Mummy the Curse– The nWoD from the point of view of the deathless, ancient keepers of the Curse. 264 pages. Our latest game line for the World of Darkness, Mummy will be developed using an open process in which the community can see the progress of the game and contribute, and released as a virtual box set.

Demon the ???– A new game line- answering many fan requests- a new look at those creatures of fire and darkness: fallen angels, nightmares from the nether realms, servants of the God Machine or something else entirely? Includes codified rule sets of those rules developed over the last few years including: Shards, SASs, Tiers, as well as a  rich background for players to immerse themselves in. 320 pages.

Return now to dying Mars in its last age of glory.
A planet of flashing swords and choking sands, of winking courtesans and lantern-lit canal cities. Mars, where fortune and death are two sides of the same obsidian chit, where lost cities and dry oceans stretch between the last bastions of civilization. Where the First Martians, the monument-builders, are but a haunted memory. Where the Red Martians become decadent and reckless in their last days. Where the Green Martians rule the wastes, remembering a history whose weight would crush a lesser people.
Tonight, find yourself in Vance at festival time. When revolutionaries strike a visiting prince, you’ll need to explore the city’s dark underbelly, before racing across its towered tombs! Save lives, end lives, and earn your water!
Live, fight, and love on Mars, a world of red death and strange mystery, a world of savagery and romance.

The quick start includes:
    A complete adventure set in one of dying Mars’ greatest remaining cities.
    The innovative Wushu rules, for high-flying, swashbuckling adventure.
    Five pre-generated player characters, ready to get into the heart of the action.

Midway through the schedule we’re going to be presenting a new idea for the nWoD “blue books” and Vampire the Requiem with the God Machine and Strix  Chronicles respectively. These both begin with a fiction anthology that combines the best fiction from the last eight years of game books with all new works that immerse the reader in the world as envisioned by the Chronicle. And when we say Chronicles, these aren’t just big adventures but entire reimaginings of the game-line viewed through a strong storyline. These books are designed to present a default setting that Storytellers and players can look to as the consistent story-rich nWoD core or VtR setting. They will contain the rules changes it is clear were needed after eight years of critical thinking and fan commentary, as well as mention of the various nWoD tools that have been developed in that time such as the Tiers, SASs, etc. Basically, here are Chronicles that can be used whole-cloth or in pieces as you see fit, but which are there in their entirety with a rich and immersive background that can be enjoyed for it’s own sake as well.

And then, in August there is Demon the ???- where we continue our rich tradition of not revealing the subtitle although, frankly, none of us remember why we always do that. Demon will build on the setting revealed in the God Machine Chronicle, but will stand entirely on its own as a new and terrifying supernatural game line in 2013.

WoD- God Machine Chronicle Fiction Anthology–. This volume combines already published stories from previous nWoD sourcebooks, and unreleased ones leading up to and hinting at the God Machine Chronicle that touch on the fear and horror that lurks within the World of Darkness.

VtR Strix Chronicle Fiction Anthology–.As with the nWoD Anthology, this one contain classic and new VtR fiction that teases the new Strix Chronicle and provide a richer look at the terror created by the fear of these malevolent spirits.

nWoD- The God Machine Chronicle- This book combines both setting and rules info to create a default Chronicle for nWoD that still allows the sandbox play that nWoD is known for. The Chronicle focuses on the legends of the God Machine that first captivated readers’ interest in the nWoD core rulebook and presents a world darkened by its presence. The general history and specific rules changes of this Chronicle set the stage for the release of Demon: The ???  in August.

VtR- The Strix Chronicle- This book combines both setting and rules info to create a default Chronicle for VtR that still allows the sandbox play that nWoD is known for. The Chronicle focuses on the legends of the Strix- the owl spirits that prey on vampires. A threat unique to VtR and used to great effect in the historical Rome books, this book will show the effects of a world where the threat of their return has warped vampire society. Will contain default tweaks to the rules and in-depth history and backstory of just such a setting.

Kuro is one of those RPGs with an interesting and unusual concept. In this case it's smashing together Cyberpunk with Japanese Horror to create a bleak vision of a high-tech future that's mingling with the occult.

Written by the Septieme Cercle team, otherwise known as the magnificent people behind the awesome Qin: the Warring States and Yggdrasil RPGs, I was looking forward to the kind of cultural attention and detail they've always put into their books. Thankfully I was glad to see that their dedication to preserving and emulating genres and cultures hasn't wavered one bit.

Kuro opens with a quick description of what the line is supposed to look like. The english version of the game will come in three products. Kuro, the corebook, presents the initial setting, while several other products will be released to push the metaplot of Kuro forward towards a second corebook that changes the setting established by Kuro.

I know that some people get iffy with the word "Metaplot" but I think that in Kuro's case it's not quite the heavy handed kind that most people worry about. If anything the writing team made sure that Kuro can run on it's own without advancing the Metaplot forward if thats how the players want to play the game. I think the closest equivalent to this would be White Wolf's Orpheus limited line or books. The first book was a self-contained book and coul easily sustain a corporate campaign for it's entire run. But for those who want more, or want to twist the nature of the game, each supplement introduced elements that shifted the way that the game could be played.

But anyway, back to the review. Kuro also starts off well with a rather large glossary of terms, a mix of both japanese terms and cyberpunk ones that make for interesting reading and will no doubt come in very, very helpful when reading the rest of the book.

The Setting

The Japan of 2046 is one that is very changed. Due to a freak accident and political tensions, Japan has been isolated from the rest of the world, with a multi-national blockade of ships making sure that all traffic in and out of Japan would come to a halt. The result is an isolated, desperate shadow of Japan. While technology has made it possible to hold out, Japan is still very much in a state of flux.

The culture of the setting retains many of Japan's traditional cultures, smashed up against the dystopian nature of cyberpunk genres. Implants and bio-modifications are present, with the occasional android or robot companion as well. However, life hasn't gotten easier, with persistent power outages, and the desperate nature of the average citizen's struggle to survive. Food is mostly cloned and and synthetically created, due to the pressures of the population on Japan's insufficient land area and the international blockade around it.

In this sort of situation, it's not unusal to think that society would begin to backslide. People become desparate, and to make things worse, other things start happening. Supernatural incidents involving ghosts and other, stranger spirits become more and more common. There are several theories on what may have happened but nobody is certain of the exact cause. Because of the frequency of these happenings, various cults and religions have found new life in trying to help (or take advantage) of those desperate for help against the supernatural.

Technology in the world of Kuro is advanced, and in Shin-Edo (New Edo, the new name of Tokyo in the setting) it's not rare to see biotechnology, nanotechnology and various advanced robotics and gadgetry accessible to most of the citizenry. One of the most interestin aspects of the setting is the presence of "Occultech" a mishmash of old shinto beliefs combined with modern technology. Aura reading spectacles, holoprojected ofuda (paper charms usually filled with wards and prayers) and various nanotech serums that serve as ointments. It's a strange and admittedly strong mental image of a cyberpunk setting still strongly rooted in ancient beliefs.

The book goes on to discuss the setting of Shin-Edo, with a remarkably in-depth explanation of the society, security, infrastructure, power and even games and leisure before launching into a generous description of all the districts and wards that make up the city of Shin-Edo. These include many of the more well known ones, such as Roppongi and Shinjuku, but also include the other less popular ones. I also like the little rumors in the call out boxes that can serve as plot hooks for some of the wards.

I'm always happy to see a chapter on the Daily Life of people in a setting, and Kuro doesn't disappoint. This is where they go into detail on the drinking and eating habits of the common man, as well as the specifics of the culture's etiquette.

The next chapter deals with the religions in the setting, and it's role in the world. Shinto is given a focus, with some discussion on Exorcists, something that has seen a recent popularity due to the number of hauntings that have been happening lately.

The Rules

The rules of Kuro are pretty simple. The game runs on a dice pool mechanic that uses a pool of d6's equal to the appropriate Characteristic for the "Action Check." The dice results are added together and compared to a Target Number. In a nice node to the culture, results of 4 are read as 0 and do not contribute to the total. Thankfully, the game also employs an exploding dice mechanic, so any dice that come up as a 6 are added to the pool and rolled again, adding their next result to the total. As long as 6's keep coming up, keep rolling. If you roll a 4, it counts as a zero.

There's an optional rule for Botches if the play group is into that, wherein if a roll results in more 4's than other results, the check is considered to have Botched.

Skills are added to a characteristic roll, and is therefore a static bonus to the total of the roll rather than being added as more dice to the pool. I find this is nice since it helps avoid the bucket of dice syndrome.

Characters

Character creation is a straight forward one, and the game highly encourages that players choose concepts that are in line with the setting. The game works on a basic point-buy system among characteristics, and several derived attributes from the characteristic scores. One of the interesting characteristic in the game is Social Rank, or Kaiso. Kaiso determines the kind of job, standard of living and wealth that a character can have. Interestingly, the player can choose any level of Kaiso as appropriate to his concept, except for the highest (6) which is reserved for the mysterious Genocrats of the setting.

Kuro doesn't introduce anything too earth-shattering at this point, and I don't really mind. It's a stable system, and the mechanics seem sound so far. There's a large collection of skills in the game and many of those who like skills will find interesting specialties to go with them.

Combat

Combat is Kuro is interesting in the fact that it mixes from some different schools. On one hand it's fast and cinematic, but also has several maneuvers to lend it a more tactical flavor. Having options for a Power Attack and a Fast Attack by default is a nice touch, for example, and having characters take multiple actions depending on their Reflexes score make them feel a little more competent than the average man on the street. Ranged combat can be particularly deadly as dodging bullets doesn't seem to be the norm in thi system.

Tech

No Cyberpunk game is complete without a catalogue of arms, armor, biotech, nanotech and robotics, and Kuro doesn't disappoint with this regard. The chapter on gear is huge, and each entry is interesting and occasionally has little anecdotes to spin off a plot hook or two in some of the more interesting items.

GM Section

Kuro is a game with secrets, and those secrets belong in the GM section. I'm particularly happy about the GM section as it was full of things that are actually useful to a GM. Aside from secrets and plot hooks already present in the game as presented in the Player's sections, the GM chapters also delve into helping a GM build the kind of mood that works best for Kuro.

Certainly there's a host of monsters and creatures that can serve for opposition, but the advice is the one that is worth the most for me was the one on trying to emulate Horror, Japanese Style. They don't scrimp on the word count for this section, going full bore on the methods of the madness and the ways by which a GM can instill the unique flavor of asian horror into the games that they run.

Origami

The last part of the book is a scenario that can be used to open a new Kuro campaign. It's an interesting way to start the game, though I do feel that the scenario was a little too heavy on the cyberpunk action and perhaps just a tad too light on the horror elements. That said it's still a good launchpad for new campaigns, and experienced GMs can still pick the scenario apart and season to taste.

---

Kuro is a solid RPG with a unique and well-thought out setting. The mix of technology with horror makes it stand out among other games in the market today, and it holds a lot of promise to fans of cyberpunk and horror games. The artwork is very good, and the layout is easy to read. As always the research and nuance of the writing team in terms of conveying the tone and mood of a setting are superb, and the fictional world of Shin-Edo feels very real.

That said, I can see that GMs may need to work a little harder to establish the tone of the game. With the advancement of tools, weapons and technology, it can be easy for players to lose the horror edge due to being able to face threats with superior firepower. But with a conscious effort to keep the horror angle, I can see a Kuro campaign to be very rewarding with it's fair share of creepy moments.

Kuro is a solid game that goes out to do something unique and succeeds. I'm eager to check out the succeeding products of the line, and how they evolve the setting forward. Fans of sci-fi and horror would do well to have this book in their collection.

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

NOTHING’S FINAL

That’s the first thing to take away. Paul and Mike say clearly that what they’re describing is what they sent to Chaosium and what they hope will be the shape of the game, but that’s in Chaosium’s hands.

Chaosium’s Dustin Wright echoed that in a separate email: The rules are likely to change, maybe a lot, by the time they are published.

Dustin said Chaosium expects Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition to be published in 2013, but there’s no firm date yet.

STRUCTURE

As Paul and Mike put it together, Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition includes a core rulebook, a “slimmed-down” version of the core rulebook, and a separate players book with rules particular to player characters.

They restructured and rewrote the rules from the ground up. They revised everything to fit together more coherently than the 6th Edition, which was built out of the original rules as they evolved over time and a lot of individual rules and chapters that appeared originally in scenarios and campaign books.

Paul and Mike set out to strip the rules down and build them back up again, while keeping the game backwards-compatible so players don’t have to abandon 30 years’ worth of Call of Cthulhu publications.

“It’s the same game,” Mike says of the revisions, “and you’re making the same rolls, more or less, but it’s how you interpret those rolls and the rolls you can make.”

CHARACTERISTICS AND SKILLS

Characteristics in 7th Edition are strictly percentile scores. There’s no Intelligence 12 with an Idea roll of INT x 5 or 60%; you have an Intelligence score of 60% and that’s your roll.

Skills have been reworked entirely, many of them consolidated, particularly combat skills. A single Fighting skill covers Fist/Punch, Kick, Grapple, Head Butt, and hand-to-hand weapon skills. A single Firearms skill covers Handgun, Rifle, Shotgun, and so on. Fast Talk is gone; Charm and Intimidate are in. The rules will include conversion notes to use old characters in the new rules.

Importantly, the 7th Edition rules call on the Keeper and the players to be explicit about what a skill roll means and what will be the consequences for succeeding or failing. That’s usually good advice in Call of Cthulhu, but it’s crucial in the system Mike and Paul have built.

In their system a player can “push” a failed skill or characteristic roll, getting a chance to try again by agreeing to more dire consequences for failure. If you push a skill, failing the retry won’t just mean you don’t get what you want, it means you also might encounter some new threat or dangerous trouble. Player-Keeper communication is key when the players have to decide whether it’s worth pushing a failed roll.

All the minor penalties are gone. Instead there are three levels of success and the Keeper says which one the task requires: success at a standard roll with the full rating, success at half the rating, or success at one-fifth of the rating. Each value is meant to be recorded on the character sheet for each skill and characteristic for easy reference in play.

Interestingly, the hoary Resistance Table is gone. Instead, in opposed tests the Keeper sets the difficulty based on how good the opposition is. If your opponent has about a 40% skill or characteristic rating, you’d roll at your full skill rating to overcome. If your opponent has something like 90%, you need to roll one-fifth your skill to overcome.

THE LUCK ROLL

“Pushing” a skill or characteristic isn’t the only way to turn failure to success. In 7th Edition, the Luck roll becomes a resource you can spend to adjust the results of skill or characteristic rolls.

Let’s say you need to roll 60 or less and you roll 63. You can spend three points of Luck to boost your odds enough to succeed after all. But now your Luck score is three points lower — if you need to make a Luck roll it’s that much less likely to succeed.

The 7th Edition rules mean to make the the functions of the Luck roll more explicit. Paul says, “It’s strictly for external circumstances beyond the player character’s control. So, you’re in the old house, you hear something upstairs. ‘I’m going to run to the kitchen. Are there any knives there?’ It’s a Luck roll.”

Importantly, spent Luck points don’t come back on their own. You can get them back only by calling on a new attribute called Connections during play.

CONNECTIONS

Connections are things that are important to the character. A Connection could be anything — a person, a place, a thing, an abstract idea. “It might be your dear old mum,” Paul says. “It might be the house you grew up in. It might be your dog. If you want to play it, it might be your trusty .38 revolver. Faith in the Lord. Abstract concepts. Whatever is important to your character.”

You can call on a Connection to refresh Luck points, but only once in a given game session for each Connection. The amount of Luck you can refresh by calling on a Connection depends on the length of the game session, one point per hour of play. Or for a one-off, standalone game session, a flat five points.

Each character starts with three Connections. You can gain more through play, mostly by experiencing indefinite insanity due to catastrophic Sanity loss. Each indefinite insanity adds a Connection: Fear of Rats, maybe, or some kind of delusions. You can invoke that Connection, playing up the insanity, to regain Luck points.

But you can have no more than five Connections. And once you hit five, if you suffer another insanity, rather than adding a new Connection it corrupts or perverts an old one. So your Connection to dear old mum might get warped and ugly as your sanity erodes.

INSANITY

Insanity is often played for laughs in traditional Call of Cthulhu games, but Paul and Mike want insanity in 7th Edition to feel increasingly dark, not silly. At the same time they wanted to codify more explicitly what happens to characters who go insane.

With an indefinite insanity, not only do you gain a Connection for that insanity after you recover from the initial, short-term breakdown — the Bout of Madness, as Paul and Mike call it. You also are subject to further breakdowns, further Bouts of Madness, any time you suffer SAN loss later.

As for the shape of insanity in the game, they deliberately set out to take cues more from fiction than from medical manuals, delusions being more interesting to play than, say, catatonia. The form of a Bout of Madness depends on the circumstances. The rules include guidelines for the Keeper.

THE IDEA ROLL

The Idea roll is still in the game, but it’s used a little differently. As Paul puts it, “It’s not, ‘Make your rolls. Oh, you failed. Give me an Idea roll. Oh, you failed that. Oh well, I’ll just tell you anyway, then.’”

The players can always ask for an Idea roll to gain a clue if they feel stymied. If the Idea roll succeeds, they gain the clue. If it fails, they still gain the clue — but the way they gain it puts them in danger.

Advice in the book about scenario design helps the Keeper set up the clues in such a way that the Idea roll won’t often be necessary.

COMBAT

It sounds like the combat rules have gotten a pretty serious overhaul. The traditional exchange of attack roll and defense roll is gone. Attacks are opposed skill rolls. The default result, if the combatants’ rolls are equivalent — both succeed, both fail, both succeed at 1/5, whatever — is that both take some damage. A lopsided result, where, say, you succeed at 1/5 but your opponent fails, means less damage for you and more for your opponent.

Grappling is gone as a separate skill or subsystem. Paul explains, “There are rules that cover things you might want to do, but there’s not a generic Grapple skill. It’s just Fighting with setting a goal.”

The Dodge skill is still there, but it’s mainly useful for trying to get out of the encounter altogether. You can attack or dodge, not both.

Characters are a little more resilient in 7th Edition. Death occurs at a negative hit point level equal to the HP score. If you have 11 HP, you die when you reach -11, not at zero. Along the way you become incapacitated and might be bleeding out, but there’s a larger buffer before death.

The core rulebook includes advice for the Keeper on considering the ramifications of how readily you kill characters. You’re encouraged to think ahead on what your goals are and how that should affect your scenario design.

CHARACTER MOTIVATIONS

The motivations for player characters putting their lives in so much danger gets deliberate attention in 7th Edition. The players book includes a chapter on building investigator organizations as a reason for characters to work together, a common motivation for them to investigate supernatural horrors, and a way to bring in replacements. It includes a number of examples.

On a more personal level, of course, Connections can be used to motivate characters. And the players book includes advice for players on designing characters to suit the game and to facilitate them becoming Investigators.

In the core rulebook, a chapter on scenario design includes advice on writing scenarios to motivate characters.

MONSTERS

Paul and Mike say the monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos are essentially the same, though their combat stats are changed to reflect the new rules.

Monsters are presented with advice for the Keeper on using them in play and adjusting them to suit the needs of the scenario and the campaign. Mike and Paul stress that it’s the Keeper’s job to decide what’s right for the game; the Keeper ought to take ownership of the game just as the players should take ownership of how they play their characters. “You’re the Keeper,” Paul says, “make it how you want.”

Mike says the longstanding monster categories are gone: “We’ve taken away descriptors like ‘lesser servitor race’ or ‘greater independent race.’ They mean nothing to me, and I’m certainly pretty sure they meant nothing to Lovecraft. There’s some sort of hierarchical system of codification of races that . . . make no sense in the Mythos. So we just took those away and now it’s like, a mi-go’s a mi-go.”

MAGIC

For 7th Edition they stripped out a lot of the spells that crept into the rulebook from scenarios over the years but weren’t crucial to the game. (Mike: “Our favorite is Call Fish.”)

Each spell has a baseline description. But each includes guidelines for making it more powerful. Spellcasters with higher Cthulhu Mythos skill and lower Sanity scores, and nonhuman monsters, can do more with magic. But it’s up to the Keeper to set the overall power level of magic and to decide how accessible it will be to the player characters.

As a rule of thumb, using magic costs Sanity, which makes you more prone to picking up new insanities, which become new Connections (“Can’t resist ancient arcane tomes”) that redefine your character in play.

SUMMARY

“It’s still Cthulhu as you know it,” Mike says. “It still plays the same, in a sense. What we’ve done is hung some bells and whistles, and tweaked some bits that we felt didn’t work so well. It’s the same game. We didn’t set out to write a new rulebook. We set out to refresh the rulebook.”

Paul adds, “Sandy Petersen wrote a great game. We’ve just tried to help it along.”

Paul and Mike will run 7th Edition games at GenCon in August and at Concrete Cow in September.

What do you think?

The Pathfinder world is high fantasy in the tradition of epics like The Lord of the Rings, Conan, the Wheel of Time and Game of Thrones.

Az "eme" talán már korszerűtlen ezt belátom....de mégsem csinálhat egy karaktert úgy egy játékos,hogy : hé héhé migiri micsoda orki morkival jötél öccsém." xD xD xD

Az "eme" talán már korszerűtlen ezt belátom....de mégsem csinálhat egy karaktert úgy egy játékos,hogy : hé héhé migiri micsoda orki morkival jötél öccsém." xD xD xD

In a 17th century that didn’t quite happen lies a world of mud, blood, mayhem and magick. England is fast descending into anarchy. A multitude of political and religious factions struggle for supremacy. Magickal pollution taints the countryside. Creatures long dismissed as legends awake. Obsessive scientists meddle with the very elements of nature. Crazed inventors create mad machines.

Fanatics of every persuasion vie for power, while war, famine and witchcraft stalk the land.

The king is dead. Oliver Cromwell and the gigantic clockwork war machines of the New Model Army do battle with the cavalier-alchemists of Prince Rupert for control of the country, while ordinary folk struggle for survival.

In a world where every man is against his brother, can you and your fellow adventurers – armed with musket, sword, clockwork and magick – hold back the tide of war?

Clockwork & Chivalry returns in a complete standalone 2nd edition featuring the Renaissance engine – a fast, grim, heroic D100 role-playing system designed for the world of black-powder weapons, political machinations and fanatical righteousness.

Alchemists, diggers, dragons, ghouls, engineers, mercenaries, puritans, ranters, royalists, satanists, thieves, witches… which side are you on?

“The best British fantasy setting since WFRP 1st edition.”
– Newt Newport, author of OpenQuest