I have recently returned to one of my favourite games through reading and playing its most recent 4th edition: Fading Suns. What is it with me and 4th editions?!
Fading Suns is a medieval factional space opera, set in a jump web of alien gates at a time when the suns themselves are waning. The heady dollops of tech, psionics, theurgy, dark powers, guilds, medievalism kind of sort of shouldn’t work, but it does magnificently. I’ve been with it since the first edition in the late 90s, noting that the authors very much defined the White Wolf style of games before moving to this game. Factional intrigue, dark magics, lost secrets, power plays, purging war against the symbiot plague threat, aliens, machines, sin, desire, a complete passion play. You can pick up and play the game accentuating one or more of these themes.
As fun as reading the lore is, it is great to experience it in play. I’ve got the game to a live stream on Youtube, flexing my tech to provide a 1440p resolution four hour game.
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| Fading Suns with friends from the Dungeon Muser’s Community |
The fourth edition delivers a traditional and meta currency heavy design. It’s a bit like 2D20 on steroids. Recognisably the same mechanics from the first/second edition, ‘Victory Points’ now feature large, a metacurrency that enables choices after the task roll. I can see why some people have recoiled from the game. It is not a ‘fade into the background’ kind of system. the system drives a lot of the action through the deployment of VPs. Your character has a bank of them which can be saved and used when needed most. So, as players, you need to be comfortable having a meta currency in the background, which you explain through narrating your actions and the character energy being used to succeed. It works for me.
Fading Suns doesn’t have a Foundry VTT system, so I have been playing on Role, which works very well for a streamed game. Role’s limitations on asset management might soon overwhelm, but for a short game I can treat most things as tokens to enable multiple asset display during play.
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| Role with multiple tokens over an image of the Jump Web |
I’ve been checking through the Streamlined Rules supplement for Fading Suns 4e. The main game is preserved, but instead of managing pools of Victory Points that you can bank and spend, you have one or two to spend for each turn, and they provide you with something like a ‘stance’. Do you keep defensive, go for effort to take out resistance or precision to increase your success chance? Your Goal roll also creates some more VP effort, if successful, and the higher the roll the better. Essentially, the numbers of VPs is roughly halved.
Although I think I like the streamlining, I’m happy enough to continue with the more voluminous full VP rules when we return to our one shot in June. I can see the streamlined rules forming the base for the 5th edition.
On which topic, it looks like there could be a new edition of the game. Hard copies are now hard to find, and Fading Suns PDFs are currently in a sale. Any edition will benefit from the great setting, but a lightening of the resolution mechanics would be welcomed. I’m happy to play either way. You can find hacks everywhere, to play in the Fading Suns with a ruleset of your choice. I’ve used Wordplay in the past.
Sometimes it is good to go back. Fading Suns delights.