Other Suns: Furries and Formulae
Whether this is a good or bad thing, or simply not a thing, depends on your connotations with that term. Regardless, it was released concurrently with the Albedo comic books (which would eventually be the source of the first 'official' furry RPG) and almost certainly wasn't an intentional part of that fandom. For my part, anthropomorphized animals don't hold much appeal for various reasons; that said, I take much more umbrage with the hilariously draconian aspects of character creation.
First: the distinctive reason for playing this game (or avoiding it) is that you can play one of a dozen-ish talking animals thinly disguised as aliens. Why, then, does the game assume you're human in the character generation chapter? All of the information from the first to second-to-last chapter is presented as if you're generating a human PC; only in the very last chapter do you get the info dump of all of the alien races and their unique set of character-building rules. Humans even receive their own listing in that last chapter! It makes no organizational sense.
Character creation is further complicated by the fact that the chapter "How to Create a Character" only covers the generation of Characteristics (the first column in the first box) and Abilities (the second column). Everything else comes at different points later in the book. Other Suns lets you choose your race; I rolled a d12 to determine mine then another roll for the PC's sex. Turns out I'm a female Sanchenzii, a lioness-person with the following characteristics:
There's more, and it's even more starkly presented than this, but you get the point. (That the "passion for physical pleasure" quality is listed first for all races leads me to believe that this is closer to furry fandom than I originally thought.) I like that character motivation is shown clearly, but there's very, very little flavor to go along with it. In any case, I take the game's instructions seriously and name my lady Slappy.
On to the dice: you'd need 6d20 for this species! I like that the game uses lots of different dice but it's also a little demanding for your average player. As a whole, though, Characteristic generation is not too radical. Typical-of-its-era mixed qualifiers for different stats, rather than a unified system for everything, is the result. Things get a little weirder on the Characteristic-derived Abilities:
Arbitrary numbers: check. Both percentages and fractions: check. Formulae involving order-of-operations: check. What's funny is that after all this basic math, I ended up with numbers entirely between 0 and 16, so they aren't going to make much of a difference anyway. I thought I rolled pretty well for most of my Characteristics, too, but INT and WIL factor into all but one Ability (and DEX is just behind), so if you roll low on any of those you're fucked. This is enough for me to avoid playing OS rules-as-written.
Finally, in a chapter called Mechanics and Melee, we come to my favorite formula of the whole box set (with a strong challenge for almost anything involving spaceships), Encumbrance. Take a look at this:
Amazing! I've still yet to obtain a copy of Phoenix Command but I believe this is the most convoluted calculation of any single statistic I've seen in a game so far. Imagine telling your friends you got this new game in which you can play as a fox! or a horse! or a lizard! then having them pull out their calculators for this monstrosity.
I had to look a bit for the skills section - this is a classless game in which skills determine your character - and it comes in chapter 5, for some reason after the weapon & equipment section. It's kind of hard to grasp your options, but eventually I figure out that you choose a primary focus (like Chemistry, Law, Merchant Marine, or Sapientology), which grants you an advantage on everything that falls under that heading (like, respectively, Geochemist, Taxation, Orator, or Robopsychologist).
The artwork in this section is the best in the whole set.
As always, I take whatever skills seem the most absurd and/or worthless, so I have a degree in Mathematics with a focus on Algebra, although it only gains 4% over the others since my Knowledge Bonus is so worthless. I also fill in my hits-by-location chart, which each has a percentage of my total HP and END, but I'm too tired to read up on the difference between the two. Even though everything else has unique statistics based on PC species, this is generic for all of them, resulting in an odd distribution of hit chances. You're eight times more likely to hit someone's leg than their chest, for some reason.
All that's left is choosing weapons and equipment, but I can't find any method to generate how much money (or SMU in Other Suns parlance) I have to buy them, so I don't bother. Until now I also forgot I, as a talking lion, also get natural attacks: claws and a bite. Nice.
Ultimately, Other Suns is a somewhat interesting artifact. It's an early example of a fandom that's considered childish while being an extremely user-unfriendly system with a whole lot of early-80s unnecessary crunchiness. An interesting aside: finding a scan of the official character sheet took me almost a month. This is a rare game that didn't print the character sheet in any books; it was only available as a cardstock master sheet in the box set. As a result, it was frequently lost, and was missing from my copy of the game. It doesn't seem to exist in .pdf form on the internet. I was only able to obtain a scan by asking a vintage RPG trade group if anyone had it, and even then only one person came through after three weeks. Thanks M.T. for your help!
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