The Inside Scoop on Gaming

This review is long overdue. There's a small story behind it...

When SenZar first came out, it was uniformly flamed on every newsgroup I saw. Word-of-mouth hailed it as "the worst game since Synnibar." So, while compiling a list of RPG companies on my personal homepage, I included a link to Nova Eth's site, and a comment about SenZar possibly being the worst RPG ever.

One of the authors sent me a somewhat indignant but courteous e-mail saying that I sounded like everyone else bashing a game I hadn't even looked at. OK, that was a fair cop. To my surprise, he offered to send me a free review copy, saying if I still thought it sucked, to go ahead and post that. Thus, I felt an obligation to actually review the book, but since I spent the last year and a half overseas, the opportunity to read through the rules and write a review just didn't come up. I hereby correct this oversight, and I hope the folks at Nova Eth will forgive my tardiness, if not my critical appraisal...

The best way to describe SenZar would be to say that this is a game I would have thought was rilly kewl when I was 14. In fact, this is a game I might have written when I was 14. I certainly knew a lot of other gamers in high school who wrote homegrown systems like this. Anyone who's been gaming since their teens has probably seen this kind of game: a personal campaign world stocked with character classes, races, magic spells, and technologies ripped off from -- err, inspired by all of the creator's favorite sci-fi and fantasy series, quantified in something resembling AD&D ("but kewler"), so you have mutant psionic vampire hunters in the same party with high elf demigods armed with laser rifles, somehow coexisting with your basic fighter/thief/cleric/magic-user archetypes.

And that's SenZar, the authors' personal campaign world with a system that resembles a cross between AD&D on steroids and Mortal Kombat.

The background is your basic pretext for dumping every fantasy cliché together with every sci-fi cliché on the same world: once upon a time ("The First Age"), the intergalactic, pandimensional Death Horde used the planet SenZar as a slave world, bringing countless races here to be indoctrinated in concentration camps. But SenZar was endowed with its own sentient life-force, called the Dragon, which inspired the slaves to rebel and drive away the Death Horde? Why? Apparently the Dragon wants lesser beings to ascend to godhood so they can play the "Dragon Game." So for the past Eight Ages (briefly described in the rulebook -- empires rose and fell, new races arrived or were wiped out, new gods appeared and old ones faded or died, slavering hordes of demons periodically invaded, etc.), this menagerie of races has coexisted in a political and ecological hodgepodge that could only exist on the kind of planet envisioned by 14 year-old boys. Kewl!

Examples of some of the races: Azaar (four-armed tribesmen looking for a contract with the WWWF), Demonians (servants of the Death Horde genetically enhanced to always look like sinister bald men in plate mail in perpetual shadow), Drakkans (dragon men), Golgothans (someone really liked "Aliens vs. the Predator"), G'rru (wolfmen), K'ryl (psionic plantmen), Tygor (tigermen), and lots of other rilly kewl races with apostrophes in their names, plus humans, goblins, kobolds (oops -- Khobolds), etc.

Example professions: Battlemage, Dragonslayer, Inquisitor, Mystic Assassin, Shy'R Warrior, Spellsinger, Stalker, plus priests, rogues, rangers, wizards, etc.

If those aren't kewl enough, there is a category called "Freaks," which are a combination of race and profession. You can be a Shapeshifter freak, a Talisman freak, or a Voidspawn freak. Über kewl!

Character creation: Pick a race, then pick a profession. This determines characteristic minimums and maximums. You use Fate Points to buy these up, and can get more Fate Points by using Karma and Codes (disadvantages). Fate Points can also buy Special Powers and skills. Like the rest of SenZar, it attempts to be a hybrid of every good idea the creators could glean from a dozen other game systems, so you have a point-based system grafted onto a class & level system. Characters have Saving Throws, Action Phases, Power Points, Hit Points, CV Bonuses, and lots of other attributes that had mostly gone out of style by the late 80s.

The martial arts system consists of the Black Wyrm and Shy'R styles, lovingly detailed with moves like the Obsidium Power Strike, the Dark Earth Deathstrike, the Sweet Pain of Warhawk, Rynd'r's Phoenix Power Stance, etc. The magic system is even more lovingly detailed, with numerous different schools, ranked by level -- I mean, "Order."

After the descriptions of magical and technological goodies, poisons and diseases, comes the chapter on becoming a god. This is what PCs aspire to do in SenZar. Actually, there are several different kinds of gods in SenZar: you can become a Material God, a Deific God, or an Eternal. Then you get to play the "Dragon's Game," in which apparently, gods try to become even more powerful while killing their rivals....kind of like back when you were an ordinary mortal PC, except you now have Primal Powers. Kewl!

Now, if I actually wanted to play SenZar, I'd probably want to actually understand the rules in more detail, which would be very difficult the way this book is organized. Concepts ranging from world background to game mechanics are constantly referred to before they are explained. The absence of an index does not help. The chapters are reasonably well laid out, but at least half the pages have greyscale background artwork which often obscures the text. The artwork ranges from mediocre to decent -- I've seen worse in more professional games. It's definitely drawn in a comic book style, and if you need more evidence that this is a game designed by and for adolescent males, every single female character illustration reveals improbable amounts of cleavage straining to be free of what few wisps of clothing contain it.

I really can't say this is the worst game I've ever read. It's pretty close to being the worst professionally published game I've ever read, but even there, I can think of a few efforts that were so unintentionally bad, I'd rank SenZar higher just for its gonzo adolescent male appeal. If you're a 14 year-old boy who thinks AD&D is rad, but you'd like to add psionics and Mortal Kombat-style martial arts and weapons of mass destruction, while spending a few hours figuring out all the combat bonuses on your character sheet, SenZar will probably appeal to you. Otherwise, I can't imagine actually playing SenZar, or buying it for anything other than amusement value, and nostalgia for the days when you were a 14 year-old gamer working on your own rilly kewl homebrewed rules.

Style: 2 (Needs Work)
Substance: 3 (Average)

SenZar
Author: Todd King, The Brüne, Joseph Giacone, Jr. Category: game Company/Publisher: Nova Eth Line: SenZar Cost: $24.00 Page count: 252 ISBN: 0-9656145-9-X SKU: NTH 1000 Capsule Review by David Edelstein on 09/16/99. Genre tags: Fantasy Science_fiction Far_Future Post-apocalypse	This review is long overdue. There's a small story behind it... When SenZar first came out, it was uniformly flamed on every newsgroup I saw. Word-of-mouth hailed it as "the worst game since Synnibar." So, while compiling a list of RPG companies on my personal homepage, I included a link to Nova Eth's site, and a comment about SenZar possibly being the worst RPG ever. One of the authors sent me a somewhat indignant but courteous e-mail saying that I sounded like everyone else bashing a game I hadn't even looked at. OK, that was a fair cop. To my surprise, he offered to send me a free review copy, saying if I still thought it sucked, to go ahead and post that. Thus, I felt an obligation to actually review the book, but since I spent the last year and a half overseas, the opportunity to read through the rules and write a review just didn't come up. I hereby correct this oversight, and I hope the folks at Nova Eth will forgive my tardiness, if not my critical appraisal... The best way to describe SenZar would be to say that this is a game I would have thought was rilly kewl when I was 14. In fact, this is a game I might have written when I was 14. I certainly knew a lot of other gamers in high school who wrote homegrown systems like this. Anyone who's been gaming since their teens has probably seen this kind of game: a personal campaign world stocked with character classes, races, magic spells, and technologies ripped off from -- err, inspired by all of the creator's favorite sci-fi and fantasy series, quantified in something resembling AD&D ("but kewler"), so you have mutant psionic vampire hunters in the same party with high elf demigods armed with laser rifles, somehow coexisting with your basic fighter/thief/cleric/magic-user archetypes. And that's SenZar, the authors' personal campaign world with a system that resembles a cross between AD&D on steroids and Mortal Kombat. The background is your basic pretext for dumping every fantasy cliché together with every sci-fi cliché on the same world: once upon a time ("The First Age"), the intergalactic, pandimensional Death Horde used the planet SenZar as a slave world, bringing countless races here to be indoctrinated in concentration camps. But SenZar was endowed with its own sentient life-force, called the Dragon, which inspired the slaves to rebel and drive away the Death Horde? Why? Apparently the Dragon wants lesser beings to ascend to godhood so they can play the "Dragon Game." So for the past Eight Ages (briefly described in the rulebook -- empires rose and fell, new races arrived or were wiped out, new gods appeared and old ones faded or died, slavering hordes of demons periodically invaded, etc.), this menagerie of races has coexisted in a political and ecological hodgepodge that could only exist on the kind of planet envisioned by 14 year-old boys. Kewl! Examples of some of the races: Azaar (four-armed tribesmen looking for a contract with the WWWF), Demonians (servants of the Death Horde genetically enhanced to always look like sinister bald men in plate mail in perpetual shadow), Drakkans (dragon men), Golgothans (someone really liked "Aliens vs. the Predator"), G'rru (wolfmen), K'ryl (psionic plantmen), Tygor (tigermen), and lots of other rilly kewl races with apostrophes in their names, plus humans, goblins, kobolds (oops -- Khobolds), etc. Example professions: Battlemage, Dragonslayer, Inquisitor, Mystic Assassin, Shy'R Warrior, Spellsinger, Stalker, plus priests, rogues, rangers, wizards, etc. If those aren't kewl enough, there is a category called "Freaks," which are a combination of race and profession. You can be a Shapeshifter freak, a Talisman freak, or a Voidspawn freak. Über kewl! Character creation: Pick a race, then pick a profession. This determines characteristic minimums and maximums. You use Fate Points to buy these up, and can get more Fate Points by using Karma and Codes (disadvantages). Fate Points can also buy Special Powers and skills. Like the rest of SenZar, it attempts to be a hybrid of every good idea the creators could glean from a dozen other game systems, so you have a point-based system grafted onto a class & level system. Characters have Saving Throws, Action Phases, Power Points, Hit Points, CV Bonuses, and lots of other attributes that had mostly gone out of style by the late 80s. The martial arts system consists of the Black Wyrm and Shy'R styles, lovingly detailed with moves like the Obsidium Power Strike, the Dark Earth Deathstrike, the Sweet Pain of Warhawk, Rynd'r's Phoenix Power Stance, etc. The magic system is even more lovingly detailed, with numerous different schools, ranked by level -- I mean, "Order." After the descriptions of magical and technological goodies, poisons and diseases, comes the chapter on becoming a god. This is what PCs aspire to do in SenZar. Actually, there are several different kinds of gods in SenZar: you can become a Material God, a Deific God, or an Eternal. Then you get to play the "Dragon's Game," in which apparently, gods try to become even more powerful while killing their rivals....kind of like back when you were an ordinary mortal PC, except you now have Primal Powers. Kewl! Now, if I actually wanted to play SenZar, I'd probably want to actually understand the rules in more detail, which would be very difficult the way this book is organized. Concepts ranging from world background to game mechanics are constantly referred to before they are explained. The absence of an index does not help. The chapters are reasonably well laid out, but at least half the pages have greyscale background artwork which often obscures the text. The artwork ranges from mediocre to decent -- I've seen worse in more professional games. It's definitely drawn in a comic book style, and if you need more evidence that this is a game designed by and for adolescent males, every single female character illustration reveals improbable amounts of cleavage straining to be free of what few wisps of clothing contain it. I really can't say this is the worst game I've ever read. It's pretty close to being the worst professionally published game I've ever read, but even there, I can think of a few efforts that were so unintentionally bad, I'd rank SenZar higher just for its gonzo adolescent male appeal. If you're a 14 year-old boy who thinks AD&D is rad, but you'd like to add psionics and Mortal Kombat-style martial arts and weapons of mass destruction, while spending a few hours figuring out all the combat bonuses on your character sheet, SenZar will probably appeal to you. Otherwise, I can't imagine actually playing SenZar, or buying it for anything other than amusement value, and nostalgia for the days when you were a 14 year-old gamer working on your own rilly kewl homebrewed rules. Style: 2 (Needs Work) Substance: 3 (Average)