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Splicers: Role-Playing Game
Book by Bellaire, Carmen
- GenresRole Playing Games
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
1 person is currently reading
27 people want to read
About the author
Carmen Bellaire
9 books9 followersAn eternal daydreamer and sometimes writer, Carmen Bellaire has always been lost in the worlds of his imagination. When he discovered role-playing games for the first time, it was love at first read. In short order he collected together his brothers and friends, and began to weave them stories of action, adventure and intrigue. Carmen started with the first edition rules of Heroes Unlimited™, as comics were a big draw for him. However, he soon added the original Robotech® RPG, first edition Palladium Fantasy RPG® and The Mechanoids® to his library of Palladium role-playing games.
Carmen ran adventure after lengthy adventure for his buddies, even when they all entered the Canadian Army Reserves together. His collection of Palladium role-playing game products continued to grow and went with him onto GMT (general military training), where he continued to run adventures on base.
In time, Carmen grew up and got married to his high-school sweetheart Christina – who he met in GMT! He drifted through a succession of construction and labor jobs before becoming a professional truck driver. Christina and Carmen had a beautiful daughter, Robyn; bought a house and settled down. But through all of it, he had his role-playing games and imaginary worlds, sometimes writing them down.
For years, some of his players had encouraged Carmen to submit some of his ideas to Palladium. When he finally worked up the nerve he was pleasantly surprised that publisher Kevin Siembieda loved them. When he had the chance to submit some of his ideas for possible publication, Carmen jumped at the opportunity. The next thing Carmen knew, he had written the popular Powers Unlimited™ 1, 2 and 3 sourcebooks for Heroes Unlimited™, the Splicers® RPG, Rifts® Merc Ops, Rifts® Mercenary Sourcebook, and Rifts® Dimension Book™ 8: Naruni™ Wave Two, as well as contributed to a handful of other titles, including Rifts® Ultimate Edition.
Carmen sometimes laments that he has far too many hobbies for his own good, including writing short stories, novels and RPG material; role-playing, miniature wargaming, motorcycling, home renovation, and medieval reenacting (the SCA). Despite his wide range of interests and a family, Carmen continues to find time to work on new books for the various Palladium Books® game lines.
Carmen ran adventure after lengthy adventure for his buddies, even when they all entered the Canadian Army Reserves together. His collection of Palladium role-playing game products continued to grow and went with him onto GMT (general military training), where he continued to run adventures on base.
In time, Carmen grew up and got married to his high-school sweetheart Christina – who he met in GMT! He drifted through a succession of construction and labor jobs before becoming a professional truck driver. Christina and Carmen had a beautiful daughter, Robyn; bought a house and settled down. But through all of it, he had his role-playing games and imaginary worlds, sometimes writing them down.
For years, some of his players had encouraged Carmen to submit some of his ideas to Palladium. When he finally worked up the nerve he was pleasantly surprised that publisher Kevin Siembieda loved them. When he had the chance to submit some of his ideas for possible publication, Carmen jumped at the opportunity. The next thing Carmen knew, he had written the popular Powers Unlimited™ 1, 2 and 3 sourcebooks for Heroes Unlimited™, the Splicers® RPG, Rifts® Merc Ops, Rifts® Mercenary Sourcebook, and Rifts® Dimension Book™ 8: Naruni™ Wave Two, as well as contributed to a handful of other titles, including Rifts® Ultimate Edition.
Carmen sometimes laments that he has far too many hobbies for his own good, including writing short stories, novels and RPG material; role-playing, miniature wargaming, motorcycling, home renovation, and medieval reenacting (the SCA). Despite his wide range of interests and a family, Carmen continues to find time to work on new books for the various Palladium Books® game lines.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 27, 2024
Nice RPG reference book. Nice plots and ides for gaming. Also a nice selection of pics. Recommended
May 12, 2023
The basic concept here is pretty cool. It's big nasty evil robots versus a human resistance armed with biotechnology. As part of the machine effort to exterminate humans, the ruling AI developed a nanotech plague that makes all metal humans come in contact with mutate and attack (complete with the obligatory D100 table of random options for how this manifests). So the humans have had to turn to biotechnology, developing living armor and weapons to use to fight back.
And there is some cool worldbuilding and character concepts. The biotech is generated by Engineers, humans who have bonded with alien creatures of unclear origin that allow them to have literal genepools for generating and mutating organisms. And the designs and plans, along with much knowledge of pre-war history, is developed by Librarians, also humans bonded to monsters. While you can't play one of those, you can be the earlier stage where the creature first bonds and grants healing tentacles. Plus there's the pilots of the host armor, people who ride biomonsters or use meat wingpacks, and even some classes that hint at a dark underbelly to the human resistance, like the mutated criminals or the servants of the Librarians who become powerful warriors at the cost of their freedom and an addiction to the Librarian's brain juices.
Things do run into some problems due to the Palladiumness of this game. For one thing, with only 224 pages and the need to occupy the last quarter of that with reprinting the usual repetitive game rules (though amazingly we're spared the insanity tables for some reason), there isn't really enough room for all the ideas to get fully developed. Enough space needs to be devoted to the rules for making host armors and characters and such that the worldbuilding doesn't get enough of a chance. It's mentioned that the human resistance is divided into feudal Great Houses, but only one is described. And as mentioned before, it feels like there's a lot of nasty stuff under the surface that it would be interesting to see get developed more overtly. Plus unlike, say, Terminator, this robot war has been going on for decades and both sides are convinced it will last decades more. I would have liked to see that explored and developed further, because I'll admit that at first that doesn't feel like it quite works for me.
There's also the usual dodgy organization and other issues with a Palladium RPG. For one thing, the whole book is set up in a completely nonsensical way. The rules on character creation don't come till the last quarter of the book, and even the player character classes are the very last thing before then. The book opens with a bit of setting overview before launching into the robots and then getting to the human resistance. It's the same ass-backward flow that their second Robotech RPG had, and I'm more baffled by it here. Robot revolutions are a dime a dozen, even back in 2004 when this was published, so why start there rather than beginning with the thing that's the big standout gimmick and also describes who you'll actually be roleplaying as? This game also has the typical flaws of the Palladium house system, though I do give it points for avoiding the Rifts thing of having characters who will just get completely disintegrated the first time a fight breaks out due to having no way to deal with MDC weapons. Not everybody is MDC inherently, but basically all characters have standard access to MDC defenses.
Basically, this is a neat idea, and I think if the book had more time to develop the setting and maybe was published for a system that was less...this, it could be pretty cool. I do also have the only sourcebook for this setting, which is a Paizo style adventure path mixed with new rules material. While it doesn't seem to involve the original author, I'm curious about it both to see what a campaign would look like and because it seems like it'll develop some of the setting things I found missing from this book.
And there is some cool worldbuilding and character concepts. The biotech is generated by Engineers, humans who have bonded with alien creatures of unclear origin that allow them to have literal genepools for generating and mutating organisms. And the designs and plans, along with much knowledge of pre-war history, is developed by Librarians, also humans bonded to monsters. While you can't play one of those, you can be the earlier stage where the creature first bonds and grants healing tentacles. Plus there's the pilots of the host armor, people who ride biomonsters or use meat wingpacks, and even some classes that hint at a dark underbelly to the human resistance, like the mutated criminals or the servants of the Librarians who become powerful warriors at the cost of their freedom and an addiction to the Librarian's brain juices.
Things do run into some problems due to the Palladiumness of this game. For one thing, with only 224 pages and the need to occupy the last quarter of that with reprinting the usual repetitive game rules (though amazingly we're spared the insanity tables for some reason), there isn't really enough room for all the ideas to get fully developed. Enough space needs to be devoted to the rules for making host armors and characters and such that the worldbuilding doesn't get enough of a chance. It's mentioned that the human resistance is divided into feudal Great Houses, but only one is described. And as mentioned before, it feels like there's a lot of nasty stuff under the surface that it would be interesting to see get developed more overtly. Plus unlike, say, Terminator, this robot war has been going on for decades and both sides are convinced it will last decades more. I would have liked to see that explored and developed further, because I'll admit that at first that doesn't feel like it quite works for me.
There's also the usual dodgy organization and other issues with a Palladium RPG. For one thing, the whole book is set up in a completely nonsensical way. The rules on character creation don't come till the last quarter of the book, and even the player character classes are the very last thing before then. The book opens with a bit of setting overview before launching into the robots and then getting to the human resistance. It's the same ass-backward flow that their second Robotech RPG had, and I'm more baffled by it here. Robot revolutions are a dime a dozen, even back in 2004 when this was published, so why start there rather than beginning with the thing that's the big standout gimmick and also describes who you'll actually be roleplaying as? This game also has the typical flaws of the Palladium house system, though I do give it points for avoiding the Rifts thing of having characters who will just get completely disintegrated the first time a fight breaks out due to having no way to deal with MDC weapons. Not everybody is MDC inherently, but basically all characters have standard access to MDC defenses.
Basically, this is a neat idea, and I think if the book had more time to develop the setting and maybe was published for a system that was less...this, it could be pretty cool. I do also have the only sourcebook for this setting, which is a Paizo style adventure path mixed with new rules material. While it doesn't seem to involve the original author, I'm curious about it both to see what a campaign would look like and because it seems like it'll develop some of the setting things I found missing from this book.
August 17, 2023
An interesting concept.
January 16, 2015
The pretense of this game seems to be that in the aftermath of a robot apocalypse, humanity gets a second chance at resisting the machines by using really gross bio-weapons. Normally I don't give too much weight to the artwork that goes along with a role playing game, but this book had far too many images that are simply visually unpleasant or gross. It doesn't make reading the book easy when you don't want to look a the page. I also think this setting is rather limited in scope. Mutants bashing robots could be interesting for a while but it seems like it would be difficult to keep a campaign going in the Splicers setting. While it might be okay for a, "one off," or a mini-campaign, I can't say I would recommend Splicers.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews