Helix: The Post Apocalypse, High-Tech, Fantasy, Western Role Playing Game

The other day my wife the non-geek asked me about Ed Wood. Actually, she asked me to explain Ed Wood (the actual person, not the movie) to her non-geek mother. Because I will latch onto anything that might bring the wife a little bit further into my geek world, I obliged. The summary I gave was that he was a man whose passion and vision for film far, far outstripped his actual budget or talent.

Enter Adam J. Weber, stage left. I don’t know whether he’s wearing angora or not, but God love him and his ambitions.

One would think that the title would say it all. Helix: The Post Apocalypse, High-Tech, Fantasy, Western Role Playing Game. I almost don’t need to write a review, because literally and figuratively it says a lot. In the near future there’s a global war, and nations are destroyed and City-States arise. There’s an evil global corporation that through nefarious means comes to control all of the City-States. There’s cyberware that was embedded with code that rewrites the genetic code of those implanted with cyberware, and those kids grow up to be “code slingers” (who are really spellcasters). And there’s some mysterious religious cult leader only known as “Helix”.

You create a character by selecting an archetype. Then you randomly roll the four attributes used in the game on 2d6. When you need to make an Attribute check, you roll a d12 and succeed if you roll under the attribute. You attribute total is the number of points you get to spend on “qualities” (skills, aspects, abilities, whatever) associated with that attribute. The cost is 1-1, so if you want Cyber Lore at 4 it costs 4, if you want Black Market Knowledge at 3 it costs 3, and so on. There are a lot of qualities, and obviously you won’t have a lot of points to go around. Qualities cap at 6, and to make a quality check you roll a d6 and succeed if you roll under.

Helix feels like a cyberpunk game that was written around 1985, and stylistically both the rules and the setting have the feel of that era. I kind of like that. If you had blacked out the copyright dates on this and handed it to me, I would completely peg it for that era. It almost feels like a companion piece to Encounter Critical, playing off of 80s gaming tropes the way EC did with the 70s. The difference, and it breaks my heart to say this because I’m not trying to bust on some really nice people who put a lot of love into creating a game, is that Helix seems to be dead serious and is presented without a hint of irony. Encounter Critical was the Plan 9 from Outer Space of roleplaying games on purpose. I get the impression that Adam J. Weber and company were really expecting to make Citizen Kane.

Look, I had fun reading this. I think I’d have fun playing it, and that’s all that matters, right? I’m truly looking at this as an unintended sourcebook for Encounter Critical. I will mine ideas from it for that game. The game mechanics, at least, are very simple and more playable than those of EC. I love this game for being exactly what it is and reveling in it.

One thing the game has going for it is support. At the Helix blog, new free content is released on a regular basis. I actually bought the game because “helixrpg” is one of my Twitter buddies, and it’s a proven scientific fact that I’m more inclined to buy your stuff if you get chummy with me. When the PDF went on sale over Thanksgiving, I picked it up ($3.50 was not a risky proposition). The fact that the folks behind the game are friendly, outgoing, and cranking out new content will give this game a long tail.

Buy Helix in print or as a PDF.