KickStarter Crying Suns - FTL-like tactical space roguelite set in Dune-inspired universe

[ArchAngel]

By my experience of the last demo this is a small and fairly simple game but still fun.

 

[Infinitron]

Accepted by GOG: https://af.gog.com/game/crying_suns?as=1649904300

 

[normie]

from September 5, A new (and longer) demo version

Greetings Crying Suns fans,

Here comes the last update before the launch (September 19th).

WIth this new demo, you will enjoy improvements :

• The demo now ends before the sector 2 boss instead of before sector 1!
• New weapons, squadrons from MK I to MK IV and new officers abilities and auxiliary systems have been added.
• New feedbacks, visual cues and improvements on all the major interfaces (Displaying remaining times, status, notifications etc.) have been implemented.
• And, as usual, A LOT of other features, game balancing and bugfix

This new (longer) demo is still available in 6 different languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Russian and Simplified Chinese).

Don't forget to join our Discord server

… to discuss with other players and the development team. Click here to join us!

Enjoy!

The Crying Suns development team

 

[Life of the Party]

Crying Suns Review: Dark Space Rogue-lite.

Crying Suns is a tactical space rogue-lite inspired by games such as FTL. It was developed by Alt Shift. It is available on Humble Bundle and Steam. The Humble link is a referral, I get a small commission if you purchase the game through it. Joseph Pugh conducted this review.

Crying Suns Overview

Crying Suns is a tactical and tough game. It features difficulty settings, but its nature as a rogue-lite means you can expect to fail quite a bit. The game separate’s itself from those that inspire it by weaving a deep story-line and a ton of lore into its randomly generated chaos. Be warned that Crying Suns is a dark game. While none of it is shown in graphic detail, it explores themes such as sex slaves, breeder stations and child suicide bombers. It is a mature game in spite of its visual style.

You play as Admiral Idaho, or more accurately, one of several clones. Considered one of the greatest Admiral’s to exist, it is up to you to explore a now ravaged empire. You have to figure out what happened and see if you can fix it. Pirates and scrappers stand in your way and the always present need for fuel.

You will jump from sector to sector, exploring anomalies, interacting with random events and battling enemies. All while gathering scrap, new weapons, and squadrons. You must press forward as the systems occupants become more aware of you the longer you dawdle. Stay in one place for too long and you will need to fight off a powerful attacker. Running out of fuel is an easy way to end your run.

Crying Suns Story

Crying Suns is a game that has an unexpected amount of dialogue and often allows you the chance to ask questions and learn more about the various aspects of its setting. Most of it isn’t required to actually play the game, but the lore is fascinating regardless.

The OMNIs, machines that were integral to humankind’s survival, shut down. Humankind’s reliance on OMNIs was so great, that events quickly spiraled out of control. Accompanied by one such OMNI named Kaliban, you must investigate what happened and see if you can reactivate the OMNIs once again.

Many random events will allow you to dig deeper into the lore and story in addition to providing gameplay elements. Systems and the events contained within them are randomly generated, so you never know what you will encounter. Some story beats are set in stone, however, such as meeting the infamous Mother. A character very reminiscent of the Mad Max villain, Immortan Joe. In fact, the entire scrapper faction features several parallels to the War Boys, whether intentional or not.

Rogue-Lite

When you eat space dust, you start again. Admiral Idaho and his core crew are once again cloned. You choose a ship, your starting officers and you start again. The officers are randomly generated. However, through certain events, you can unlock special officers. From then on they can always be chosen.

The game is split into several chapters. Each chapter unlocks a new ship that you can choose to use in a later run. Every system is a set of branching paths, each containing a solar system. Solar systems contain several points of interest. These can range from battles, stations where you can repair your ship and squadrons, heal officers or purchase goods and personnel.

Random events are also present. Usually denoted as an anomaly, they can be positive or negative. You won’t know which until you explore it. Many events present you with a choice, and at times having an officer with certain skills on your ship can influence that choice.

Any of these encounters can reward you with new squadrons, weapons, crew or scrap. Scrap can be used to purchase goods, or it can be spent to upgrade aspects of your ship. Adding additional hanger bays or weapon slots can increase your offensive capability, but you may also add more hull or scanner upgrades. Fuel gathering is particularly important. The most common way to acquire fuel is by gathering it from a star in each system. The amount you get is usually low and upgrading your ability to obtain it is exceptionally important.

Crying Suns Gameplay

Crying Suns is very risk versus reward oriented. Do you risk your fuel exploring as much as possible? Or move forward before your pursuers can catch up. Hitting a big reward can help you with tougher fights that you will encounter later in the game. If you make a bad call, you may end up worse for wear instead.

One type of activity you can take part in are expeditions. If your scanner picks up something valuable on a planet, you can send an officer and platoon of commandos down to retrieve it. The success or failure is based on the skills of the officer and the number of commandos you send down. The degree of success and failure can vary. It is possible to obtain the loot, but lose several commandos for example.

The expeditions are visually neat. You watch a scanner as your squad moves in and you get little pop-ups detailing what skills are being used. From a game-play perspective, expeditions are disappointing. They lack interactivity, you choose who to send then watch things happen. Success or failure is entirely based on who you chose and you simply witness the results rather than take part.

Ship battles are the meat of the tactical game. They are in real-time and are played on a hexagonal grid with each battleship facing each other on opposite ends. It is here that your weapons and squadrons come into play. The focus is on the latter, the battleship is important but plays a supporting role to your squadrons. You summon and control your squadrons on the field directly.

There is a very rock, paper, scissors method to this. Fighters deal extra damage against drones, frigates wreck fighters and drones eat up frigates. This might seem shallow, but it is offset by the additional subsets of each type that you can obtain. Such as a fighter that can cloak or drones that explode upon death. Other ship types exist as well, such as long-range cruisers that take more damage up close.

When you combine this with the varied environmental hazards, battleship weapons, and officer abilities, it actually becomes quite intense. If a squadron is destroyed, they are slowly rebuilt but have less health until you can repair them at a station. You can attack the hull, squadron bays or weapons of a battleship. Each one does damage to the ship itself but they also generate heat on each portion. If a section gets too hot, its actions become delayed until it is fixed up.

The combat becomes a war of attrition, directing squads to engage one another, pinging the enemy battleship and retreating to defend your own. All while using weaponry on the ships themselves and navigating any hazards on the grid. If you get overwhelmed, you can activate a tactical pause at any time and still give orders. It’s thoughtful and a ton of fun to play.

Verdict

Crying Suns manages to combine interesting lore, a storyline, tactical combat and an FTL inspired branching path of random events in a pretty solid package. It has a few issues, the dark themes might turn off those who weren’t prepared for them. The planetary expeditions are disappointing and for a rogue-lite, there isn’t much variation in how you start a new run.

The world is interesting, the battle system is well done, tactical and fun. You have a lot of choices to make as you play, what to upgrade, how much to explore and how to handle events. Crying Suns takes a lot of inspiration from FTL, but twists the idea into its own unique set of game-play mechanics that set it apart.

If you like rogue-lites and strategy, Crying Suns is easy to recommend. It’s a solid strategy title and hits most of the notes it was trying to sing with success. What little problems I have with the game weren’t at all enough to take away from my overall enjoyment.

Pros

• Great tactical combat.
• Variety of unlockable ships and special officers.
• Difficulty settings present.
• Tons of random events and player choice.
• Interesting storyline and lore, if dark at times.

Cons

• The lack of interactivity in planet expeditions is disappointing.
• Not too much choice at the start of each run despite its rogue-lite nature.

https://gideonsgaming.com/2019/09/19/crying-suns-review-dark-space-rogue-lite/

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

1st time when I played a demo and thought: "aren't you showing too much of the game?"
Makes me wonder if full game has really that much additional content.

Demo itself is pretty impressive and gameplay and presentation (even those annoying sounds that games insists on playing while filling speech bubbles can be turned off) is good enough, though I think that at some point I will get tired of those little animations that game plays at every opportunity.

I'll probably choose between this and Shortest Trip to Earth with a coin toss.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

artsy, in the worst meaning possible. gets repetitive extremely fast, battles are a chore of repetitions more than anything.
the author wanted to tell a story (probably a pretty banal one) but didn't know how to write a novel, so he thought it'd have been a great idea to put down some trite dialogues and divide them with hours of bad, mobile level videogaming.

 

[Van-d-all]

Game is a fairly fun FTL clone but with a pretty low replayability. Adds some banal text based choice events that get repetitive quite fast. Consecutive replays change somewhat with "chapters" going from 1 to 9 (if you finish it) & progressing the overall story, but it's nothing to write home about. The only really interactive game part (outside of resource management) is a simple RTWP combat on hex grid, but the only thing to do here is either shuffling squadrons with rock/paper/scissors mechanics or shooting capital weapons so it falls really short in comparison to FTL thus becoming a chore quite fast. Got me bored in under 4h.

 

[Riso]

Disappointing but good to know someone else took the bullet.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

Managed to finish it, was ok, though I would say too expensive for what it was. Combat gets repetitve quickly, story is just so-so. Reply value is practically nil, the difference between ships is just the various upgrade levels you can have, no actual change in mechanics. Officers are also disappointment, the "unique" ones don't really add anything story wise, just increase your chances in expeditions as they have 3 skills vs. 2 of normal ones.

 

[thesecret1]

I found the game quite easy and disappointing in content compared to FTL. The only innovation worth mentioning is the combat, but everything else is downgraded and simplified (no ship management? Really?). I don't really get what's the point of making a clone of something, if you're going to be so much worse than the thing you're cloning. I recommend not wasting time with it, it'll just make you wish you were playing FTL instead.

 

[Binky]

It's basically the same thing as the demo. 3 sectors per chapter, a boss at the end of sector 1 and 2, and a boss ship on steroids at the end of sector 3. You beat the chapter, you start from scratch and play the next one. Rinse and repeat. It's not hard. You map out your route to have five jumps and as much of land missions as possible, and you'll have all the scrap and fuel you'll ever need. Only the last fight gave me a bit of trouble because you have to fight three boss ships one after another.

Story had me intrigued enough to play it to the end. The atmosphere is superb. Too bad, I was expecting much more.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

k.
I'm going to buy Shortest Trip to Earth instead and earmark this for inevitable sale.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

you can happily skip that other too. it's just a worse, much worse, ftl.

 

[ebPD8PePfC]

I should have read this thread before playing... yeah, it's not good.
The combat is extremely shallow, and ends up with you and the enemy trading dps in extremely long combat. Both motherships send small ships at each other. The small ships skirmish, and the winner is based on dps and rock-paper-scissor. Those that remain get destroyed by the mothership's weapons. The few that survive get to damage the enemy mothership a bit. Than all small ships revive (10-15 seconds), destroy the enemy ships that attack the mothership, and the fight effectively restarts. This cycle happens once or twice in regular combat where you dominate the enemy, and 5-10 times in boss fights. But it's a cycle. There's no meaningful difference between cycle 2 and cycle 8.
There's close to zero decision making, the one with the better numbers win, but it takes way way too long.
I would remove ships reviving, add special abilities to all the small ships (those exist, but they are rare), and change mothership weapons to deal CC instead of dps. This way combat would be less reliant on dps, different fleets would be way more different since they would differ in abilities, and weapons wouldn't be just another form of dps. Combat would also resolve faster since units wouldn't revive every 15 seconds.

The game out of combat isn't any better. There aren't many decisions to make, you usually have the relevant skills to pass a skill check or you don't. There are some building considerations to be made, which is nice, but those relate to optimizing the numbers, so they don't change from game to game. You should always optimize the numbers.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

ads are getting smarter.

 

[MRY]

I've played it a bit -- since the devs told me they were inspired by Primordia, I felt obliged to -- and I like it. I'm not as good at games as others in the thread, so even on Normal difficulty, I find it fairly challenging. (I haven't yet won the first Chapter.)

Because years and years ago (2006, I think?) I designed my own "rogue-like space opera with events" game (Star Captain), I find CS quite interesting because it solved many of the problems that bedeviled me with Star Captain. The biggest difference is that it tells a lot of the story in a very stylized way. A good example of this is the ground missions. These episodes are conveys without any text at all, using a neat map, a series of skill-related obstacles, and some very simple artwork. Star Captain (which eventually morphed into Fallen Gods) used painted illustrations and heavy text for events. The result was that ground missions became extremely cost-intensive to create, and perhaps not much fun. Ground missions in CS could use, IMO, just a hint more flavor text to lend narrative to what's going on (even a prompt like, "So-and-so comes across a landmine" before the Demolitions check or whatever), but even without it, I think they're fun, evocative, and cheap to create from a design standpoint. I also thought that the game cleverly moved the dialogues away from Captain -> Crew to Captain -> Caliban, which allows for a streamlined structure there, too.

I think the fleet combat is quite fun, and reasonably well balanced. It suffers from the ubiquitous asymmetry of all PvE -- the enemy only cares about winning this one fight, you care about winning the whole game, so enemies don't try to preserve the smaller ships, while you have to -- but the way the enemy can surrender helps that asymmetry at least a little bit.

Visuals are generally very strong, I thought. Some of the effects get tedious quickly, though: the wormhole every time you change systems, the Mass-Effect probe drop every ground mission, etc. Still, not such a big deal overall.

Finally, I think the game falls a bit short thematically. Like any reasonable person, I love the Emperor of the Fading Suns / Dune / Dan Simmons pastiche. But something felt a bit off. The player is ostensibly the greatest admiral the Empire ever had (or his clone, at any rate), piloting an intact capital ship of the Old Empire before technology collapsed, crewed by imperial space marines cloned from the best gene seeds, and assisted by the only still-functional AI. Yet none of that seems to matter much. The AI doesn't create any powerful differential (as you would expect it to), our ship looks and functions just like the run-down scrap piles we're fighting against, the caliber of the marines is seldom referenced in the events (though I suppose you can infer their significance from their small number), etc. I'm not sure the game would be more fun if your ship were sleek and wildly outclassed enemies (it would probably be less fun), but that just suggests to me that a somewhat different narrative frame would've been better.

 

[ArchAngel]

Finally, I think the game falls a bit short thematically. Like any reasonable person, I love the Emperor of the Fading Suns / Dune / Dan Simmons pastiche. But something felt a bit off. The player is ostensibly the greatest admiral the Empire ever had (or his clone, at any rate), piloting an intact capital ship of the Old Empire before technology collapsed, crewed by imperial space marines cloned from the best gene seeds, and assisted by the only still-functional AI. Yet none of that seems to matter much. The AI doesn't create any powerful differential (as you would expect it to), our ship looks and functions just like the run-down scrap piles we're fighting against, the caliber of the marines is seldom referenced in the events (though I suppose you can infer their significance from their small number), etc. I'm not sure the game would be more fun if your ship were sleek and wildly outclassed enemies (it would probably be less fun), but that just suggests to me that a somewhat different narrative frame would've been better.

Take into account that world/galaxy moved on while you were "asleep". What you face is same technology you had at that base + all the improvements added in the meantime. Only because it is a post apocalyptic world is why the opposite is not happening, you facing much improved and advanced enemies that you got no chance against.

 

[MRY]

Take into account that world/galaxy moved on while you were "asleep". What you face is same technology you had at that base + all the improvements added in the meantime. Only because it is a post apocalyptic world is why the opposite is not happening, you facing much improved and advanced enemies that you got no chance against.

To be clear, we're dealing with a make-believe story where nothing is (or needs to be) realistic, so your explanation is fine, I guess. From my perspective, though, the "elite soldiers have survived the apocalypse with pre-apocalyptic tech" is a very well established trope in both sci-fi generally and space opera specifically, and it entails certain follow-on expectations that Crying Suns doesn't deliver on. Instead, IMO, Crying Suns (from a gameplay standpoint) is much more like Homeworld Catacylsm or Star Control II's set up, where you're starting with what amounts to a crappy cargo vessel that slowly gets upgraded into a viable warship. I would've used that trope explicitly, and said that Gehenna simply doesn't have warships, it has cargo vessels designed to bring resuscitated clones back to core Imperial space, but since there is no core Imperial space anymore, the best Kaliban can do is jury-rig it one of those into a warship. "You should take every opportunity you can to upgrade this into a fit fighting vessel, Admiral." Etc.

 

[ArchAngel]

Or you can explain it by it only having base version of Imperial warship and upgrades you do are based on its max capability. As you said, it is a cloning facility, not a military space shipyard. For it to be fully equipped it needs access to scrap that is not available to that facility. I don't see anything wrong with it. What is more wrong is that it has an unlimited amount of such warships and Calibans so you can start over :D
Why only send one? Awaken 10 of them and conquer back the galaxy.

 

[MRY]

The infinite supply of Kalibans did trouble me.

I'm about to finish the first Chapter. I'm not sure I'll go much farther. At this point I've gotten reasonably good at the game, but it just doesn't seem much fun.

First, something is really off on the combat. It's hard to put my finger on it, but I think the problem is that the difficulty is generally too low. 90% of the fights I've had, I win without suffering any losses at all; that is true even for anomaly combat. When I do suffer a loss, it's usually a squad getting wrecked. And that often happens because something occurs that I can't react to. It's not that my forces got ground down, or I was being too bold (maybe?). More just like, their capital ship happened to shoot one of my squads just before I won the fight and blew it up. Or reinforcements randomly teleported in and they were all rocks to my scissor and I couldn't get my scissor back to the ship in time. But then, occasionally, you get into a fight where suddenly you are overwhelmed and either lose outright or suffer massive damage; and there's no way to repair that damage without happenstantially hitting a base where you can repair. In other words, what doesn't happen in combat is a sense of increasing despair (as your ship is slowly worn out by attrition) or increasing power (as you level up). It's more just like a game of Russian roulette.

Second, unlike in FTL -- a game I liked but didn't love -- the upgrades feel super lame. My recollection of FTL was that everything was absurdly awesome in a System Shock 2 like way -- you wanted to be able to get every upgrade because they'd let you do something really cool, but you can't afford every upgrade. You get some great item, but you can't use it because you don't have the prerequisites. The chance to use those items, unlock those skills, is really exciting. By contrast, in Crying Suns, only two upgrades are actually fun -- adding more squad bays and, to a lesser extent, adding more guns. And they aren't that fun. The other things are all extremely boring (more HP bars! more HP points in your HP bars! very slight chance of getting more fuel from suns!). It's all very unthrilling. And the weapons all seem eccentric and kind of lame. I guess a weapon that hits everything in an X shape would be useful in rare instances, but it's not something I'm that excited to get. All of the area-effect weapons, while situationally useful when your squads are overwhelmed, nevertheless feel like losers' weapons, not like they are giving you a fun tactical edge in dominating your foe. Some of the special-effect weapons are, like the Grease spell in AD&D, perfectly valid tactically, but again aren't remotely as fun as the special effect weapons in FTL.

Third, the events retain the "if you have the relevant key, you win" aspect of FTL, which I did not care for, and largely boil down to "guess which door is better" without any particular clues. The events don't offer much chance to make cost-benefit decisions like "trade 4 commandos for 50 scrap" or "trade a squad for weapon" or whatnot. They aren't even gambling options, usually -- instead, once you've done an event, you know that Door 1 is bad, Door 2 is good, every time.

Fourth, I find the setting a bit too bleak. Obviously, this is a YMMV thing, and in many respects the setting is window-dressing and by design somewhat comical, but even compared to WH40, Battlestar Galactica, and other nominally "dark" space opera settings, something feels off here. In WH40k, the Empire is dystopian, but the forces it's fighting against are generally much worse, and in any event, the Empire hasn't yet fallen. BSG, humanity has fallen, but humanity was basically delightful and you want them to reestablish themselves, and, as in WH40k, they're fighting against inhuman monsters so you have to root for the home team. But Crying Suns is set up as basically a dystopian Empire that clearly sowed the seeds of its own destruction with evil AI has fallen and now everything is Mad Max. What's the point? You're not going to reestablish the Empire (instead, it certainly seems like I'd be establishing a dictatorship of Kaliban), but even if you did, the Empire sucked to begin with.

Very dark science fiction can be good, but generally it is about the protagonist's survival instinct. Here, the cloning premise (reinforced by gameplay) is that your life is ultimately irrelevant. So even that aspect is eliminated. And I don't think "very dark" is the right take for space opera. Space opera is at its best when it's about cheering for noble humanity in the face of insuperable odds, about beautiful discoveries and forging alien alliances against the greater evil, etc. CS doesn't really have that going for it. And, honestly, grimdark stuff doesn't even feel edgy to me any more, it feels mainstream and pandering.

If anything, the game should've made Kaliban the protagonist. I think that would've helped with a variety of things.

(Incidentally, despite these flaws, the game is obviously super impressive. Great visuals, some really great design ideas, very positive reaction from most players, etc.)

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

MRY there are some twists in the further chapter that might make the story better for you. Without spoiling too much, it could actually end up ok-ish. Since they drawn inspiration from Dune, think Leto II not Paul.

 

[MRY]

OWhat is more wrong is that it has an unlimited amount of such warships and Calibans so you can start over :D

At the end of the first chapter, Kaliban says there are lots of Kalibans on Gehenna, so that at least sort of answers that.

 

[Galdred]

The infinite supply of Kalibans did trouble me.

I'm about to finish the first Chapter. I'm not sure I'll go much farther. At this point I've gotten reasonably good at the game, but it just doesn't seem much fun.

First, something is really off on the combat. It's hard to put my finger on it, but I think the problem is that the difficulty is generally too low. 90% of the fights I've had, I win without suffering any losses at all; that is true even for anomaly combat. When I do suffer a loss, it's usually a squad getting wrecked. And that often happens because something occurs that I can't react to. It's not that my forces got ground down, or I was being too bold (maybe?). More just like, their capital ship happened to shoot one of my squads just before I won the fight and blew it up. Or reinforcements randomly teleported in and they were all rocks to my scissor and I couldn't get my scissor back to the ship in time. But then, occasionally, you get into a fight where suddenly you are overwhelmed and either lose outright or suffer massive damage; and there's no way to repair that damage without happenstantially hitting a base where you can repair. In other words, what doesn't happen in combat is a sense of increasing despair (as your ship is slowly worn out by attrition) or increasing power (as you level up). It's more just like a game of Russian roulette.

Second, unlike in FTL -- a game I liked but didn't love -- the upgrades feel super lame. My recollection of FTL was that everything was absurdly awesome in a System Shock 2 like way -- you wanted to be able to get every upgrade because they'd let you do something really cool, but you can't afford every upgrade. You get some great item, but you can't use it because you don't have the prerequisites. The chance to use those items, unlock those skills, is really exciting. By contrast, in Crying Suns, only two upgrades are actually fun -- adding more squad bays and, to a lesser extent, adding more guns. And they aren't that fun. The other things are all extremely boring (more HP bars! more HP points in your HP bars! very slight chance of getting more fuel from suns!). It's all very unthrilling. And the weapons all seem eccentric and kind of lame. I guess a weapon that hits everything in an X shape would be useful in rare instances, but it's not something I'm that excited to get. All of the area-effect weapons, while situationally useful when your squads are overwhelmed, nevertheless feel like losers' weapons, not like they are giving you a fun tactical edge in dominating your foe. Some of the special-effect weapons are, like the Grease spell in AD&D, perfectly valid tactically, but again aren't remotely as fun as the special effect weapons in FTL.

Third, the events retain the "if you have the relevant key, you win" aspect of FTL, which I did not care for, and largely boil down to "guess which door is better" without any particular clues. The events don't offer much chance to make cost-benefit decisions like "trade 4 commandos for 50 scrap" or "trade a squad for weapon" or whatnot. They aren't even gambling options, usually -- instead, once you've done an event, you know that Door 1 is bad, Door 2 is good, every time.

I finished the demo, but I am unsure about getting the whole game.
To me, the combat feels too much like: fight X waves of opponents, then grind down the enemy ship.
You don't have any way to alter the enemy capacities (unlike in FTL, where you could focus on disabling their defenses or offence, or whatever else you neeed).
I ended up parking my squad near my ship so that it would be faster to retrieve and deploy a new one, and wait until there is no enemy wave left to get to their ship (it also makes it much easier to use corvettes as you only need to block 2 tiles).

I wholeheartedly agree about the events (Mechanicus did the same, but even worse, as the best door is picked randomly each time you choose...).
Which games do you think had good COYA events?
The ones I can think of are usually non RPG (Crusader Kings and Field of Glory Empires have events where you mostly choose on which area to focus, or on tradeoffs to make, even if there can be some randomness in the outcome, it never feels like guessing what the designer thought should be the best option).
Maybe King Arthur the RPG wargame had good ones too but I played it so long ago that I cannot remember.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Which games do you think had good COYA events?

I liked how Renowned Explorers handled those with skillchecks, specific skills and hidden perks that characters had.