This is the set-up for White Sands: A Role-Playing Game the Fight for Clean Air, a game of ecological resistance set in the near future, published by Critical Kit Ltd, best known for Be Like A Crow – A Solo RPG and Aces Over the Adriatic: A Solo RPG. The Player Characters are Activists, newly activated members of Breatheless. An Activist is simply defined by six skills—Strength, Speed, Sneak, Shoot, Smarts, and Sway, plus an Area of Expertise. Examples of the latter include Hacker, Driver, Construction, Engineer, Gardener, and Accountant, but the player is free to create his own. Player Character creation is very simple. A player simply has to assign a set of dice types to the six skills, decide on an Area of Expertise, and then flesh out the Activist’s details, including a description of how his respirator mask is decorated and a ‘handle’ rather than an actual name—since they must never reveal their actual names.
Mechanically, White Sands is equally as simple. To have his Activist undertake an action, a player rolls the appropriate Skill die. On a result of one, the Activist fails and he suffers a knock in confidence, temporally reducing the size of the die type attached to the Skill. A result of two is failure without any complications; three indicates a success with a complication; four is a straightforward success; and five or more is a total success with potentially better outcomes. If the Activist has an appropriate Area of Expertise that applies or has the ‘Upper hand’ in this particular situation, then the player rolls two dice instead of one and selects the best result. Combat uses opposed dice rolls, the Strength Skill versus Speed Skill for melee combat, the Shoot Skill versus Speed Skill for ranged combat. Combat is fast and potentially deadly, an NPC or Activist having anywhere between two and nine Injury Points. An unarmed attack will inflict a single point of damage, whilst a melee weapon or a hit by a rubber bullet fired by a riot gun typically used by the Stewards both do two points of damage. The roleplaying game advises that a player create a replacement Activist given how deadly the combat system is. Overall, the rules to this roleplaying game are very simple such that specific outcomes are going to rely on narrative rather than mechanical outcome.
White Sands includes the scenario, ‘Havana Down’, which is intended to provide an introduction and single session’s worth of play. The Player Characters are newly activated Activists living in the former beach resort town of White Sands. They are asked to locate an Activist called Havana who has not been seen for a few days after successfully obtaining a keycard that give Breathless access to important MegaCorp facilities. The Activists must at least find the keycard if not Havana. It is not a complex investigation, but offers a decent mix of action and interaction, and if the players want to carry on beyond the scenario, hooks for possible further adventures.
Physically, White Sands is decently presented. It is actually very nicely illustrated such that you wish there was more to the setting than is given in the text. The book also comes with a location map for the scenario and a map of the city.
There are two ways in which White Sands can be used. One is as a one-shot, the Game Master running the included scenario, ‘Havana Down’. This makes it suitable for use at a convention. The other is as a more traditional roleplaying game, the Game Master running the included scenario, ‘Havana Down’, and then using it as the basis for a continuing campaign. That though requires more effort upon the part of the Game Master, since there is not a huge amount of detail to the poisoned future of White Sands, and she will need to develop more of the world upon which to build her campaign. Either way, White Sands: A Role-Playing Game the Fight for Clean Air feels like a low-budget television series on the Sci-Fi Channel from the nineties—playable, but leaving the reader to wonder what more there is to the world.
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