Game: Master Plan – Starships One
Publisher: UKG Publishing
Series: generic
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 3rd, October 2004
Reviewer’s Rating: 7/10 [ Good ]
Total Score: 7
Average Score: 7.00
I think one of the run away successes in the PDF RPG industry is the busy and high quality cartography market. Publishers like 0one and Darkfuries produce maps for your miniatures. I remember when paper cartography products were a priceless paradox. They were barely above disposable in terms of use but frighteningly expensive and therefore rare because they didn’t sell. It just wasn’t commercially viable to produce paper packs of coloured square (or hex) maps. The PDF RPG world changed this. On the strength Starships One I’m happy to add UKG Publishing to the list of decent PDF map publishers.
It’s not yet a too crowded marketplace. Besides, UKG’s style is different from the other offerings I’ve seen before. The production is different; the product is a combination of PDF documents and HTML files (web pages). You use the web pages to navigate between PDF files and the PDF files contain the coloured maps for printing. There’s an unexpected catch here. If you’ve downloaded the infamous “Service Patch 2 (SP2)” from Microsoft then Internet Explorer will intercept most of the clicks you make on the index and you’ll have to confirm you’re happy for the PDF file to open. This is terribly unfair on UKG Publishing, it’s not something they could have expected and can be very annoying. However you can open each PDF individually directly from the product folder anyway and I’m not going to let the technical gremlins interfere with the review.
Starships One is a set of floor plans for space ships. That’s brand new territory as far as I know. I don’t think anyone else has done that yet. UKG give you an overview of the whole spaceship design – this is for your minds eye and for putting the pieces together, really, as the scale is probably too small to be used effectively with minis. Unlike other publishers UKG include repeats in their PDF. In other words if there are eight identical sleeping quarters in the starship then there are eight identical tile plans for them. Okay, the downside to this approach is obvious; it’s terribly inefficient. The upside is that it’s easy, you don’t have to fuss around printing multiple copies of some pages and single copies of others nor do you have to wrestle with the guilt versus effort of finding a good colour photocopier.
There’s more than one starship floorplan in Starships One. As the name implies there are maps for many starships (and yes, there is a Starships Two). There’s a dropship in colour and grescale and there’s a passenger shuttle in colour and greyscale. Each of these two just have one PDF page for their floor plans. The Lady Royale is a medium passenger liner, available in colour and greyscale and which has an associated 29-paged PDF. There’s an Outrider Class Scout, also in colour and greyscale, and which has 6 PDF pages of maps. We’re at a decent sized PDF already and at the good value mark for electronic cartography for the US $8 product. It gets better though. Starships One has the Star Huntress, an Orion Class Carrier, in colour and greyscale and with an impressive 64-paged PDF collection of floor plans! Add in a Small Freighter, also in colour and greyscale, with 10 PDF pages and you’ve a giant product for only $8.
Frankly if you’re running a space adventure and foresee the need for floor plans then there’s very little reason not to pick up Starships One. There quality here is good but shy of some of the superb fantasy floor plans I’ve seen. The quantity of floor plans here is unchallenged. That’s important; you need enough floor plans before you can safely use them at all. I think it’s incredibly awkward just to use floor plans for one specific fight in your campaign – not because it marks that fight as significant but because it automatically downplays any melee that doesn’t involve the floor plans. Players can suss that the arch-villain isn’t actually going to be finally confronted in a melee if the GM doesn’t have floor plans ready for the encounter and he uses floor plans for every important fight. There’s no danger of this happening with Starships Ones. There are plenty of floor plans. The GM, of course, can use the individual starship bits in the 100 or so PDF pages here to build starships which aren’t in the main index. The very nature of “in ship” fights is different too; the same floor plan can be used whenever the aliens invade the PCs’ starship and the same set should be used whenever the players raid a Small Freighter.
I think UKG’s main strength is their hefty and diverse catalogue. You have PDFs for almost every scenario. On top of this the quality of the cartography is better than most could manage themselves. Good stuff.
