YMMV / Fading Suns

• Ensemble Dark Horse: Lady Salandra Decados. Oh, she is an important character — a high-rank Decados noble in a sort of frenemy hatefuck relationship to Emperor Alexius — but not a faction leader or anything like that. Just a girl of some means and big dreams... with Faith 1, Torture 9, parents mysteriously dead after her return from boarding school, and "Kill him." as the entirety of the quote in her character description.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game and its setting are but a footnote of the 90s tabletop RPG, largely forgotten and usually even derivatively called "knock-off 40k" ... and one of the most defining things for the Polish scene. To make it a bit more complex, it wasn't particularly popular to play as such, but the people behind both of the scene-defining magazines were huge fans of Fading Suns and kept constantly gushing about them in their articles, creating an overexposure of the game. And even if it wasn't so, Polish RPG market was poor in sci-fi games those days, Fading Suns being about the only space opera at hand. So even if barely anyone played it for longer than a one-shot or two, a whole lot of people were familiar with the concept, borrowing left and right from the lore and the game mechanics. In fact, playing Fading Suns at least once was considered to be a Rite of Passage of sorts into a "real player" in certain circles... just rarely there were groups willing to stick to it after doing so.
• The Scrappy: The Shantor, collectively, are widely considered by the fandom to be possibly the lamest idea to appear in the setting. Simply put, they're a species of sapient horses. For one, although the setting gleefully indulges in the kind of stuff that only works on the far soft end of space opera, most of the time these things fit the overall theme of the setting. For two... well, while "lizard-people crack-squad mercenaries" or "fish-people with ancient astronauts vibes" were also hard to work into a typical campaign, "talking horses with a sympathetic backstory, inability to speak human languages, and obvious problems with operating machinery resulting from their limbs ending in hooves" clearly wasn't a concept that appealed to the average player. It's perhaps telling that newer editions of the game tweak their descriptions to at least allow them a passable ability for item manipulation.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The Victory Point System the game originally ran on was based on a roll-under d20, with a critical fumble on 20 and non-critical loss on 19. To put it without judgement: the fact that it resulted in a guaranteed 1-in-10 chance of failure is a staple of fans' complaints.

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