Red Planet • A World of Adventure for Fate Core
A downloadable game
Join the Martian Union of Materialist Republics today!
It’s the year 773 Post Revolution, and Mars is basking in the long embrace of progressive materialism. The Union of Materialist Republics rules over a utopian planet and two moon colonies. The people are happy in their roles; the governments of the Republic remain at peace with one another; technology designed to better mankind advances by leaps and bounds.
But all is not entirely peaceful, for the Union is under attack by the corrupt “U.S.S.R.” and decadent “U.S.A.” back on Earth, the feudal alien Venusians, and the expansionist two-dimensional Country of the Geometers!
Defend the Union and Mars against its enemies, and bring glory to yourself, your squad, and your collective. Put your lives on the line to defend utopia in Red Planet, a Soviet retro-pulp adventure by Jess Nevins. Red Planet requires Fate Core to play. This 59-page supplement includes:
- A detailed review of the solar system—Fate-style
- A social-class based character generation system with two new skills: pilot and renown
- Interesting new rules for Conversions: a mental conflict in which characters try to convince others to agree with their point of view
- Pulp-style spaceships and gear to equip your campaign
- A sample adventure: 34 Chernykh
Welcome, Citizen, to the Red Planet.
The Fate Adventures & Worlds line provides compact, rich, affordable, gorgeous settings with a ready-to-go adventure for GMs in a pinch. Buy one this afternoon, be ready to run this evening.
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This is an imaginative and ambitious module of alternate history speculative fiction, exploring life in a collectivist future that escapes the totalitarianism that the USSR collapsed into. The USSR *and* the USA are both presented as antagonists, and the setting is an interesting place for characters to grow.
My only complaint is minor and largely stylistic: the game features a sidebar discussing the atrocities committed under theoretically-leftwing totalitarianism. I'd have preferred to also see a comparative sidebar about the numbers of people who are killed and displaced under capitalism and the 'normal' totalitarianism of the present day, precisely because we as the audience have more practice understanding collectivism as Bad than we do evaluating how Bad the capitalist status quo is. Given that power differential in representation, having both would potentially give this module even more impact.
I'm a million years late but I agree, a sidebar about capitalism would have been welcome. Sure, they're the bad guys in the game, but that's one layer too removed considering the other bad guys have an IRL sidebar about them.
Other than that, hot damn do I LOVE this setting.
It's not just "discussing the atrocities", it lists a bunch of ludicrous and deeply offensive propaganda clichés, some Cold War era, some downright Goebbels. Okay, the given number of "executed political prisoners" is 20 times more than even in the books of Soviet dissidents with the richest imagination and reaches half of the population of the USSR, okay "Holodomor", the existence of which is a debatable historical fact, since the famine was in Russia at the same moment, for example, in the Volga region, as well as in other countries of Eastern Europe, but for some reason only Ukrainian politicians use this famine for political purposes
But "2 million raped (German) women in World War II"! I can throw up my hands in annoyance at the previous points, but this is absolutely outrageous. Not a single sane historian in any country has ever considered this as the truth, there has never been any evidence of this, finally, even a novice military theorist knows perfectly well that an army distracted by rape (especially on such a scale) loses all combat effectiveness and discipline, and will be defeated by the enemy in the shortest possible time, so that any attempts at such a command are forced to stop, if not out of respect for German women, then at least out of a desire to win the war. And yet no "communism" or other ideology is capable of pushing people to rape on such a scale, it's just a Russophobic, misanthropic statement about "Russian pigs dreaming of raping European women" straight from Goebbels' repertoire.
The author hypocritically placed the book's dedication to "victims of capitalism and communism around the world" only to immediately reproduce one of the most inhuman, gruesome lies ever created by propagandists in a capitalist state, and a non-capitalist one too.
Absolutely disgusting.