I originally picked up The Babylon Project because the first supplement, Earthforce Sourcebook, used a variation of Jon Tuffley’s Full Thrust miniatures wargame rules for the ship combat system. I described my love/hate (mostly hate…but in a kind way) relation with The Babylon Project in a March 2022 post:
In every RPG I had played before The Babylon Project character generation was by die roll. In a major change of pace, characters in The Babylon Project are not “generated” but instead “developed” through a thought exercise. At first I was totally lost—where are the die rolls and tables? As much as I loved the setting, this was totally NOT what I expected in an RPG. So I bounced off the game system very hard. It also didn’t help that the Task Resolution system was the polar opposite of character generation with a seemingly endless demand for table lookups. Even this Grognard wargamer had difficulty with multi-step combat resolution system that had table after table…for what? Even worse, The Babylon Project uses 2d6 but not in the traditional sense; here you have “The Random Modifier” where you roll a “positive” die and a “negative” die and generate a result from +5 to -5. Sigh…
“My 2022 #TTRPG CharGen Challenge – The Babylon Project (Chameleon Eclectic, 1997)”
Over time I have come to realize—and even appreciate—the design of The Babylon Project. Looking back, this particular roleplaying game (RPG) very likely was my first “narrative” design, though with plenty of combat crunch (see the hit chart on the character sheet!). Character generation is very narrative with just a hint of point-buy. So let us see what today’s thought exercise brings…
Adam Sonbelt
Race: Human / Age: 30 / Archetype: Closet Radical Haunted (Driven?) by Past Tragedy / Profession: Journalist (Spy) / Gender: Male / Home: Wherever the story takes him.
Characteristics
- Proud of his Belter heritage.
- Haunted by the death of his parents in a labor strike; Company shut off air and killed strikers.
- Fanatical and committed to bringing down the Company by whatever means necessary.
Adam poses as a freelance journalist prowling the space lanes for stories. He tends to work out of B5 but lives in flop houses and amongst the lower classes. That said, he can “clean up” to get next to a prominent figure if there is a story. Adam has a visceral hate for a major interstellar corporation that, before they went big, killed his Belter parents in a labor strike while he was away at school. So now he has a side hustle; feeding info to a radical “labor rights” group that is not above planting an occasional bomb or organizing an assassination. Adam fully understands that “one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist” and is comfortable with whatever label one wants to apply to him.
Feature image courtesy RMN
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Rocky Mountain Navy Gamer 
I grew up on The Babylon Project It was my second non-D&D RPG (after Shadowrun 2E). I recall the games we played with it fondly – but I recall the rules as grossly over-convolved and quite badly designed. The boot itself, though, had wonderful production quality for the late 1990’s (high-grade gloss paper with tons of color art everywhere). It was also the first book I ever ordered online, from Amazon!
It was also an incomplete game. When you think of Babylon 5, you think of the Shadow War, telepath affairs, and grand space battles. None of these were in that book, which focused on the 1st and 2nd seasons of Babylon 5 and even earlier eras.
Like I wrote, it was the EARTHFORCE SOURCEBOOK with FULL THRUST for space combat that brought me to TBP. But yes, the TBP core game mechanism was a leap too far for me at the time as it was (and still is) not a crisp design. As a narrative chargen model it’s ok but beyond that 🤷🏻♂️