In 1870, according to Space 1889's rules, Thomas Edison crashed on Mars in his newly-invented "ether flyer", and discovered a ruined, decaying civilization. Two decades later, British redcoats are fighting for Her Majesty in Syrtis Major as well as the Sudan.
Which means, welcome back to the newly revived LP of this "science fiction role playing in a more civilized time"! (Yeah, that's the official subtitle.)
Before we proceed, however, two random observations:
1. There is, like, no experience system in this game and no way of improving the attributes? According to
an extremely nice short review of p&p Space 1889, in the pen-and-paper version there are experience points, "used to improve skills, although a die roll is required to raise a skill above the level of the associated attribute", but in the computer version I haven't been able to locate them in the character profile. I'm a bit surprised by that, frankly, and I hope there will be a way of raising the skills at least. The manual is silent on that.
2. So far it seems the fatigue factor isn't as high as the developers advertise it in the manual. In fact, so far it seems to be non-existent. I believe they forgot to implement it properly (or at all), as I completely fail to notice any consequences of our stomachs being empty. This may change later, of course; I'm playing it blindly, after all.
That said, I'm having fun with the game so far, even though I haven't left London nor completed a single quest yet. Truth be told, I just have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing and I'm only starting to get the hang of the way it plays, so I'm just messing around for now and making things go boom.
Right next to the museum is... Stonehenge?
The Stonehenge? In the centre of London? Oh boy.
Most of the NPCs we encounter are commoners who have nothing of substance to say to us. No wonder, them being commoners and all.
Facing the Archaeologist's shop.
manual said:
ARCHAEOLOGIST. An archaeologist can supply information about an item in your inventory. Select which character will pay for the information, and which has the item to be examined. Select the item horn his inventory. You will then be given a description of the item you selected.
Miss Bee has no objects, neither does anyone else, and we can't do anything here at the moment.
We can actually leave London and just go walking around the globe (it's Britain though, so we wouldn't get far on foot), but let's leave that for later.
A weapon shop! Now that should incline our exploration greatly.
WEAPON STORE. You can either BUY WEAPONS/AMMO or SELL WEAPON. If you decide to sell a weapon, you are asked which one of your characters will sell a particular weapon, and which one will receive the money from the transaction. If there are any rounds of ammunition included with the weapon, you are properly reimbursed. If you decide to BUY WEAPONS/AMMO, you are asked whether you wish to BUY WEAPONS or BUY AMMUNITION. To BUY WEAPONS, you must determine which one of your characters will pay for the weapon(s), and which one will receive them. Next, you will asked what weapons you want to purchase. To BUY AMMUNITION, you are asked which character will buy the ammunition, and which one will receive it. Then you will select the ammunition type and then the number of rounds you wish to buy.
First we must decide whether we want to buy or sell, then between weapons and ammo, then who will pay, and finally who will receive the weapon/ammunition. Going through five menus in a row only to buy a weapon is
the example of a clunky interface. What's wrong, game? Where's my button-awesome connection?
At last, after struggling with the interface and prevailing, we reach the list of available weapons. And boy, do I like what I see!
Miss Bee buys herself a 12-gauge scattergun.
12-GAUGE SCATTERGUN. A standard 12-gauge double-barrel shotgun with the barrels sawed off to give greater effectiveness at close range. Favored by American desperadoes. Wt: 6 lbs. Price £5.
Favoured by American desperados? Well, Bee's a criminal, after all.
Being the richest one in our group, Bee is the one to buy weapons (as well as everything else) for everyone. I wonder how much buying a spaceship is going to cost us... But anyway, Pariah and Kazgar receive a 12-gauge lever action shotgun.
12-GAUGE LEVER ACTION. A shotgun with a tubular magazine capable of holding five cartridges. The weapon is cocked and cartridges loaded and ejected by means of a manually operated lever. The Winchester Repeating Shotgun is a typical example of a lever action shotgun. Wt: 9 lbs. Price: £5.
As for Faith...
...we buy her a Maxim. Yeah, you heard it right. And we can afford that.
MAXIM. The Maxim gun is a single-barrel, water-cooled machine gun which uses the force of one cartridge's recoil to eject the spent round, load a fresh one, and fire it. This sequence continues until the gunner removes pressure from the trigger or the ammunition is exhausted. Maxim guns are just entering experimental service with the British Army (although the gun has been on the market since 1883). Wt: 40 lbs. Price: £150.
The rules say a character needs the Gunnery skill to operate a machine gun, but screw the rules. We're LARPing here. A witch with a machine gun? Sounds fun.
(Well, we do buy a shotgun for Faith, too, just in case. And now I regret I didn't invest in anyone's Gunnery.)
We now have our first items in the inventory, and they're deadly. We're off to a good start.
It took me some time to figure out how to equip a weapon though. You can't do that from the party screen, only via the
Use command.
We shouldn't forget to buy ammo as well, since otherwise the weapons are going to be useless.
Good thing the game automatically chooses the type of ammo for you depending on the weapon(s) you're carrying.
The next screen just put me in a stupor. I mean, shots? shells? grapeshot? shrapnel? Uhm, what? How do I choose among those? The bloody manual as always remains silent. I went for shots and bough a hundred shots for Bee, Kazgar and Pariah, and 200 shots for Faith's Maxim, but I wonder if someone knows the difference between those, uhm, thingies.
And here's the local inn.
INN. When you enter an inn, seek out the shopkeeper (you must talk to the people in this building to find out who this person is). He asks you if you wish to stay for the night. If you do, you will automatically begin a new day and the fatigue levels for each of your characters will be zero.
Note that it's already the 188th day and we haven't eaten anything yet, and despite that our fatigue still equals 0. Talk about a half-assed implementation.
London's interiors aren't very exciting or varied, really.
The innkeeper offers us a room, but we decline -- being a superhuman band of adventurers, we aren't a bit tired despite having spent two hundred days exploring one tiny area of London.
In a room here, we meet one Dr Maxwell Raven who advertises a substance called Fever Serum to us. A meagre £50, he says. Time to test out the bargaining interface. We press B for
Buy.
Next we can choose between buying
Info or an
Object. Fever serum, eh? Must be an object.
And now we are presented with a choice as counterintuitive as it gets. Here,
Money and
Item indicate not the action we must choose or the kind of thing we want from the NPC, but rather what we want to
offer to him in exchange for the object we need. A more intuitive interface would be saying something like "Buy" and "Barter/Trade" instead.
Now, again, we choose who pays the money, then who receives the item, and finally we get to type in the sum we wish to pay. I forgot to switch the current party leader to Kazgar (who has some bargaining skills) and I didn't want to go through the interface again, so Dr Raven wouldn't agree to anything below fifty quid.
"It was a pleasure doing business with you. Someday, you will be glad you met me."
We use the
Study command to examine the serum. Well, it does sound useful; let's hope we didn't spend that money for nothing. (We can't buy any more fever serum from Dr Raven, by the way, so this must be a unique or at least rare item.)
Given that Stonehenge is right near the British Museum, no wonder Silbury Hill is here, too.
Inside it's pitch dark and we're likely to be eaten by a nasty grue. I believe we'll need a torch or something to be able to explore the place.
That suitcase-like symbol means we're approaching... a bar. Makes sense, I guess.
TAVERN. Bartenders will usually share information if you buy a drink or two.
Yeah, it's only now that I've read this line from the manual.
Stay tuned for a Return to the Bar in the next update.
Meet Ian the Bartender.
"You must die for your actions!"
And here's a drunkard. I've no idea who he has mistaken us for, but luckily he hasn't the guts to attack us or anything.
We also encounter one James A. Grimes here. He offers to sell us the blueprints for a spaceship (called "ether flyers" in this game), but I don't think we need that at the moment.
At the market we can finally buy some food.
MARKET. You must buy food for your party or they will quickly become fatigued. The market cashier asks you which of your characters will pay for the food. He then tells you how many days of food the character can buy with his money, and how much food your party currently has. The food adds no weight to a character or the party, so it is a good idea to buy as much food as you can.
For the sake of LARPing, I buy 10000 days' worth of food.
And this here is, you've guessed it, a pawn shop.
PAWN SHOP. In the pawn shop you can buy or sell any item. To buy an item, select BUY PRODUCTS. You then specify which of your characters will buy the product and which one will receive the product. Then you will be asked what product you want to buy. To sell an item, select SELL PRODUCTS. You then specify which character will sell the product, and which one will receive the money from the transaction. Then, you will be asked what item from your character's inventory will be sold.
After the weapon shop, this is probably the most useful kind of shop around here.
We'll probably need at least some of those items... No way to tell which ones, though. And some armour too. Anyway here's what I bought.
Miss Faith receives a rope, a breast plate, a helmet, and a set of shoulder scales.
ROPE, 100 ft. This has a tensile strength of 300 pounds. Wt: 5 lbs. Price 2/-.
SHOULDER SCALES. Metal epaulets designed to protect the shoulders and neck from downward chopping blows. Wt: 2 Ibs. Price: 2/6.
BREAST PLATE. Solid plate metal protection for the chest and abdomen. Wt: 6 lbs. Price £1.
HELMET. Protection for the head, usually of metal. Wt: 2 lbs. Price £1 2/-.
Judging by the manual, shoulder scales + breast plate + helmet seems to be the best armour combination, so everyone in our party receives just that. Equipping armour is done the same way as equipping a weapon, i.e., with the help of the
Use command.
Miss Bee gets some lockpicks (each takes up a separate inventory space, which is kinda lame), a rope, and a miner's hat.
LAMP, MINER’S SAFETY. A small lamp designed to be worn on the head, usually fueled by carbide and water. A pound of carbide will provide 16 charges, each charge will last two hours. Wt: .3 lbs. Price: 8d.
LOCKPICKS. Tools for opening locks without the proper key, including several picks, skeleton keys, and so on. Wt: Negligible Price: 18/.
Pariah is now carrying a doctor's bag, a shovel, a rope, Conklin's Atlas of the Worlds, and navigation instruments. He's both our doctor and our pilot (even if not a particularly skilled one), after all.
CONKLIN'S ATLAS OF THE WORLDS AND HANDY MANUAL OF USEFUL INFORMATION. A gazetter and atlas of Earth, Mars, Venus, and other worlds in the Solar System, with vital statistics and other information, all in a single handy reference book. Wt: .5 lb. Price: 1/-.
DOCTOR'S BAG AND SUPPLIES. A leather bag containing surgical instruments and supplies, and also a supply of medicines and other materials for the treatment of wounds and sickness. Wt: 10 lbs. Price: £3.
SHOVEL. Tool used in excavating. Wt: 5 lbs. Price: 21-.
NAVIGATION INSTRUMENTS. A sextant, chronometer, compass, and other instruments used in celestial navigation. Wt: 8 lbs. Price: £12.
I have no clue if the atlas and the instruments are going to help us navigate an ether flyer, but well, one can hope.
Finally, Kazgar receives a copy of Edison's Encyclopedia, a set of camping equipment, a lantern, a rope, a shovel, and -- last but not least -- a pack of dynamite.
EDISON'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GENERAL INFORMATION. A tome of useful information about the universe, written by the inventor of the ether flyer. No inventor or scientist can be without this compact volume. Wt: 1 lb. Price: 1/-.
CAMPING OUTFIT. A gentleman needs certain essentials for life, even in the wilderness, and this kit provides them all in a convenient carrying case. It includes a stove, tent, cot, folding stool, cooking pots, dining utensils, toilet requisites, and many other items. Wt: 80 lbs. Price: £2.
LANTERN, CARBIDE. A larger version of the miner's safety lamp. A pound of carbide will provide eight charges, and each charge will provide light for four hours. If spilled, the carbide will not burn, unlike liquid fuels. Wt: 1 lb. Price: 1/-.
DYNAMITE. Invented in 1866 by Nobel, dynamite has largely replaced gunpowder as a common explosive. Dynamite comes in cases, each with 100 half-pound sticks. Dynamite has an explosive power of 4 per pound (2 per stick). Wt: 50 lbs./case Price: £5.
That camping stuff is weighty, isn't it? Sounds indispensable, though. As for the dynamite... But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
There was also some clothing for sale, which I didn't buy:
CLOTHING, FOUL WEATHER. A rubberized hat, overcoat and boots to protect the wearer from wind and rain. Wt: 3 lbs. Price: 8/-to 12/-.
CLOTHING, ROUGH-LIVING. A suit of heavy-duty clothing, including pants, shirt, jacket, boots, hat, and so on, for use by explorers and those who expect to be "roughing it." Wt: 3 lbs. Price: £1.
I wonder if we should acquire that, or is it there for a purely atmospheric purpose? What do you think, Codex? .... Uhm, Codex? Ah, nevermind.
And back to Silbury Hill we go.
It's dark, true, but! We now have a miner's hat.
And voila, there was light.
Funnily enough, we encounter a reporter here. I wonder how she was making her way in complete darkness.
Wait... prophet Kazakhstan?
Really!?
In any case, this is the first dungeon we've come across, so let's see if we can make it through.
We head north through narrow corridors until we stumble upon this dirty male.
No wonder he's dirty, he's an excavator!
This is the farthest room we've been able to make it to, and the way to the left is blocked by a wall, the one the excavator is excavating.
Hmm, how 'bout we place some dynamite there, for scientific purposes? (You can actually see some dynamite placed on the wall in the above screenshot if you look closely.)
Kaboom! I'm enjoying this game already.
What do you think, a set of stairs!
Onwards, in search of Prophet Kazakhstan!! (But we must buy more explosives first.)