I've got a copy of FTL:2448 and here's the nutshell review. It's got lots
of tables for everything from poison to learning a new language, but
not much else. The planet generation tables are quite detailed, and
Traveller players might be interested in some of the stuff as source
material for their campaigns (e.g. the alien races) but there's not
really enough 'meat' to make an independent game. Most of the tables
cover the sorts of things a DM just improvises during play, so I found
very little useful stuff in it.
However, another game by the same guy--FRINGEWORTHY--is worth getting.
Portals to alternate universes have been found on present day Earth, and
explorers are needed. The catch is that only 1 out of every million people
has some unknown quality that allows them to pass through to the other worlds.
Since this quality is distributed randomly throughout the population, your
character can be from any walk of life (banker/thief/spy/aborigine/etc.)
The hard part of Fringeworthy is designing internally consistent parallel
universes for the players to explore. But it's a decent game otherwise.
Martin Snow
[email removed]