Review of Zero

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You are one with the hive mind. All of your emotional and physical needs are taken care of by Queen Zero. All is bliss within the Equanimity. Until...

Suddenly, the buzz of voices in your head is gone. What just seconds ago was warm and familiar is now foreign and frightful. Everyone around you continues to perform their assigned tasks, but a few other biomechs in the chamber are also looking around. They too look scared, confused....*aware*. Before you even have a chance to think, however, you hear the tramping of feet and know with sinking certainty that you probably won't have to worry too much about your sudden severance from the Equanimity...because you'll be dead.

Zero, the new RPG from Archangel Entertainment, places you in the role of a Rogue - a biomech that has somehow, for some reason, "lapsed" from the Equanimity. Queen Zero rules over an underground society of humans who are trained from birth to be part of the "Equanimity", which is similar to an insect-like "hive mind". Each child is chosen to belong to one of five different worker castes, and is implanted with the necessary cybernetic hardware to allow her to perform her job in an efficient manner. All members of the Equanimity communicate by telepathy - speech is a forgotten art. The society lives in huge underground caverns, with miles of twisting tunnels and forgotten, hidden places.

Once they have been cut off from the rest of the society, the players are faced with some interesting dilemmas. They're underground (and in fact don't even know of the existence of an "aboveground") with no light, no food or water, no heat. They have only the specialized skills that their caste knows. They're like newborn children. The environment conspires against them even as they're being hunted be Queen Zero's forces. And who knows what strange, mutated horrors lurk around each corner....

The game mechanics are good, being both simple and easy to learn. Players choose from one of the five castes available. The caste a player chooses may limit her choices of skills. An interesting idea is that the more skills a character chooses the less proficient he is at any of them; the 'ole "jack of all trades" principal brought to role playing. The number of skills chosen is that players "Focus Rating". When attempting any action, two six-sided dice are rolled and multiplied. If the result is greater than the focus rating, the character succeeds. Scoring much higher than the target results in greater success at the chosen task. It's easy and it works. Emphasis is not on massive amounts of dice-chucking, but on role playing.

The book contains background info on the hive, Queen Zero and her cohorts, and various creatures and NPCs. It also has a nice introductory adventure that allows you to introduce the players to the setting as well as bringing them all together as "lapsed" characters. It has some info on equipment, but it's not emphasized. The game is not about fighting simply because the characters would be most likely pasted in any direct confrontation with the Hive. Instead, guile and smarts are the key to surviving in Zero. If you're into munchkin or power RPGing, you might want to skip Zero. A campaign that gave the players too much power would soon see all the mysteries of the Hive and Queen Zero revealed, leading to a very dull game indeed.

My biggest complaint about the book is the price. Zero has a number of pages of full color art that the game was supposedly based on. While it's decent, it's not really earth-shattering. The book is seventy- eight pages, with fourteen of those being artwork and three being Table of Contents and Character Sheets. That leaves about sixty-one pages of large-type text. I read the whole thing in about an hour. At $25.00, I expect a bit more from a book. If one looks to other RPG companies, you see that the same amount of money can buy a *whole* lot more. I hope that Archangel's next supplement for it will have more meat, less flash.

Zero is an intriguing game. When I read the synopsis I immediately thought "Borg rip-off". After reading through the whole thing, though, I realized that while it does have obvious parallels it stands very well on its own. The setting is an engaging one for a role playing game. I know an RPG is interesting when I immediately start thinking up scenario ideas after reading it. I'm curious to see the supplements Archangel adds to the system; hopefully they'll continue to grow the game. I think Zero would be an *excellent* introduction to role playing, and as such would make an excellent holiday gift for a budding gamer.

(C)1997 Ronald Olszewski

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)