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In Flames
What you know... You are not in your own body. You can remember snatches of your past, of a heavenly existence, and of a terrible fall from grace, but no more. This place is only fleetingly familiar. What you have been told... The thing that calls itself Ghede has told you that you were once something more than human; you were a god, a post-human, one of the Loa. You and your fellows carved worlds from pure matter, danced in the corona with suns and created life as playthings. You moulded the very stars themselves, and held worlds in the palm of your hand. Your world was called the Understar - a paradise beyond this reality. Separated from the material realm, your kind found delight in watching and manipulating the lesser beings trapped in a material existence on the Flame Worlds, playthings created for your pleasure. You called it Dreaming, an endless source of entertainment and intrigue. But times change. You committed a crime. A terrible crime, one that stood against all that your peers believed in. And for that you were thrown out, ejected, cast down to the lower worlds, named an Exile. Now the Understar seems little more than a vague memory that slips through your fingers. But there is hope. Ghede, the force that represents the Understar in the material reality, has offered you a chance to return home. All you must do is walk these lesser worlds performing tasks as required by your new master, and in doing so find a way to resolve the guilt of your crime. What you seek is forgiveness and a return to the Understar. Under Ghede's guidance you invoke your one-time comrades, the Loa, and through them reveal more of your home and your past. Doing so risks psychosis, but Ghede gives you the black pills it keeps to help with that, as long as you are good. This is where you are - the Flame Worlds, a hazily remembered place of death and intrigue, among billions of souls trapped in this mundane existence. You and your fellow Exiles must accept Ghede's offer, and meet others of your kind to do his bidding. What will you discover among the Flame Worlds? Who knows, but if it ends your exile, it is worth it. In Flames is a science fiction role-playing game of action, adventure, psychosis and discovery utilising a variant of the D6 system.
170 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 2011
2 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 17, 2017
Warning: This begins with a long, complicated sentence.
This game has an interesting premise, built around the idea that the singularity came and transhumans ascended to posthuman, supramaterial, godlike existences, but that there are crimes in the posthuman realm that can get one kicked back down to a mortal existence in a sordid, dangerous, interplanetary society of weird and menacing character, seeking a way back to an existence so grand it can no longer be held firmly in the memory of someone crammed into such a benighted existence, condemned to the limitations of a meatsuit.
What passes for morality in this "primitive", somewhat horrorific science fiction society is grim and at times perverse. The skew imparted by dimly held memories of experience as a posthuman being beyond mortal comprehension can lend a bizarreness to these descended beings. It's a bizarreness that makes even the broken interplanetary cultures' mores seem tame by comparison. An exploration of the mindsets of such characters, and of their willingness to do what it takes to get back to their previously exalted states or their behavioral changes if and when they give up on it, seems like it could be some great roleplaying experience.
So one hopes after reading some of the premise material. Unfortunately, this is almost entirely invented by the reader, trying to read between the lines. As it starts getting more and more into the mechanics and the concepts of actual roleplaying plotlines, several things become increasingly obvious:
1. The details of the material world are more like a tangle of high-concept ideas roughly sketched out like an overenthusiastic show-and-tell presentation at school than like a coherent setting. The weapons list is a pretty concrete example (short, strangely specific, and haphazard; among the melee weapons are both a conventional mace and something never really described or clarified called a "sing-sword", but let us not forget the pulse weapons that are astonishingly more powerful than everything else in the list). Then, of course, there's a weird bit of interaction with posthumans dropped in as a kind of superpower or magic mechanic whose terminology is lifted directly from a Hollywoodish interpretation of voodoo.
2. The obvious expectations of play are very conventional, in that it's set up to urge the PCs to pursue tasks handed out by a quest-giver, presenting something of an unfortunate door-kicking dungeon-delving flavor.
3. The mechanics do little or nothing to prioritize the kinds of character development and exploration tantalizingly half promised in the early pages. They come off a bit like a hacked together hodge-podge of clunky math and calculations of numbers of dice (such as the "axe" melee weapon with a damage code of "Might dice/2 + 3D").
4. The author's writing style is dry, a trifle patronizingly pedantic, and awkward.
5. The author evinces some oddly, naively conservative worldview characteristics, and weirdly sheltered outlook, through some of the phrasing, examples, and assumptions baked into the text. Consider the examples of people who have high or low scores in the Charm stat: "High Charm value - your best friend, your mother, or a social worker; low Charm value - a cold hearted person, a murderer, or your ex."
There is a clear sense that the rules are fiddly, crunchy, and mechanistic, but the actual content of the book is spotty in that area. While there is intense, detailed focus on those small spots, everything else gets vague, fuzzy, or even altogether undefined.
There is a clear sense that the setting is rich, flavorful, and inspired, but the actual content of the book is pretty spotty in that area, too. While there are a few brief descriptions of very cool ideas, they quickly fade away into a lack of real guidance on what is going on, or any kind of sense of how it's all meant to be stitched together.
In short, if someone ran with the basic premise ideas and setting flavor of this to create an Apocalypse World campaign, it could be awesome, but as is it's a lot of wasted ink and a little bit of hints and broken promises that a fertile mind could perhaps turn into something good with a lot of hard work and little or no credit due the author of In Flames.
I was tempted to give this one star, but I figured the basic premise is interesting enough (even if left pretty much entirely unused in the game itself) to warrant some kind of positive regard.
This game has an interesting premise, built around the idea that the singularity came and transhumans ascended to posthuman, supramaterial, godlike existences, but that there are crimes in the posthuman realm that can get one kicked back down to a mortal existence in a sordid, dangerous, interplanetary society of weird and menacing character, seeking a way back to an existence so grand it can no longer be held firmly in the memory of someone crammed into such a benighted existence, condemned to the limitations of a meatsuit.
What passes for morality in this "primitive", somewhat horrorific science fiction society is grim and at times perverse. The skew imparted by dimly held memories of experience as a posthuman being beyond mortal comprehension can lend a bizarreness to these descended beings. It's a bizarreness that makes even the broken interplanetary cultures' mores seem tame by comparison. An exploration of the mindsets of such characters, and of their willingness to do what it takes to get back to their previously exalted states or their behavioral changes if and when they give up on it, seems like it could be some great roleplaying experience.
So one hopes after reading some of the premise material. Unfortunately, this is almost entirely invented by the reader, trying to read between the lines. As it starts getting more and more into the mechanics and the concepts of actual roleplaying plotlines, several things become increasingly obvious:
1. The details of the material world are more like a tangle of high-concept ideas roughly sketched out like an overenthusiastic show-and-tell presentation at school than like a coherent setting. The weapons list is a pretty concrete example (short, strangely specific, and haphazard; among the melee weapons are both a conventional mace and something never really described or clarified called a "sing-sword", but let us not forget the pulse weapons that are astonishingly more powerful than everything else in the list). Then, of course, there's a weird bit of interaction with posthumans dropped in as a kind of superpower or magic mechanic whose terminology is lifted directly from a Hollywoodish interpretation of voodoo.
2. The obvious expectations of play are very conventional, in that it's set up to urge the PCs to pursue tasks handed out by a quest-giver, presenting something of an unfortunate door-kicking dungeon-delving flavor.
3. The mechanics do little or nothing to prioritize the kinds of character development and exploration tantalizingly half promised in the early pages. They come off a bit like a hacked together hodge-podge of clunky math and calculations of numbers of dice (such as the "axe" melee weapon with a damage code of "Might dice/2 + 3D").
4. The author's writing style is dry, a trifle patronizingly pedantic, and awkward.
5. The author evinces some oddly, naively conservative worldview characteristics, and weirdly sheltered outlook, through some of the phrasing, examples, and assumptions baked into the text. Consider the examples of people who have high or low scores in the Charm stat: "High Charm value - your best friend, your mother, or a social worker; low Charm value - a cold hearted person, a murderer, or your ex."
There is a clear sense that the rules are fiddly, crunchy, and mechanistic, but the actual content of the book is spotty in that area. While there is intense, detailed focus on those small spots, everything else gets vague, fuzzy, or even altogether undefined.
There is a clear sense that the setting is rich, flavorful, and inspired, but the actual content of the book is pretty spotty in that area, too. While there are a few brief descriptions of very cool ideas, they quickly fade away into a lack of real guidance on what is going on, or any kind of sense of how it's all meant to be stitched together.
In short, if someone ran with the basic premise ideas and setting flavor of this to create an Apocalypse World campaign, it could be awesome, but as is it's a lot of wasted ink and a little bit of hints and broken promises that a fertile mind could perhaps turn into something good with a lot of hard work and little or no credit due the author of In Flames.
I was tempted to give this one star, but I figured the basic premise is interesting enough (even if left pretty much entirely unused in the game itself) to warrant some kind of positive regard.
September 23, 2013
I picked up this game a couple of years ago due to the awesome cover and just now finally got around to reading it.
The setting is an interesting one. The characters are post-humans that have transcended normal reality, but who have been banished back to that reality for largely unspecified crimes. If they ever hope to return they must now perform missions for a mysterious task master until they've atoned for their crimes.
The physical world that they find themselves in is a dystopian one where the majority of people live in dangerous and oppressive conditions. Although never explicitly stated in the book, this raised some interesting questions for me while reading as the purpose of the players in the game appears to be to maintain the status quo of this dystopian society for the benefit of the transcendental society that they have been banished from.
There were a couple of bits about the setting that bothered me. One is easily explained away, but the other wasn't. The first is that the societies described didn't seem very stable to me, but that just feeds back into the role of the player characters, as they and others like them appear to be what is keeping everything from falling apart. Whether or not that's actually a good thing is debatable.
The second wasn't as easily explained away. Now, my knowledge of astrophysics is sketchy at best, but I'm pretty sure that objects with a larger mass don't generally orbit those with a smaller one, yet the main world of this setting is significantly smaller than at least two of its "moons," at least one of which is three times as massive as the world it supposedly orbits. Given that the text of the game mentions a couple of times that it is a "hard science-fiction" setting, that seemed a bit odd to me.
Mechanically, the game uses the tried and true D6 system that was released under the OGL a few years back. D6 goes back to at least 1987 as the engine for the original Star Wars RPG, and is a relatively easy system to use. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that this book is the best introduction to the system. It's complete, but the lack of an index, and a layout that could be better, might make it difficult for someone new to the system to learn it from this book. Still, the implementation appears to be solid and I imagine it will work well in play if the Narrator (the game's term for a gamemaster) can grasp the essentials.
The game apparently has had two supplements published for it that can still be purchased, but otherwise there appears to be zero support for it. I was hoping to find some errata for it, but couldn't find any. It's published by Cubicle 7 as one of their "partners" but there's no support for it on their site or forums, and "Fire Ruby Design," the studio credited with its creation, appears to have no current web presence whatsoever. Even Micropanzer Wargame Studio, the source of most of the illustrations in the game, appears to be defunct.
Overall, it's an interesting little game (literally, as it's less than 200 pages and digest size). I'd consider running it if I didn't already have a long list of other games that I want to run.
The setting is an interesting one. The characters are post-humans that have transcended normal reality, but who have been banished back to that reality for largely unspecified crimes. If they ever hope to return they must now perform missions for a mysterious task master until they've atoned for their crimes.
The physical world that they find themselves in is a dystopian one where the majority of people live in dangerous and oppressive conditions. Although never explicitly stated in the book, this raised some interesting questions for me while reading as the purpose of the players in the game appears to be to maintain the status quo of this dystopian society for the benefit of the transcendental society that they have been banished from.
There were a couple of bits about the setting that bothered me. One is easily explained away, but the other wasn't. The first is that the societies described didn't seem very stable to me, but that just feeds back into the role of the player characters, as they and others like them appear to be what is keeping everything from falling apart. Whether or not that's actually a good thing is debatable.
The second wasn't as easily explained away. Now, my knowledge of astrophysics is sketchy at best, but I'm pretty sure that objects with a larger mass don't generally orbit those with a smaller one, yet the main world of this setting is significantly smaller than at least two of its "moons," at least one of which is three times as massive as the world it supposedly orbits. Given that the text of the game mentions a couple of times that it is a "hard science-fiction" setting, that seemed a bit odd to me.
Mechanically, the game uses the tried and true D6 system that was released under the OGL a few years back. D6 goes back to at least 1987 as the engine for the original Star Wars RPG, and is a relatively easy system to use. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that this book is the best introduction to the system. It's complete, but the lack of an index, and a layout that could be better, might make it difficult for someone new to the system to learn it from this book. Still, the implementation appears to be solid and I imagine it will work well in play if the Narrator (the game's term for a gamemaster) can grasp the essentials.
The game apparently has had two supplements published for it that can still be purchased, but otherwise there appears to be zero support for it. I was hoping to find some errata for it, but couldn't find any. It's published by Cubicle 7 as one of their "partners" but there's no support for it on their site or forums, and "Fire Ruby Design," the studio credited with its creation, appears to have no current web presence whatsoever. Even Micropanzer Wargame Studio, the source of most of the illustrations in the game, appears to be defunct.
Overall, it's an interesting little game (literally, as it's less than 200 pages and digest size). I'd consider running it if I didn't already have a long list of other games that I want to run.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews