Introducted to the sytem via Dredd and worlds of 2000ad. Great for sandbox. Highly recommended

This was my first RPG experience. I wanted to have a game where I could leave out magic or psi/chi and this book gave me that option, skipped the PDF and went straight for the hardcover. Loved the career system as you can make a well rounded PC with it. Such an open system that allows careers from OLD and NOW to work smoothly in NEW. The supplements are also great too. With an active community and creater on Enworld.org you can discuss rules and encounters so that you never feel alone and stuck.

Loved it! No, Loving it!

A sandbox system that provides a fast playing comprehensive rules set that give you the opportunity to play in almost any setting. However what sets this title apart is the community behind it. Educated, interested and witty are the people you'll find using WOIN and they have a vast array of resources you can use to flesh out your games. It's a bargain for the price.

I bought the book after acquiring the Primer. I wasnt exactly thrilled with the Primer, but I thought that it had promise so I went and got the Hardcover book. Overall, the material is good, but the presentation is iffy.

Plenty of typos throughout the book, made up words ["inbuilt" ??? i assume the writers meant "built-in" or "builtin"] <--- I stand corrected.

Stats dont match the artwork provided The Redeemer Warframe on page 115 and described on page 117 and statted on page 120 makes no reference to the weapons other than mentioning that the wearer can mount an existing rifle or weapon to it.The description doesnt mention its 2 [TWO] mounting hardpoints. What about this???

Chromed Evolved Combat Suit - also not detailed until page 138. Or this?

Still have not found rhe descriptions of the Exotic Melee weapons statted on page 98. Or this???

None of the vehicles, mechs or walkers depected on page 125 [including the obvious "pod racer rip-off" are described. The few that are statted and depected with weapons do not have any weapon systems statted in the book. I didnt ask about rules, I asked about descriptions and weapon stats.

Combat rules are all over the place and barely make sense. A nice, clear of example of a combat situation would be highly beneficial. This concern was avoided as well.

The Good... The overall, general mechanics of the system are ok if not a little clunky. The art is nice.

A FANTASTIC GAME

This game has almost everything im looking for in a TTRPG!

Armour as damage reduction A Careers system of creating your character Awesome melee and ranged weapons Cybernetics Psionics

DEFINITELY WORTH CHECKING OUT THIS GAME! (and its counter part O.L.D)

I love this rules system. It gives you everything you need to have to play a game straight out of the core book. Reading through it the artwork is good and I got the feeling that with a little imagination I could run any sci fi game I could think of and there would be rules to cover whatever i thought up. It is the next game I am bringing out to my group.

Comprehensive. As a DM, this is the type of tool I need. There comes a time when, as a DM, you require more out of your game engine. This is where all the homebrew content for all our beloved RPG systems comes from, falling anywhere inbetween moderately balanced to completely out of place.

Using this system, it provides you not only a deep dice pool based resolution mechanic, but all the tools (and more) that you need to make your own content without the fear of it being totally out of place or imbalanced.

-On first impression the book seems very well laid out, and it is fairly easy to see where everything is. As you flick through it for the first time you see it covers a lot of ground. However, there are some issues too. The rule writers have throughout the book failed to give examples. In one or two rare places they do give an example, but you have to read and re-read some sections to try and fugure out what you are supposed to do, and I found in several places you had to make a decision on rule interpretation that simples example would have clarified in a second. There are also some ommissions too.

The first section of the book deals with character creation and then equipping him or her. There are several races to choice from that are failry standard RPG types. Dwarves, Elves, Orcs, androids, all thinly disguised are to be found! I would say that this game aims to provide a mechanism to play games in the Star Trek / Star Wars genres, and it is flexible enough to cover most settings from low tech near future to highly advanced ones.

The second section of the rules deals with the game mechanics. Tests are based on the core mechanism of dice pools being thrown to beat a difficulty target number, or beating an opponents dice pool score for an opposed test. All dice are D6. Attributes skills and equipment all provive dice pool additions. The level of the character acts as a dice pool cap, giving a less experienced character a smaller dice pool to play with. One really nice idea in the rules is a count down dice pool. This is a dice pool that is thrown at intervals, determined by the situation, and dice are removed from the pool on a 6 or f a quicker dice pool is required on either a 5 or 6. When the dice are gone the reason for the count down happens, the bomb goes off, the character bleeds to death etc.

Combat and space ship combat use grids, or what the game calls "Theatre of the Mind," which means no grid, and people have to calculate ranges from the grid based figures in the weapon tables. Combat also has some strange ideas added into it. A grid represents 5'. For me, this is where first major issue in the rules crops up. A ranged weapon gets a penalty for each grid over the first. So if you fire at a target 4 grids away you get a -3D6 penalty! This is the future, you are not firing inaccurate black powder smooth bore muskets or pistols! Add to the fact that from the dice pool you have to buy extra damage or effects I feel this creates a real problem. The rules do say that without buying extra effects and damage character will take a long time to take a foe down. As you have to spend two hit dice to get a dice of extra damage, you have to juggle between actually hitting the enemy at all, and whether to do serious damage or death by a thousand cuts! Death and wounding is dealt with not by one mechanism but two! It is not terribly clear whether the two methods effect eachother, producing yet another example of the lack of examples causing problems. hen damage takes a characters health to zero they fall unconscious and if it is below zero they form a dice pool and start a count down to die. The other system uses tracks which are start at mild and go up as more damage is accumulated. When you reach the end of the track you die. The concept is good, it provides a more graphic description for players of what their character is experiencing. I feel however extra clarity is needed. For instance critical hits move you aong the track for that weapon, but it is left to the GM to guess whether damage is also added as well as tack movement. I assume it is, but I can't be sure this is what the designers intended.

The final section of the books deals with world building, travel, and the the GM. It provides rules for travel, space combat and encounters.

Starship combat is a cross between a roleplay game and a miniatures game. It is time consuming to play and as this is a RPG and not a Wargame it seems a little out of place. It is not detailed enough to please a wargamer, and will soak up too much time in a RPG.

Space travel and journey times form another area of the rules where examples would make a huge difference to rule clarity. Add the rather clunky system of jump increments, to drive type, and an odd medical test, and whole series of tests you are supposed to make and space travel using ships becomes a nimber crunching chore. Crew always have a chance of suffering some penalty the longer they are in space. This seems a little strange, unless it is part of a characters makeup like sea sickness, but that is something that the rules don't provide. I feel a huge number of GMs will probably rework, tweak or ignore a lot of these rules.

There is a really short section of foes near the end of the rule book. These are humaniod enemies for the characters to have encounters with, like street thugs etc. Once you finish this section you realise there are no animals detailed in the system at all. There is a small reference to creatures in a section on size and characteristics, which actually tells you that creatures have their own stats are not covered by this, then it does cover them briefly!

The games good features are : A comprehensive character creation system, that allows well rounded starting characters, and allows characters to improve as part of a career, or as individual skill/attribute training. It has an interesting trait system that can make characters more than just stats. There is a good selection of equipment.

The bad points are : An almost total lack of examples. A few places where the target numbers for well described tests seem to be missing. A few failures to clarify how rules impact on eachother. Space travel calculations are a chore, they are poorly explained, and lack of examples, forcing the GM to read the section several times carefully. Space combat is not really quick enough for many groups, and is not detailed enough to satisfy wargame inclined players. Ranged combat penalties seem odd in the future. Also the idea of tying ranges to grids and forcing players to convert these to feet is inconvenient, when both figures could have been given in the tables. The lack of any real rules and guidence on animals is a shame. The GM has more work to do initially than is normal making decisions on rules targets, and interpretations.

In conclusion the game system has a lot of potential, but, a failure to provide examples, some odd penalties and tests, and the omission of rules for animals let the game down. All GMs tweak add or ignore rules to some extent, this game however will require more work before play to get the system sorted out, depending on what the GM intends to include. Combat will probably be the one area where everyone has to accept or tweak the rules. This can be a fun game, and many players will enjoy it a lot. It is not an original rules set, with nothing that I have not seen used in other game systems. As the rules stand they fail to live up to the promise of what might have been.

I very much like systems that are a toolbox and this is one of them. This has most of what I need, it certainly ticks most of the boxes, creature design, alien design, weapon/armour, worlds and star systems etc. It also let you run scifi at various levels, from hard, opera and space fantasy. Alas no ship design, but I can live with that and I have the seperate book. It's certainly an adaptable and well rounded book, with the vaguest hints of it's own setting, so it's easy to plugin and create one for yourself.

Great layout and good art. Being an artist I appreciate good art. Certainly a fine book and a pleasure to read, some fiction too, that I always like.

The core mechanic is easy to understand and is very flexiable. You can certainly use or chuck out bits you don't like and add your own easily enough.

On top of this it has additional content and support via EON a Digital Magazine on patreon, certainly a good thing in my book.

I highly recomend this book.

Where to begin. N.E.W. is not what I was expecting and I was very disapointed in the game.

In the world of RPGs, you can have what I call "life simulators" that try to mimic a world logically, in detail. The other end are the story based games where the goal is not to simulate "reality" but tell a good story with PCs becoming part of the story. Life simulators tend to be more data driven or "crunchy" while story games have little focus on the numbers and stats but on methods to move the plot into interesting areas. I favor the simulator games, BRP, MERP, Rolemaster, Runequest, these games all have great detail and logical design. N.E.W. is presented as being crunchy game, a life in the future simulator, but unfortunately it has "crunch" but not logic. Too many things in the game make it hard to "suspend disbelief" as the logic behind the design failed to work in my head. It fails to be a life simulator, and it is waaay too dice intensive to be story based.

Another issue, and this is with many SciFi games, is that they fail to predict the future. What they do instead is take the world of 2016, add spaceships, aliens and blasters and WALLAH the future. Eclipse Phase does an outstanding job of bucking this trend and that setting does a fantastic jobs of giving gamers a believable future in which to roleplay. It is not just 2016 with window dressing. N.E.W. on the other hand sadly seems to stick to the former trend. The aliens take a page from the Star Trek rule book of alien creation, just add make up and funny ears and there you have it, alien. In N.E.W. they just happen to be future orcs, dwarves, elves and Tieflings/Klingons/Nietzscheans. N.E.W. is more about the future according to Hollywood and DnD than actually giving us something different and well thought out.

Finally, and this is NOT the games fault but my own bias. I really do not like D6 systems. Sometimes I will buy a D6 source book to glenn ideas. This book failed to give me anything original or useful in the idea department - stale. The good news is that with so many cool RPGs out there, this one is at no risk of becoming a time suck in my life.

The good, it is organized, the art is okay (better than some worse than others) and if you like D6 and want something that you could play out that soft SciFi Hollywood hit, you should give this game a try.

I am a little short on time so this will be a quick review.

I just picked this up a couple days ago and I have to say it is chock full of 'CRUNCH,' just the way I like my SciFi games! Like many of the reviews below, I can say this book is loaded with excellent ideas on how to run just about any sci-fi game you can come up with! It has extremely detailed character creation and the concept of using exploits to handle any kind of special training, psionic and special abilities makes for a simple, yet detailed way to present these types of character/NPC characteristics.

Two thumbs up!

I am really sinking my teeth into this system. I really took a shine to the character creation and progression, since it makes it easy to build a very nuanced concept of whatever kind of character you would want. Can't wait to get my players on board, and looking forward to the Fantasy rulebook.

I'm one of those people that are never satisfied 100% with an RPG. I read them, tweak them, house rule them, generate tons of characters, and unless they are really very good, I end up putting them on my virtual shelf. N.E.W. is NOT going to sit on that shelf. Sci-Fi games are hard to pull off, and even harder to do very well, and E.N. Publishing has set a new bar for content, dice mechanics, and playability. I especially like the CountDown mechanic; very unusual and it can be quite a suspenseful tool for a game. The art is great, the non-human races (one place many Sci-Fi games fall flat) are well done, the character generation procedure with the careers is reminiscent of Traveller without all the dying during generation, and the broad range of all the great Sci-Fi tropes in equipment is well represented. Overall, I'd put N.E.W. up there on the top of the list of best Sci-Fi games; the same list that has all the classic great games like Traveller, Star Frontiers, Alternity, Space Opera, and Star Ace. If you're on the fence about purchasing this game, then climb on down and do it. You won't be disappointed at all.

Very versatile game with lots of tools to promote a Sci-Fi game from Opera types to Gritty. We've started some "Firefly"-esque characters and hope to continue with the campaign.

I and my players like the depth and development of characters during creation. It gives variety but control to the players. Love the Career Development that promotes player contributions and character strengths.

Combat works well and does not bog down. One can use Tactical Maps or Theater of the Mind. The non-combat was also well done and not just a series of skill rolls. There was some challenge and tension in some of the scenario.

In summary: a customizalbe and nicely done sci-fi game. Also, you could probably do a Fantasy Sci-fi cross-over (ie He-Man, Thundar, etc) with the tools contained.

W.O.I.N. N.E.W. RPG is a solid and versatile roleplaying system. I would recommend this rpg and book for any science fiction fans and others who have an interest in running or playing a science fiction game.

For the gamemaster, the game is a tool kit that allows you to add elements and options to create a universe that is alive and dynamic. The game offers different styles of play from the hardcore science fiction to space opera. The book allows options for creating new species and careers, which I really enjoy with the ability to expand upon what is provided. The different play styles between tactical and theatre of the mind are excellent options to help the gamemaster to adapt the game to the gaming group's preference.

For the player, the options provided in the book allow the player to customize the character to fit their idea of what the player wants to play. The open skills system allows the players to be creative in the development of skills that can be useful within the game. As stated above for the gamemaster, the ability to create new races and careers allows players to expand the selection of species to use within a particular game.

In conclusion, I highly recommend this game for roleplayers. I have run the game frequently with a group and the system is efficient and allows for fast and exciting action scenes without being over complicated. It is this fast learning curve and versatility that captures the essence of a true science fiction roleplaying game.