CEE: The Babylon Project

[Kersus]

Has anyone here had experience with the original B5 RPG from CEE?

K

 

[Greg Smith]

It was something of an oddity.

It was set before the series egan, between B4 and B5. It lacked any information on the events of the show, just had background on the races and so on. There were several sections of texts, that said something like: "Rangers are really cool. But the players can't play them." "The Shadows are really interesting and mysterious. But the players can't learn about them."

There was no real problems with the rules. Character generation left a lot to the player, you would generate race, stats and skills, it was up to the player to decide exactly who and what the character was.

The licence CEE had was obviously somewhat restrictive, because there were no pictures of the cast (with the exception of the front of the Earthforce book). Pictures from the show were few and far between.

The introductory scenario in the rule book centres around discovering who is behind the destruction of Babylon 3 (IIRC).

The Earthforce book had a space combat system based on Full Thrust. The counters for this were left out of the book!

 

[lastbesthope]

Pretty much whatGreg said, though it was possible to send off or the counters, I have them, I bought the game when it came out (I wasn't a gamer, I just loved B5 that much).

If you email me I can scan them for you and send you the counters, let me know your preferred file format.

LBH

 

[Greg Smith]

I did get the counters off the net. They aren't very good though.

 

[Traveller-61]

Hmm just to add a few things - the dice system was unusual to say the least (roll 2d6 and subtract from each other - add the result to your stat+skill score [there was something else but I have forgotten it]); and the Earthforce source book was not only missing the counters but a lot of the ship diagrams were missing stuff too; and to cap it all the picture of General Franklin ends up being used for half the other EF Chiefs of Staff, male and female :shock:

That said the ship combat really captured the flavour of B5 and was a lot simpler to play than B5Wars; the only other B5 game around at the time.

The GM screen errata corrected a lot of the problems and added some new ships and foes. It is a pity that the game died - there were at least two other books planned but never saw print.

DW

 

[koranith]

I picked up the game as soon as I saw it in my LGS many moons ago. I never had the chance to play it though, and the rules were difficult to follow w/o actually going through the motions. Between the two books it had some nice info about the station and ships, but other than that they're just collectors items for me.

 

[Kersus]

While I loved B5, finding other RPGers who knew much about it was difficult. I taped the first 4 seasons on VHS so I guess I should loan them out. I picked the 5th up on DVD. It seems like a game where the GM AND player's need to be fans.

So, with the CEE version of the game, do you think there are any books from the current version that could complement it if someone was going to use it's system of rules instead, or are the two games so different it would be too much trouble?

K

 

[lastbesthope]

Scans on the way Kersus.

The rules are different enough that conversion (Must not rant about converting B5 rules) would be tricky at best.

Lots of the bhooks have lots of fluff though.

LBH

 

[talonspiritcat]

My copy came with counters....



Ahh...i remember this game. We spent hours building characters and everyone died in the first gaming session when we were shot during a brawl in some bar. A game where you wished to avoid combat...how odd.



The second game was better...I was a Centauri telepath working with some Earthers who were marooned and then rescued by Narns. That GM had a nasty sense of humour.

 

[Golan2072]

I still have this game, though I haven't played it for a decade or so. Some of the flavor text was nice, as were the advice on campaign-building, but the rule system was clunky at best - chargen was interesting but unclear at times, mechanics were over-complex, and combat was quite complicated. Psi rules were extremely unclear. There were almost no ship-relevant rules in the corebook, and, as was mentioned above, the entire thing was set in the first season or before it - not that it stood in the way of me (as the GM) including Shadows, Drakh and Zener in quite a high dosage in the actual game...

Despite this load of problems, we had a blast with it - we misread the rules, combat was painfully annoying, but once we get over it (and once I winged up most of the stuff not covered by the rules) we really enjoyed ourselves.