Author Topic: Review of Abandon All Hope  (Read 1438 times)

Offline Nanshork

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Review of Abandon All Hope
« on: May 27, 2021, 07:16:40 PM »


Okay, this one is going to be a little different because this is one of my weird obscure games that is hard for me to describe in bits of pieces which is why this review is happening.  I have read it (although I haven't done a deep dive into how balanced the game is, my expectation is not super balanced).

Abandon All Hope is a weird indie action/horror RPG written in 2010 by a guy with a terrible website design.  The whole product catalog consists of the core rulebook, a 6 book adventure path, and a choose-your-own-adventure style book that is designed as an alternative to the normal character creation system (you run each player through it individually before the actual game starts or have them run through it themselves) which serves as an introduction to the setting and an alternative starting point to the adventure path (and the selections the characters make determine all of their stats/etc.

Buckle in, this is going to get weird.  I'm going to get more detailed than I normally do.

 - Chapter 1: History
 - Chapter 2: Characters
 - Chapter 3: Contraband
 - Chapter 4: Gangs
 - Chapter 5: Combat
 - Chapter 6: Warden Only!
 - Chapter 7: Demons
 - Chapter 8: Other Threats

If you didn't notice, we have contraband, gangs, a warden, and demons.  I describe this game as "Space Prison in a Hell Dimension".


Chapter 1: History

Right off we're told that this is a horror game with strong sci-fi themes (I remember weak sci-fi themes so we'll see) with a GM (called the Warden) and it features mature themes such as psychological terror, insanity, extra-dimensional horror, and survival.  This game is not for all groups.

How's this for a backdrop: "Players take on the role of prisoners in the far future, all of whom are condemned to serve life sentences aboard a megalithich starship on an automated, circuitous route on the frontier of known space".

Okay, here's the deal.  Humans did a lot of warring with each other and eventually became unified as one empire which includes both Earth and some fledgling colonies because we were probably going to kill each other off if we didn't unify.  Total disarmament of everyone was the goal, pure pacifism so we'd stop being evil little shits.

Since we're never having war again, everyone who ever fought in a war was put into re-education camps so they don't taint other people.  This included a lot of major psychological analysis of everyone to see if we could find out who is pre-disposed towards violence.  The culmination of this is the "Ludovico Gauges" (named after the drug-aversion therapy the Ludovico Technique) which measures the human psyche in the fields of despair, guilt, and insanity which are believed to be the causes of violence.  Therefore if you're mentally capable of violence you are now a bad bad person.

This caught on like wildfire, both as a concept and as something that the government should do something about.  The answer was to build the biggest self-supporting/self-sufficient colony ship ever conceived of and just put everyone on it because Australia was already full.  With all the bad people gone, nothing bad can happen on Earth right?  (We don't actually care about the people left on Earth, they're not part of the game.)  Of course, this is the future so the staff are all robots.

To give you a sense of scale, the primary prison module is almost three miles long and consists of five hundred levels containing over ten million cells and dormitories with food dispensaries and farms and gyms and infirmaries and everything else that your normal self-sustaining prison ship needs.  And everything is overseen by an AI run in computers bigger than a city block.

It was sent off into space and disappeared and basically nobody on Earth cared.  What happened?  It entered a hell dimension.  The how's and why's aren't really important, it's not like the players are astrophysicists who can figure out what is going on and fix it anyway.  Oh, and this fucked up the ship both structurally and electronically. Millions of people died as this happened (and you can experience it happening if you play through the adventure path).


Chapter 2: Characters

This is a character creation system involving random tables (although the character creation system can't kill you and you can't get three lifetime's worth of jobs to gain a bunch of attribute points from so it isn't Traveller).  This is a classless system.

Oh, and for some reason the primary die type used is the d12 although the whole standard set can come into play.

Character creation is done in the following steps:

1) Roll your "Convict Identification Number / CIN".  Roll a d10 seven times and write them down in the order that they were rolled.  This is your CIN.

2) Look up your CIN to see your Prison Status (aka are you a short timer or an old timer or in-between?)  This impacts multiple things and gets written on the character sheet.

3) Determine your Attributes and Gauges.  Remember the Ludovico Gauges I mentioned earlier for despair, guilt, and insanity?  Those are character stats and go from 0-10.

The attributes are Prowess, Reflexes, Wit, Willpower, Social, and Intimidation.  Depending on how long you've been in prison determines how you randomly roll each stat individually.  Works cast scenario you're rolling a d10 and hoping you don't roll a bunch of 1's, best case it's 1d6+4.  There is no balance here.  Everyone gets 0 despair, if you've been in prison the longest you start out with 1 insanity (otherwise it's 0), and the longer you've been in prison the more guilty you feel but everyone has guilt.

We also get some rules text here.  Attribute checks are rolling a d12 and trying to get equal to or below your attribute (so attributes of 1 are just fucking worthless).  Willpower checks are used to stop your Ludovico Gauge scores from going up.  Despair is used to check for fear based things.  Guilt is a measure of your conscience and your starting guilt from character creation is the lowest your guilt can ever be.  Insanity is how crazy you are.

Everyone starts with 10 health regardless of your stats.

4) Determine your starting Build Points.  Build Points are character customization points.  Add up all of your stats (not the gauges).  The higher the number, the less build points you get to spend.  This goes from 350-600.

5) Determine your conviction record.  Why were you put on the prison ship?  This one is selected, not randomly determined.  Are you a murderer (which could just be someone determined to be pre-disposed to killing even if you never did anything or a former soldier), n Vice Offender (porn, drugs, rapist, other bad things), a Dissident (don't disrespect the government) or an Anarchist (you cannot avoid being a citizen?  Each one grants a bonus point to one of two attributes (your choice) and a free trait (explained soon).

6) Purchase some traits.  So you've got all of those (or not very many) build points.  What do you spend them on?  Traits and equipment.  Guess which this step is?

The main thing here that isn't just normal trait stuff is that there are five categories of traits (Background, Social, Psychological, Combat, and Aberrant), and every conviction record (reason you're in prison) has different costs for each trait and some traits are not available to some conviction records.   There is a trait that lets you rearrange your stats so that's something.

It is impossible for me to tell how balanced character creation is if you couldn't tell already.  Oh, and some traits talk about psy potential so psykers are in this system.

Some traits cannot be purchased after character creation and there are advanced traits which cannot be purchased during character creation.  Trait costs are always in multiples of 100 (some traits can reduce the cost of other traits).

7) Purchase some equipment.  Everyone gets "convict basic issue gear" and in addition whatever build points you have leftover get converted into smokes.  Yes, this is space prison and cigarettes are money.  Equipment that is purchased has to be worked out with the GM though, just fyi.

8) Determine your identifying features.  Roll some dice, find out what is wrong with you!  This is an optional rule but everyone uses it or everyone doesn't.

9) Pick a secret personal goal.  Here is where things get even more interesting.  Everyone has a personal goal which is a secret between them and the GM.  Acting according to your goal can grant bonus build points during the "xp granting" phase.

Possible goals are: Redemption (you want to become a better person and do good things), Power (everything is better if you're in control), Survival (don't die don't die don't die don't die), Escape (you don't know how but you're getting the hell out of here), and Damnation (these stupid people are running or fighting the demons, you want to join them).

10) Backstory time!  Pretty self-explanatory.

11) Pick a name, everyone has one.  You should to.


Chapter 3: Contraband

Everyone gets some overalls, a personal hygiene kit, boots, a metal wristband that can magnetize to stick you to the bulkhead so you don't get sucked into space, and that's it.  Everything else costs smokes, and items are restricted by Control Level so some are way harder to get (and more expensive) than others. 

Shivs are 50 smokes just fyi.

If you have the right traits, you can also salvage components from parts of the ship.  You can then use those salvaged components to make things (such as shivs).


Chapter 4: Gangs

There were gangs before the hell dimension and there are gangs after.  If you join a gang you gain bonuses from the gang with each gang having specific entry requirements.  There are 12 major gangs which will want you to go on missions if you join them (and there are inter-gang feuds as well).


Chapter 5: Combat

This is your standard rounds and turns based combat.  Initiative is 1d12+Reflex.  Generally in combat you can move and then do a thing (like attack) or move twice.  Attacking is rolling a d12+Prowress,defending is d12+reflexes, defender wins ties.  It's all very simple.

There are rules for suprise attacks and reloading and disengaging and other things like that but most fancy things (like disarming) are going to be traits.


Chapter 6: Warden Only

It's the GM part of the book.  Actually, the beginning reminds me of the Alien rulebook.  We have normal suggestions such as the rules are only guidelines and can't cover everything, and then horror-rpg oriented ones like make the demons be rare enemies and use humans more because they can be terrible too.

Then we get into specifics about the ship (which players obviously don't know about ) with what can be found where and how everything is doing in the hell dimension, and there's a large two page spread map.  There are some tables to randomly generate encounters and stuff the player's might find.

Injury and recovery rules are found here, as well as in-depth rules about despair, guilt, and insanity (helpful hint: more of these are generally bad).

Interestingly enough there is also a hope mechanic, that is up to the DM about how to adjudicate and is a once per adventure thing.  Also it's used by the group, not by individual party members so a unanimous decision is required to use it to pull their fat out of the fire.

The psy rules are here as well, and they aren't brutal to the psychic but they are very rare.


Chapter 7: Demons

As the gauges go up, demons can manifest as they are attracted to the strong negative emotions.  And then they kill people.  It's a little more complicated than that but you get the idea.

The most powerful of demons have stats in the teens and health higher than the entire party put together so you don't want to fight these guys unless you know what you're doing and have more than the bare fists that you start the game with.


Chapter 8: Other Threats

These are all of the non-demon threats the party might face.  Robots, convicts, and other hazards (such as environmental ones).


Final Thoughts

I still love it and still want to run it if I can ever find the proper group.  Is it balanced?  With that character creation system who knows but it's not as bad as I remember it being.  I've got this one in paperback and it is definitely a keeper.

Offline Stratovarius

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Re: Review of Abandon All Hope
« Reply #1 on: May 27, 2021, 08:06:32 PM »
What didn't quite come through is what the goal is, both for the players and the group. Are the players encouraged to have goals at odds with the party (as is common in some coopetition board games), and hose one another, or is it working together to survive, or some combination thereof?

Offline Nanshork

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Re: Review of Abandon All Hope
« Reply #2 on: May 27, 2021, 08:41:23 PM »
What didn't quite come through is what the goal is, both for the players and the group. Are the players encouraged to have goals at odds with the party (as is common in some coopetition board games), and hose one another, or is it working together to survive, or some combination thereof?

That's completely up to the group. There is nothing specifically encouraged or discouraged, options are just there for people to use.