Pyramid Review
Among the Clans: The Andorians
Published by Last Unicorn Games
By S. John Ross with Steven S. Long, Adam Dickstein
128 pages, $22.00
I know exactly what you're thinking, because I thought it too. "Andorians? What's up with that?" After kicking off the Alien Intelligence series of Star Trek RPG supplements with the excellent The Way of Kolinahr: The Vulcans, you'd expect the second volume to describe a race like the Betazoids or even the Ferengi -- not the Andorians. After all, how many times do we ever see one of these blue-skinned, antenna-headed aliens? Unless I'm mistaken, they appear only a couple of times in The Original Series and movies and fewer still in the later series. Consequently, skepticism will be a common state of mind upon first approaching this supplement.However logical that skepticism might be initially, it ceases to be so after reading only a few pages into Among the Clans. The book's first chapter focuses on the history of the Andorians and does so beautifully. In my opinion, the history sections of alien books are often dry and unexciting, providing only a few snippets of genuinely gameable information. In most cases, I'd have preferred additional cultural details instead. This book avoids that pitfall by combining the two approaches, anchoring many elements of Andorian culture in their history. A good example is the place of kethni, or clans, in Andorian culture, which gets a solid treatment in the first chapter.
The second chapter . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: February 11, 2000
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