From: v116qhth@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu (I'm not evil...I'm just good looking)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc
Subject: Re: Battle Lords of the 23rd Century
Date: 2 Oct 92 15:25:00 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: University at Buffalo
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41

In article <1992Oct1.191938.12873@sbcs.sunysb.edu>, smccauli@csws15.ic.sunysb.edu writes...
> 
>    I believe that someone was asking for a review of Battle Lords of the
>23rd century, in reference to the fact that they were trying to find out
>if the game was any good beyond the designer's opinions.
> 
>	For those of you who don't know what Battle Lords of the 23rd
>Century is:
> 
>	BL23 is a sciencefiction rpg, which is sold by a small company 
>called Optimus Design System located near Buffalo NY.   The name of the
>guy who wrote it is Larry Sims.
>	The game tends to be bulky and dedicates much of its volume to
>character types weapons and yet more weapons.  It's kind of like a palladium
>game in that respect.  Character generation tends to be centered around which
>alien race one pics to be at the beginning of the game.  The races themselves
>tend to fall into fairly standard sterotypes.  You have the noble warrior,
>the psychotic, the basher, the small puny intelligent masters of the known
>universe, the werido, the con man, and of course, one can be a human.  These
>are not the actual names of the aliens, but a fairly good representation for
>them.  This tends to lock people who would rather role play than just
>shoot things into this reather drab character molds.  This is one of the
>weeknesses of the system.  If, however, you like to blow things up then and
>not waste anytime on chracter development then you should definitely look at
>this as an advantage.  There are also a few neat quirks to the character
>generation system such as the fate tables.
>	The combat system trys to be realistic and fast paced.  It does not
>really accomplish either, but can still be fun to play.  As mentioned before
>there are lots of weapons, some of them are bit pseudo-scientific, which
>can be fun to play with.
>	There are also psionics, called matrices.  The system for them tends
>to work fairly well as long as you don't give the characters access to the
>real high matrices where one can destroy an entire solar system with a bad
>dream.
>	For those of you looking for a game with star ships, this is not the
>game because there aren't any rules (yet) for star ships.  Considering this
>is such a tech oriented game I was suprised.
>	The setting for the game is a corrupt future empire run by
>genitically engineered humans and the afore mentioned small intelligent aliens.
>Corporations are the real muscel behind the Alliance, they are presumably
>who the characters work for.  Even though the section dedicated to the
>setting is small compaired with the rest of the book it does give a good
>job of at least giving you the flavor of the setting.
> 
> 
>	Final score: The game is ok.
> 
>Sean McCauliff

  The game is not only for shoot'em up gamers. The races are all fairly well
detailed and just because the first supplement was the weapons manuel is mostly
because the shoot'em up gamer is very abundant and VISIONARYIES is one of
the up coming books that is devoted soley to the role-playing gamer.
VISIONARYIES is already partialy written and will have so much info
on the races and role=playing that your head will spin.

				Psycho (company liason)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc