Brilliant Lances - Oh dear...

Well, I would like to start with taking my hat off to GDW - I had thought
that they couldn't screw anything up more than they did with the TNE
rulebook, but I was wrong! They managed to excel themselves by some
orders of magnitude with Brilliant Lances (and I hope you are listening
GDW - this is one *very* dissatisfied customer).

I am sure regular readers of this column would have seen the errors that
other people have pointed out about this game, so I won't bother to
point them out. When I first read them, BL was not available in my local
shops (UK), so I took them with a pinch of salt - "sure", I thought,
"there are teething troubles with every game, these are just a few
errata". Oh no - these are just the tip of the iceberg! I knew I was off
to a good start when the box contained a sheet of corrections. It looks
as if they had a correction for just about every ship in the game, and
they still haven't found them all.

The game itself, I think, is definitely overpriced. It is $30, which was
selling at 20 UK pounds here, for what? 80 pages of rules in two
booklets - one of which they couldn't even be bothered to cover in card;
a pad of forms which are overly crowded and complex, and as usual would
have been much cheaper to photocopy from a book; three hex play sheets
(haven't had any of them before (not) - add them to the stack I guess); two
sheets of counters, which although colourful, are not exactly ground
breaking in their design; two player aid cards; and three dice which
must be the worst dice I have ever received in a game - sheesh, even the
six sided dice have SPOTS on!!!!! Oh, the sheet of errata, and a survey
sheet which they really do not want me to fill in - not that I will,
because they can't even be bothered to make that pre-paid.

On to the game - well I haven't play tested it, mainly because I don't
want to - the game does not exactly ooze with welcoming desire to play
it. It looks as if they have bravely forced the combat rules into their
house system, which they may well have succeeded with, but looking
through, I found the rules cramped, and difficult to refer to. For
example, I decided to look up how Meson screens worked, and there is no
entry in the meagre contents table, and the paragraph is only
highlighted with a small piece of slightly bolder text in a chunk which
turns out to be the whole set of rules on special defences.

My more major concern is the design rules, as to be honest, my ship
combat rules when I play tend to be heavily altered - I will rarely, if
ever, bother with plotting the positions of ships etc, and work with an
abstract system - much as MegaTraveller did. This of course makes most
of the box set redundant to me, but however, I had to purchase it
because GDW saw fit not to bother putting the ship design rules in the
main rulebook.

Why, I just do not know. At sixteen pages, they could have easily have
ditched the sample scenarios (which are a waste of space anyway, as any
serious player would have bought the rules book anyway), and put it in
with the rest. Especially as they put in a load of stuff which was meant
to tide us over until BL, but turned out to be just as long anyway!

And, to top it all, the rules are incomplete as well! We get a small
sample of weapons (presumably we have to buy Fire, Fusion and Steel
now), mostly lasers - no indication of Fusion/Plasma weapons, no Hi-tech
(TL16+) weapons, a very small sample of spinal mounts, which must have
been built with some system already available, as the prices are not
plucked out of nowhere - the erratic figures suggest they have been
designed from some sort of table, so why is it not included?
No decent screens, a rehash of the missiles which turns them into flying
lasers (why no explosives as before), etc etc etc. In my opinion they
have *really* screwed up the ship designs big time.

In fact, the only bit which seems to have survived intact from MegaTrav
is the torturous sensor designs - which were the only bit I disliked in
the first place! I *hate* trying to add up measly .003 cubic meters when
everything else is in multiples of cubic meters!

We have such anomalies as no indication of maximum number of turrets (I
presume you could theoretically build a ship with as many turrets as you
could get on the surface area), plus the use of multiple spinal mounts.
Not to mention the changes to drives etc, most of which I don't like.

And the armour! That's a good one. As far as I can make out, with
minimal extra cost, all you have to do is stick 20 cm of armour on a
ship (x28 toughness = armour value of 560!) and you have a ship which
cannot be penetrated by anything apart from meson guns! So you may lose
some antennae, but hey! who cares....

I don't know whether this system will be improved with Fire, Fusion and
Steel, but if it is, it is going to take an extraordinary amount of work
to do so - such as tables detailing how to make all those missing
weapons etc.

I guess BL is playable and workable, but either in its much reduced form
which is definitely not familiar to existing Traveller users, or with an
enormous amount of effort in order to get the thing into a recognizable
shape - hopefully some of this work will be done with FF&S, but then
again probably not.

In either case, there is a lot of work needed just to get rid of all the
errata. I for one won't be bothering - it's off to the shop to get my
money back, as I am not paying 20 pounds for 80 pages of rules.

It's a pity really, because it looks as if they could have made a very
good job of the whole thing. The idea of variable power lasers is
interesting, and could well be expanded to lots and lots of other
weaponry to make a truly variable set of spacecraft, but where are they?
As we can all probably guess, we get all of that in FF&S - but with the
track record they have with TNE so far, they will probably screw that
one up as well.

Sorry GDW. Maybe you'll get it right eventually, but not this time eh?


         _             _           _           "To err is human; to screw-up
 ___  __| |/\       __| |    ____ | \   _         needs the root password."
 \__\ \_   _ \     /  | |   |  _ \| |  | |
        | / \ \ /\/   | |   | | \ \ |  | |           O
    __  | |_/ / \  /| | |   | |_/ / |__| |  __         O               _ _
   |__| |    /  /  \| | |   |  __/|  __  | |__|          o  |\__/|  .~    ~.
        | |\ \ / /\   | |___| |   | |  | |                  /  o `./      .'
        |_| \ \\/  \  |_____| |   |_|  | |                 {o__,   \    {
             \ \    \_|     | | ____   \_|         ____      / .  . )    \
              \_\           \_| \___\ aka Asmodeus \___\     `-` '-' \    }
   ______________                         ____________     .(   _(   )_.'
  /_____________/ [email removed] /___________/     '---.~_ _ _|