), and the reason for your banishment (a crime, being framed for a crime, a personal disgrace where your family/Syndic just wanted you out of their sight, or just being of low status and picked at random to "support colonization efforts"...)

•Affiliation•
Here's where the Syndics come in! The important thing with Exile is that it isn't a binary choice like a Clan or Tradition, but rather you pick five different Syndics, having a different sort of affiliation with each, and each type of affiliation having a different affiliation score. These are Champion (50%), Enemy (40%), Initiate (30%), Spy (20%), and Contact (10%), all fairly self-explanatory.

Honestly this is probably a bit overcomplicated, but it definitely explains why there's a wide variety of Syndics, why they often have overlapping members and goals, and why some of them barely qualify as "Syndics" at all. In addition...
•Attributes•
Like the Storyteller ones, they're rated from 0-5, though 0 usually isn't found on player characters. You get 18 points to divide between the
If they didn't have Coordination in there they could have gotten away with a sweet VIPER acronym. Once more White Wolf ignores critical gameplay concerns!

•Skills•
There are some! The level of affiliation with a Syndic tells you how many points you can spend in its skills (from 5 to 1, basically divide the base affiliation score by 10) and what skills you can choose from. Like with affiliation score you roll a die to get the ones digit of the final score. In addition to the stuff listed above you can burn successes on, you need to spend a certain amount of successes to define how well you succeeded at a skill check. In general 1 is "barely succeeded" and 5 is "I am the Moon". If the roll is contested, whoever gets the most successes wins. No, there's no mention of how to resolve ties.

•Memes and Drives•
Memes are "the clusters of ideas, ethics and visions of each Syndic which describe what hold them together as a group." You get three, picked from the lists of your various Syndics (yes, including the enemy one). These are something like a combination of Merit and Power, but also indirectly defining an aspect of personality kind of like how Nature and Demeanor did in V:tM. Every Syndic has three examples in the draft, but presumably the final book and any supplements would have had more. Some examples are...
A character will also have the derived Temper (Vigour+Coordination), Passion (Presence+Expression) and Pride (Reason+Intuition) traits. You get these by taking the two scores and assigning them to either the tens or ones digit as you prefer (so a 3 and a 5 could be 35% or 53%). There's some advantages to both high and low scores, thus the option.

•Indulgences•
The "stuff" you start with. Being Exiled doesn't mean you're totally bereft of possessions, and even the disenfranchise can scavenge up or be granted some basic resources (it's exile after all, not a death sentence, and the Hegemony wants to give at least the pretense of a fair chance). You get seven rolls to represent the seven days you have left on Diadar before your exile, basically picking a skill or attribute and rolling a challenge against it as you try to get resources from your syndics. The narrator is encouraged to make each of these rolls a scene as you try to justify your challenge, but honestly that sounds like it'd get to be a colossal hassle in practice for a group of any size.

You get successes like usual and can burn them to buy stuff from the appropriate Syndic's list, like spacecraft, estates on a Grange world, a military commission, and other assorted things that will make your life significantly easier. However, a roll of 01 is a botch; normally this means forfeiting any remaining rolls as you're unexpectedly deported the next day, but at the Narrator's discretion you can just die it's a combat roll. There's a bit of Traveler in here after all!

•Logos•
Basically the freebie points from Storyteller chargen, stuff spent at the end to boost stats and such to make each character a little more unique. You get 20 points to start, and can spend them on...
... and yeah, like with WoD chargen some of these are clearly more valuable than others. A big example would be hit points and Memes; there's no way to add those through experience later, at least in this draft, and Memes are fantastically cheap for their effect. I can't say I'm a fan of the random elements either, but eh. You can also save Logos for post-chargen, but I'll cover that in a moment.

•The rest•
Your Pathos is a d10 roll, although it's kind of a vestigial trait since it's mentioned solely in this note and in a single Meme. Your Reputation is 0, but is definitely a vestigial trait since literally nothing else mentions it. Your age is anywhere from 10 to 100 (people tend to live a long time in the Hegemony even without anagathic treatments), though most Exiles are young.

Naturally, there's a bit list of syndics, skills, memes, and all that sort of stuff in the draft. I'm not going to bother transcribing that here.



• Game play •

•Acuities•
Super-normal abilities available if you have the certain Memes of certain Synddics. Basically a sort of limited psychic ability; it doesn't work on Artifex or other mechanical or overly logical entities, for example. There's one tied to each attribute. Some examples are the Meditation of the Zae that lets you ignore the need for rest, food, or water on a successful roll (and possibly on consecutive days...), or the Diva of the Trancers that lets them erase malaise points if they lead a trancer event.

•Logos•
The good news: Exile has a "hero point" style mechanic. You can spend Logos to reroll a challenge (but only once), to add three successes to a roll, and similar things that help to mitigate the bullshit of random chance. You can also spend a point to do some dramatic editing of the scene, pretty much identical to similar mechanics in other games (like the later Adventure!). This is pretty nice!

Only problem is, Logos is lost when it's spent; you don't really have a regenerating pool of it. Fortunately you can gain more by following the intent of your Memes, but if you were saving some after chargen instead of buying permanent traits you probably fell into a pretty big chargen trap. But in fairness it is 1996 here, people were still experimenting with these types of mechanics.

•Drives•
The personality traits. Generally self-explanatory; Temper is how angry you are, Pride is how strong your self worth is, and Passion is how emotional you are. These play a big part in Reaction Checks ; in cases where you need to make an immediate, gut response, the Narrator might have you make an appropriate Drive check. These can be good or bad; a fearful moment might be a Temper challenge, with success letting you fight bravely and failure forcing you to flee, but if something that makes you enraged you'd only retain control if you fail the check.

In addition, successful use of social skills (Seduction, Leadership, and the like) on you can force you to make a challenge of the appropriate drive, again with positive or negative outcomes on success depending on the skill and circumstance. Succeeding on a Pride check after a Leadership roll means your fear is reduced, but succeeding on a Passion challenge after a Negotiation roll means you get greedy and give in to their offer, for example.

In any case, if you don't like the result you can take a Malaise point and roll a different Drive to try and counter the result. Allies can use skill checks on you similarly with no Malaise cost.

•Combat•
I'm nooot going to go into full detail here. Basically, every combatant gets to make a skill roll and take an action, and can take the action even if you fumble the roll. Everyone also gets three free successes they can spend on Initiative, Movement, or Defense, giving people who've failed their rolls some tactical options. And yes, Initiative is decided by how many successes you spend on it, and actions are decided at the start of the turn and counted down from highest initiative to lowest, so there's some trade off in how soon you strike versus how well you strike. There's also a whoooole lot of things to spend combat successes on, including basically all the fancy maneuvers (grappling, suppressing fire, etc.) that most games have. I think it's a pretty elegant means of handling these compared to the additional checks or unnecessary subsystems a lot of games have.

With damage, characters have health levels... although unlike Storyteller, it's divided between six locations, the head, torso, and all four limbs, each with different numbers of health levels; an arm has three, the torso has seven, and so on. The defender chooses where they're hit unless the attacker spends successes on choosing a location, and damage is determined by the weapon used (a flat non-random number) and is reduced by any armor or force fields. A limb reduced to 0 is disabled, and you're unconscious if the head or torso hits 0. If you're unconscious, any additional damage means a death challenge against vigor or fortitude.

Overall... it's not that bad really. No worse than Storyteller, but there's a lot more fiddly tactical aspects and it it doesn't have the same sort of death spiral effect.

•Experience•
These rules are... uh, incomplete. There's a few places where concepts are cut off mid-sentence, like some mentions of spending Logos for stuff but not saying how. In any case, the Narrator hands out 1 to 7 experience points, and you pick which traits to use them on, getting a roll for each point spend. If you succeed, you gain 1%. If you fail you can 2%, and an exact success gains 3%. I'm not a big fan of random chance rolls for character advancement since it can lead to long term imbalance, but this is a pretty elegant way of handling it; the better a trait is, the slower it increases. The section mentions "watching the levels of your drives" but there's no mention of how they'd ever decrease, and it also notes that Syndic affiliation can only be changed with RP.

• Final assessment •
Overall? The system is rather sparse but there's definitely enough to play a game with here if you really wanted, at least with some willingness to add extensive house rules to trim vestigial stats and make rules for edge cases. It's nothing exceptional , but moving to percentile dice removed a lot of the wonkyness that Storyteller had with its dice pool probabilities. The real problem that I can see (admittedly, without ever actually playing with it in practice) is that in many cases you're going to have a 50% or less chance of actually succeeding at all on a roll in a skill you haven't focused on, and that's just going to be frustrating a lot of the time. The early encouragement to have the Narrator only force rolls when it's absolutely necessary helps a bit, but in practice I don't see it helping this improving the situation in most games. The upside is that when you do succeed you usually wind up with multiple success levels to play with, and in most of the systems where constant failure would be problematic (like combat) you're given some automatic successes to distribute. Combat is very, very different from Storyteller due to this; it becomes a bit more tactical in how you plan your actions and spend your successes. In any case it's hard to really say how well the game would work without some actual playtesting; I suspect it's not a bad concept, but you'd want to tweak the chances of overall success versus success levels granted to even it out a bit.

As for character generation, I think that it's... functional but mediocre? It's kind of like Storyteller in that it's not horribly complex and there's a fair bit of flexibility in how you make a PC, but there's way too many random elements. Obviously that comes down to personal taste, but the rolls just seem to add unnecessary complexity and potential imbalances between PCs. There's also the Storyteller style problem of a big disconnect between chargen and experience costs... but experience is done differently enough that there isn't the compounding costs problem that lead to the dumb builds of early Storyteller games.

Next time : Closing thoughts!

Final Thoughts

posted by Asimo Original SA post

Mark Rein·Hagen's Exile

•Part Eight: Final thoughts•



•The Text•
To be honest, it's hard to really give a fair review about Exile. What we have available is basically a first draft that was maybe total seventy or eighty pages at the most, clearly far less than the 200+ the final book would have clocked in at. The rules are very rough with several unused traits and a lot of character options given only basic examples to test with, and the setting was still being changed and expanded between the drafts. So with that said, I'll try to look at the good parts of the game and try and ponder how what's broken or missing could have been improved, since it's impossible to say what the final product would have included.

On the whole... I actually really kind of like Exile. It's full of 90's thematic conceits and some design that would be out of place these days, but I fucking hate classic Storyteller and for all of this system's flaws it's at least a lot more transparent. The overall setting themes are much "higher concept" than a lot of the sci-fi games that had been released until then too. It's not quite as heavy on transhuman themes as Transhuman Space would eventually be, and it lacks the sort of relatively hard sci-fi that something like Traveller had, but it's this odd mix of harder sci-fi themes, creatively done softer themes (I still love the "stardiving" conceit for FTL), and a sort of pervasive spirituality in the backdrop of an ancient but slowly decaying civilization that seems to get its influence from Frank Herbert or Larry Niven more than George Lucas or Gene Roddenberry.

The problem with the Exile drafts however is that, as mentioned earlier in the thread, they're very interesting themes but the setting information is focused on the wrong areas for the game. There's far, far too much attention given to the Hegemony itself and the Syndics, and once the prelude (and scrounging up your Indulgences...) is done the characters, pretty much by definition, won't exactly be interacting with it again directly. It's probably an inevitability of seeing the game this early in development; the Null Foundation wanted to make an entire game line out of the setting, and the characters ultimately would have lived the start of their lives in the Hegemony, so it only makes sense to give the core of the setting a lot thought and early attention to detail.

If you're only working with the draft though you're going to have to make up most of the setting for the Grange. The HTML draft has a lot of information on lingo, and small-scale customs and behaviors and the like, but it just doesn't give you enough information about politics in the Grange, major stations or political powers, and other stuff that's sort of critical to crafting a campaign. I'm not entirely sure this is something that would be sufficiently resolved in the final game too... it's quite telling that there's only two Syndics (the Bak' Sakusa and the Trancers) that are explicitly Exile-focused. Still, the fact character traits are defined by their interactions between multiple Syndics (and by extension, elements of the setting) is a really interesting way of handling traditional splats that I wish more games did.

I actually rather like that Null-F didn't see to include a "power" system like basically every White Wolf game had. The Memes (and the Acuities... which are bought through Memes) are maybe the closest equivalent, and even those tend to be a bit more subtle and focused; the closest equivalent in a contemporary White Wolf game would probably be the knacks from Adventure! , for example. There's a lot of ways to break characters, both good and bad, but overall everyone is on a roughly even level. Of course, a lot of attention is given to the Ulsters and spaceships and other essential technology, and everyone having powered exoskeletons does reduce the need for personal power crunch too.

As I mentioned last post, like the overall idea behind the rule system... percentile dice are pretty easy to work with, and the potential number of successes scaling with the chance for success makes for an interestingly escalating competency at higher skill levels despite the flat roll. Most of the problems really come down to how successes scale, since as it is many players would be looking at 50% or less chance of success on a particular roll, but that may have been something that the playtesting would have changed.

•Would I play it?•
Yeah, probably. It's incomplete and I pity the GM who'd have to flesh things out for the campaign, but there's a whole lot of worse themes and systems around, and if anything the 90's "spacepunk" concepts and visuals seem almost charming now.

•So what about Aeon/Trinity?•
This... is really the biggest piece of the story, and one of the things I know very little about. As I mentioned in the first post, Rein·Hagen left White Wolf in 1996 and took Null Foundation with him, while Aeon came out less than a year later in 1997. It's pretty clear that White Wolf was going to do a science fiction game one way or another, but at this point it's impossible for anyone but the people involved to say whether it was an argument over control over the game line, a break in creative intent, or personal company politics. Similarly, it's hard to say whether Aeon came about due to White Wolf making a game in their own style while trying to piece together scattered drafts and unused ideas, or whether Aeon was actually intentionally rushed in order to undercut Null Foundation. Whatever the case, Aeon actually got released while Exile didn't.

There's a few things that help to give some hints to the behind the scenes development. One is how the first edition of Aeon had almost the exact same esoteric printing format that the draft wanted for Exile; a spiral bound, black-covered book with only a logo prominently displayed. It's clear it inherited a bit of Exile's intended design there, but that may just have been the affectation of some particular staffer who remained at White Wolf after Rein·Hagen left. Then there's the Null Foundation itself... my sneaking suspicion is that Rein·Hagen wanted a lot more creative control or felt the company wasn't working in his interests, and having the game done in a "non-profit" organization in his name let him keep the rights when he finally left. It's telling that the organization got converted into a for-profit company a few years after Rein·Hagen split from the company, even if Atomoton only made a single failed product before closing.

Whatever the politics, Aeon/Trinity was ultimately a... very different game. I can't speak for everyone, but for a while there Exile was kind of a big deal in the online gaming/usenet community due to being "the next big White Wolf thing" even if the interest eventually fizzled once it became clear the project was going nowhere. Considering those expectations for a high-concept setting, Aeon was kind of a poor substitute. It's not a bad game but it definitely was much smaller in scope, quite a bit less experimental, and had very little in common thematically.

For those who aren't familiar with it, a quick summary would be that the player characters are the psychic agents (Psions) of one or more government or corporate organizations during the rebuilding after a catastrophic world against cosmic-powered superhumans (Aberrants). It's almost entirely focused around Earth and the solar system (to the point that the warp-capable psychics have fled for... reasons before the game begins), society is in an overall state of regrowth and rebuilding rather than a decline, and the characters are generally presumed to be well-supported and well-trained agents rather than outcasts and, well, exiles. It used a variant of the Storyteller system (probably the initiator of the branch that Exalted would later use, rather than the later NWoD's), the characters are tightly tied to their single splat (to the point that it's incredibly difficult to use powers from other splats), and where Exile kept to a lot of WoD themes while drastically changing the mechanics and metagame, Aeon changed a lot of themes while being very conservative with the mechanics and overall design.

If I had to pick between the two, I really sort of wish Exile had got completed instead. On the other hand, Aeon eventually lead to Adventure! which I'd argue is the best game White Wolf ever did and one of the best RPGs in history, so it's hard to really hold too many regrets.

•The Art•
I'm not gonna lie, I love Timbrook's stuff and I'm kind of sad the game never released with more proper finished art rather than low-resolution concept sketches. I used a lot of the Timbrook pieces that were up on archive.org throughout the review, but I didn't get to use the majority of pieces. Most of these sketches are unusably low quality these days, but it's still some design work that would otherwise have been forgotten and helps to get across a bit of the feel of the characters and technology, so I threw it all the images I could find into an imgur gallery. Enjoy!

http://imgur.com/a/ILkzi#4

•The PDF draft•
What, you thought I'd leave you hanging? Between this and the playtest draft on archive.org you'll have everything I know of that still exists from the playtest. Yeah, I guess it's technically but it's for a publicly released document for a game that never got released by a company that no longer exists, so I'm pretty sure nobody will care.

The downside is I'm not quite sure of the best way to share this, so here's a bunch of file sharing links for places that hopefully aren't too virus-ridden. You're probably best off trying the onedrive one first, though I have no idea how long that will last. If they're all dead in a month or two just give me a PM or something and I'll just email it to you.

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?res...081DB0CDCC!1056
http://www.filedropper.com/exile11stdraft
http://www.freefilehosting.net/exile11stdraft
http://www.sendspace.com/file/2ysdhv
http://www52.zippyshare.com/v/87350767/file.html




•Thanks for Reading!•
If anyone does actually own one of the Z-G figures and the related cards and accessories, could you do a quick review of the material for the thread? I recall it having almost nothing in common with Exile beyond the theme of the Ulsters, but I vaguely remember the small rulebook having some basic setting information and I'm curious just how much was actually kept. Also, if anyone really liked or had problems with the review, PM or let me know; the ones I've done in the past have either been rule-free books or comparatively simple games, and if I do another in the future I want it to be as good as possible.