ChrisTalbot.com

I pushed myself to finish reading Conspiracy X last night. Overall, my impression is positive. I like the setting. I like the politics of Aegis and the NDD. I like some of the conspiracies that have been worked into it. And I certainly like the idea of cells that basically have to support themselves. The one issue I have with Delta Green (based on my one experience in a PbP in progress) is that budgets for ops tend to have a very high ceiling, whereas Aegis cells don't get a lot of support from their parent cells and have to rely on their own contacts, abilities and resources. So if you want that Big Fucking Gun, you'd damn well better have a way to get it.

The tone of the book seems about right. Very little information about the paranormal or extraterrestrials are given throughout the book. The Greys, Saurians and Atlanteans are mentioned, but no information appears until you get to the very end of the last chapter. Then it offers information, but broken into two pieces -- what Aegis knows and what's really going on. Another nice touch.

The paranormal aspect of the game is something I'm not quite sure about. The idea that hunches, intuition and such are essentially low-level ESP seems a bit odd. I think I can get behind it, though. With enough training, just about anyone could make use of psi powers to an extent; and I can see some of my players really liking that aspect.

However, the paranormal/psi aspect of Conspiracy X is less interesting to me than the extraterrestrials. While there is a nice history of Aegis, the NDD and their contact with the various aliens, I felt like there just wasn't enough information about the aliens themselves. Some of their motives still aren't clear.

My biggest quibble: I don't like it when I'm reading a core book and it tells me to get more information on certain things to go buy a sourcebook. Throughout the book, the author (David Chapman) mentions The Paranormal Sourcebook and The Extraterrestrial Sourcebook several times. In the section about psi and the paranormal, he actually wrote that to get the full rules for psi that readers would have to go buy The Paranormal Sourcebook. This was less in-your-face in the part about the aliens, but considering there's not a whole heck of a lot of information on each of the alien species, it's safe to assume that The Extraterrestrial Sourcebook will contain more detailed information.

Note that I wrote "will contain." Neither of these sourcebooks are currently available. I wouldn't want to bet on their release dates, either. So far, they're not even listed on the Conspiracy X site as being in the pipe.

Oh well. The nice thing about Conspiracy X is the book is written in a way that suggests GMs and players make the game setting their own. I really got the sense that it was expected that GMs would take the idea of conspiracies, the paranormal, psi and aliens secretly living on Earth, and run with it by making up their own ideas, new conspiracies and even new aliens.