Pyramid Review
Transactions of the Royal Martian Geographical Society - The Journal of Victorian Era Role-Playing (for Space 1889)
Published by Heliograph Inc.
Created by Dr. Mark Clark (Ed.) et al.
$20 (vol. 1), $22 (vol. 2), $18 (vol. 3)
For the gamer with a discerning taste for playing in a more polite, civilized era, 2000 was a vintage year. Not only did we see two GURPS supplements - Castle Falkenstein and the incomparable Steampunk, as well as Marcus L. Rowland's Forgotten Futures, but also the return of the RPG that can claim to have initiated the interest in combining all things Victorian with other genres. GDW's Space 1889 melded Science Fiction and Victoriana to create a fantastic setting that cast the colonial and imperial urges of the great powers across the ether to Mars and Venus. Long out of print, Heliograph Inc. has reprinted not only the rulebook, but all of GDW's supplementary materials, with two GDW titles reprinted in each of the new Heliograph books.
Alongside the official GDW books, Heliograph have also released three volumes of the Space 1889 fanzine, Transactions of the Royal Martian Geographical Society (TRMGS), combining a mixture of reprinted and new material. First published in the early 1990s, and later to include GDW's official Space 1889 newsletter, Ether Society News, Heliograph reprints the first four issues of the original fanzine in their first volume, issues five through eight in the second, whilst the third contains material only seen previously . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: March 23, 2001
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