Space 1889 was originally created by GDW in the late 1980s, and featured a fantastic campaign setting: a world as might be conceived of in Victorian science fiction. Space travel is possible, and the great powers have established colonies on Mars, Venus, and Mercury (with varying degrees of success). Liftwood from Mars makes the creation of flying ships possible, while the jungles of Venus are filled with dinosaurs. Against this heady background, Europe totters its way towards World War One, with diplomatic incidents and the Great Game of nabobism and border scuffles. It's an amazing setting for an RPG. Being rooted (loosely) in history, it's easy for players to follow what's going on (without reading much background material) and to grasp the attitudes of the time: jingoism, a class based society (and the inherent conflict that brings), and a condescending attitude to locals.

The original game is still available through Heliograph press, but there have been two 'modernisations' of the game, one using Savage Worlds ('Red Sands'), and this version, using the Ubiquity system, published by Clockwork Publishing (the English arm of German publishing house Uhrwerk Verlag).

The book begins with summarising the setting. To a large extent, this reproduces material contained in the original GDW game, but incorporating material from the original game's supplements as well the core book. Where the authors expand extensively is in the treatment of Earth. The original game focused largely on Britain, whereas this edition discusses the rest of Europe in considerable detail (in particular, Germany's situation is elaborated on, and portrayed more sympathetically than in the original game). Two interesting changes are made to Earth: the South wins the civil war, and the French (in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war) have a revolution that results in France being communist. These are interesting changes. The first introduces a potential set of villains, and has the interesting side effect of leaving Mexico with an emperor. In general it makes America a more 'interesting' site for adventures. Having France communist heightens the conflict between labour and capital, which was a feature of the period, but underdeveloped in prior versions of this game.

Interspersing the campaign setting is an extensive bestiary for all the planets, which should give a GM plenty of fodder. Notably absent are stats for people, Martians, Venusians etc, however these latter are provided with the GM screen, which alone makes the screen worth buying.

The book then turns its attention to character generation, skill usage, and combat before concluding with a fairly extensive equipment section.

Character generation is point buy, and features attributes, skills, resources, talents, and flaws. Attributes describe how strong, smart, quick etc a character is, and provide a base level for skills. Hence a character with high intelligence will generally be good at skills based on intelligence even with minimal training. Talents are special abilities a character has (similar to feats in Dungeons & Dragons), and often let him/her bend rules. Resources are arguably the neatest part of the system (and where the authors have augmented the original Ubiquity rules) allowing you to define the allies, wealth, contacts, social status etc of a character. It's worth looking at the 'archetypes' (pregenerated characters) in this and some of the other books (Venus and Mercury) to see some neat applications of the resource rules. One could easily create an impoverished nobleman, a servant who accompanies his master or an adventuress with her gentleman companion with this system (and these are the types of tropes that can make for a great Space 1889 game). Flaws let you give your character shortcomings. These aren't compulsory, but are highly recommended, since they are a primary source of style points (see later).

The mechanics of the ubiquity system are fairly brief, but the system works well (if you want a preview, you can find the quickstarter rules on Clockwork's website). Ubiquity uses a dice pool system, where characters can 'take the average', effectively assuming they roll what they would have on average. Alternatively, characters can take 'chance dice', increasing the variability of their rolls. These two effects mean that on the one hand, expert characters don't 'whiff' their rolls, but on the other hand, incompetent characters always have some chance of pulling difficult things off.

Combat is a gritty affair, where a gun fight (or encounter with a dangerous animal) will quickly down combat oriented characters if things go wrong. Offsetting this is the presence of 'style points', which the GM hands out for role playing, and particularly for player use of their characters' flaws. With an adequate pool of style points, players can have their characters rise above the gritty system and achieve deeds of derring-do. This can create a virtuous cycle round the game table where players get in character, get in trouble (with their flaws) and pull through with their style points.

The equipment list gives a good mix of weapons, tools, and conveyances with which to make mischief round the planets. There are also some nifty inventions and Martian artefacts to round it out.

What's the verdict? This is a lovely book, beautifully put together, and the authors have clearly got a great love for the setting. Added to this is that the book was published as a kickstarter. As a result, Clockwork has also produced a number of adventures, along with two sourcebooks covering (respectively) Venus and Mercury (two planets that got relatively little press in the original game). It's also worth noting that Uhrwerk Verlag has a reasonable catalogue of material in German for the game, which is only a translation away from being English sourcebooks and adventures. All of this makes for a very vibrant game now and moving forward. I especially like that the Clickwork adventures are less 'militaristic' than the original GDW material, and capture the adventurous feel of the time. Two gentlemen having a wager over who can circumnavigate Mercury the fastest, and an analytical engine manufacturer taking his machine into orbit to speed its calculations stand out especially. And heck, if you want more adventures, you can even buy the old GDW ones (either stand alone books or articles in their 'Challenge' magazine) and update a few stat blocks for more colonial era hijinks. My players and I ran the quick starter adventure and had a blast. Really looking forward to playing more of this game.