Kazei 5 Review

[steelwulf99]

Kazei 5 book and .pdf review by Scott (steelwulf99)

 

So, why should you trust my review?

 

The short answer is that you shouldn't. You should check things out for yourself - not so hard if you're at your local gaming store thumbing through the book. Much harder online. Hopefully this review will be beneficial to those of you in the latter category. A note on my spelling - I am in New Zealand, so the Queen's English shall be the order of the day. Unsuspecting Americans, prepare to be ambushed by extra U's and a dearth of Z's in words!

 

 

Physical considerations

 

The book is made in the style of 5E supplements. That is to say it is black and white interior, printed on 80gsm paper. The cover is glossy colour and seems to be 300gsm paper stock. The book is perfect bound and my copy has no print or binding defects. The book itself is large, double the page count of the UNTIL Handbook HERO Games kindly bundled with it as a free gift. It's printed Letter sized, which is not surprising, but still nice. As a non-US native I have gaming books printed in both A4 and Letter and I believe that Letter dimensions make such books more pleasant to hold and use than the thinner and taller A4 dimensions.

 

 

The cover

 

I'm going to state right here and now that not only do I dislike the cover, but it actually put me off discovering this book. If I'd had known what the content of the book was like I would have purchased it the moment it was released. But I digress, so let's examine the cover in more depth.

 

There's some cleanly done anime-inspired artwork of a sports car, a cat girl and a hot chick in tight clothing in a funny pose (it turns out she's an incredibly powerful psychic and she is floating just above the ground), all on an oddly contrasting background, with the book title, Kazei 5, and the tagline - animepunk roleplaying. After reading the book, the cover makes much more sense! However I still can't shake the sensation that the book would have been better served by a cover which is more representative of the general content - so for version three let's see a more dynamic cover with espers dueling, mecha/power armour bouncing around and all sorts of the usual cyberpunk suspects blazing away at one another.

 

 

World Content

 

This is the fluff of the book. It's the underlying theme throughout and the direction the book follows. There are sections on what the world is like, how it got that way, along with more detail of the Neo York area (transplantable easily into a generic Cyberpunk or even a Shadowrun-esque game), and a little on what could happen in the world.

 

The last bit intrigues me - you see, the entire book is a labour of love for the author, Michael Surbrook, and clearly Kazei 5 started out as a campaign name which gained traction and now is a fully realised supplement. All throughout the book are little reminders that what is in your hands is the result of years of testing and tweaking. From the minor cues, such as the now outdated names in the glossary for espers, to bigger hints like the massive NPC roster, the book delivers a sense of being part of a living setting. So when I read about future timelines I'm not picturing in my mind how things could be, instead I get a feeling that somewhere on earth, some people gathered around a table and played out those events... that the events were so entertaining they were included in the book as ideas for stories and campaign arcs.

 

Mechanical Content

 

This is the crunch of the book - the templates, the prebuilt esper powers and the equipment tables. The book has been written with a view to being used alongside Dark Champions. As far as character templates go, there are templates for all of the concepts which Kazei 5 covers.

 

You start with a racial base:

Are you an unaugmented person? Maybe you are genetically upgraded, part of societies wealthy elite. You could be replaced with enough machinery to be called a cyborg, or you could even be a replicated (vat-grown) human.

 

Let's stop the crunch overview and talk about replicated humans for a moment - these are one of the defining features of Kazei 5. That cat girl on the cover? Replicated human. What if you don't like cat-people? No problem. You can use the system as is, just changing any animal features to something like "neon pink hair". The complication is based on being distinctively vat-grown, so mix up the special effects to meet the needs of your own game. This is excellent metagame thinking on the part of the author, and it's stuff like this which makes so much of the content transplantable into similar genres.

 

Back to crunch - after you pick your racial template, you can pick a professional template (should you desire it) and there is an appropriate spectrum of roles already costed out. The list is heavily influenced by games such as Shadowrun and Cyberpunk - this is a good thing though.

 

You flesh out the last few points of your character with cybernetics and/or skills, raid the equipment lists and off you go. The cyberware section is very good, it covers most of the hardware your PCs are likely to want, and you can always use the existing kit as inspiration for your own implants.

 

My observation on the equipment lists: the list of firearms is good, and looks like it should be supplemented with something like a generic HERO equipment book. That's OK. What I really missed was stats for power armour suits. There's great artwork of power armour/mecha all through the book - but very little actualised and given form in the equipment section! It may be because in anime such suits (when used by heroes) tend to be rare and personalised, or it may be a page count consideration. Whatever the reason, I'd love to see a Kazei 5 supplement dedicated to equipment.

 

Before I move away from the crunch and into the conclusion, I'd like to discuss espers. These guys are heavyweight psionics in the Kazei 5 setting, and Surbrook has cleverly come up with a blanket limitation on all esper powers, which themes them powerfully into his world view. Whenever an esper uses a power, there are uncontrollable side effects, which scale with the AP limit of the power used and the HERO mechanic used to adjudicate Psionics.

 

The esper template in Kazei 5 uses a multipower pool for the psionic powers. Surbrook also discusses the use of variable power pools and I can see the powers would adapt well to a skill roll based system. You can work this into your game (or ignore it outright if you want pure cyberpunk), but the important thing here is that Surbrook hasn't dictated any single one right way. He gives you a rock solid list of powers, costed with AP & RP, but without frameworks, and he gives you that lovely side effect limitation. You're on your own for the rest, but your starting foundation is very solid.

 

 

Conclusion

 

This book will appeal to you if you like anime, if you like mecha, if you like Cyberpunk. If you wanted to play Shadowrun with HERO system, then get this book! You can use as much or as little of the anime stuff as you want, so this book could provide the foundation for a classic Cyberpunk game, or something as gritty as a Bladerunner inspired game.

 

There are some minor typographic errors, but they really are minor (and all of my gaming books do have some errors in them, so no-one is immune). The art is variable in quality, but themed well.

 

The book is well written. Surbrook isn't a full time game author and designer - but he should be.

[Susano]

Re: Kazei 5 Review

 

Thank you for the review.

[Susano]

Re: Kazei 5 Review

 

BTW - if at any point you develop your own Exo or APEX suits, I'd like to see them. I hope to have an supplement for K5 in a few years, and would love to include player-created ideas.