WindZone is a 144-page perfectbound book with a rather plain cover in black & white with touches of colour (charitably it could be called evocative), and interior black & white art all done by co-creator Michael Paul Simon. The art is in many different styles, from anime and furry cartoons to some well-rendered dark pen & ink work, with only a few pieces being better than RPG average and more falling at the amateurish end of the scale; many of the pieces have little or no apparent connection with the rules or setting. The layout is a simple two-column arrangement (with no particular attention given to making adjacent columns come out to even lengths), and there are few large expanses of whitespace, but plenty of odd chunks of it are scattered about. The border treatments are nice, and having the chapter titles at the bottom of each page is a nice touch.
The writing has problems. Along with not being spellchecked, an independent proofreader would probably have caught a number of easy-to-correct mistakes (such as swapping the definitions of the Lift and Carry terms midway through in the section on weights), and might have convinced the authors to settle on a single solution to the question of the third person neuter pronoun (which swaps between "he," "they," "it," and rarely "she" throughout the book, frequently within a single sentence). There are numerous cross-references in the book, but by section header, not page number, which means that (since the book has no index) the reader is required to flip to the table of contents and then scan through the four columns of section names to find where to go for a cross-reference.
WindZone is an RPG set on a flat world of infinite dimensions; without the consistency restrictions that a finite world sets on setting and genre, WindZone is a universal system and a semi-universal setting, supporting tech levels from "Caveman/Prehistoric" to "Futuristic 2100 AD+" and settings from fantasy to planet-bound SF (the atmosphere being infinite in upwards vertical extent and the ground being infinite in downwards vertical depth as well). But no attention is paid to the question of how close you can put a prehistoric area and a high-tech area without causing cognitive dissonance; the actual details of the assumed setting are scattered throughout the rules section, and then fleshed out minimally in a four-page appendix (the first place in the book where it’s explicitly stated that the default setting for a WindZone campaign is a high-tech metropolis; if they’d made this decision right from the start of the book, they could have used the space devoted to hide armour and rowed war galleys to more detail about the chosen setting)(or for that matter, an explanation of why, along with Origin Of Civilization 5000 BC-500 AD tech level galleys, there are Futuristic 2100 AD+ tech level oar-using galleys in the setting)(and while I’m asking for the moon, maybe an editor or proofreader would have suggested "Age of Empires" or even "Imperial" in place of "Empirical" as the name for the tech level described as "British Empire, U.S. Revolution War, U.S. Civil War, 1300 AD-1950 AD").
The laws of physics are somewhat different here: instead of a sun rising as the planet spins, day and night are the product of the wind that blows constantly across the plain with no source or destination: every 12 hours the wind changes intensity, from a calm breeze that generates daylight as it passes, to a softer whisper of wind in which the light is reduced to a soft glow. Once the morning or night breeze has blown in to change the local light conditions, the wind is then free to pick up, die down, and/or change direction, with no affect on the lighting, although different wind speeds and directions change the colour of the sky (with no details given for which directions correspond to which colours, assuming there is any such constancy to it). It might have been interesting (and consistent) to have the light get brighter if the wind picked up (imagine the brilliance of a hurricane) or drop to absolute darkness in a calm, but like many other things in this book the authors failed to follow up on the implications of their design decisions, and the whole day/night breeze motif reads as a kludge required to accommodate day and night cycles on a world that shouldn’t have them.
Fire is radically different in the WindZone setting. Burning matter vaporizes without releasing heat or light. The only ways to generate heat are through magic or by finding certain minerals that release heat naturally. Magical fire is rare enough that a character without Medicine or Survival skills can’t figure out how to put the fire out by rolling on the ground.
While there are surface dwellers in the setting, most sentients live on islands floating in the sky, ranging from 1,000-meter-radius rocks to entire flying kingdoms. Rocks generate heat in this world, so the surface is always comfortably warm, but the higher you go in altitude, the colder the air gets; floating rocks generate heat as well, but a small rock at a high altitude will be a miniature arctic waste (part of the infinity of possible settings for campaigns), and only big rocks are inhabitable when you get high enough. No rule is given for the rate that temperature decreases with altitude or rock size, though.
And just as the majority of land surfaces the campaign is going to be concerned with are aerial, so too do most of the PC races fly: either with their own wings, through magic, or in high-tech air cars. The seven sentient races are essentially humans with bird wings sprouting from their backs (Avians), humans with bat wings sprouting from their backs (Chiropterans), wingless humans who fly by force of will (Hyons, derived from "High Ones," and Darkons, an outcast group), flightless humans (Lowons), flightless cat people (Felinoids), and the half-breed mixes of most of the other races (Gamin) that are able to fly using tiny wings that sprout from odd places on their bodies, such as eyebrows or ankle bones. The social interactions between the different races and a bit of the history of race relations is detailed, but generally with little context (e.g., the war between the Hyons and the Darkons is described but nowhere is it stated how long ago the war was fought; is it part of the legendary past of the races, or are there veterans of the war still alive and angry?).
And aside from the above, details of the societies of each race and on the conventions for naming characters of each race (with the naming section longer than the society section for some of the races), the stats for various vehicles and weapons at various tech levels, the half-page descriptions of three "places to go" and the one-paragraph sketches of three guilds (mercenaries, mages, thieves; remember, this is supposed to be the equivalent of 2100 AD society), that’s all of the setting information for WindZone: no maps of the setting metropolis (heck, only four paragraphs of text about it), only three of the six one-paragraph adventure seeds takes place in the city.
My favourite line of tortured prose and logic (from the Inhabitants chapter): "The world of WindZone is a vast and unending place and there is a great likelihood that describing all the creatures of WindZone is outside the scope an capability of this tome." Then follows a reprint of all the non-rules text for each of the PC races, and descriptions of 10 creatures, all of them flying except for the horses, donkeys, mules, cattle, and oxen (grouped in a single entry as Riding Beasts/Beasts of Burden) used by the Lowons in low-tech regions, running the gamut from generic fantasy creatures (pegasi and rocs) to the ridiculous ("Djinn are a race of extreme creatures with infinite powers," who are able to grant 333 wishes), with only one setting-specific creature (the "windless," a vampire that sucks a person’s Wind Affinity (a primary stat that determines a PC’s flight speed and his pool of magic points) out of him, instead of blood or life; they also use a variety of high-tech weapons, such as guns with Wind Affinity-seeking bullets, apparently even at tech levels where guns haven’t been invented).
As for the WindZone mechanics, characters have six primary statistics (five relatively standard, and the aforementioned Wind Affinity), plus seven relatively standard figured statistics. Primary stat values range from 0-30, although PCs start with an average of 12 in each (calculated by one of three different methods) and an absolute range of 2-22. Dice checks in the game can be 3d10 rolled against a stat, opposed checks of 1d10 plus a stat vs. an opponent’s 1d10 plus a stat, or percentile rolls against a target number. Instructions are provided on how to get results other than 1-10 (e.g., 1d7 for auto-repeating laser pistol damage, or 1d3 for farm implement damage) when other dice types are called for.
Characters are given a stock of skill points to spend on skills (most of which are pretty standard, and add +10 per level on percentile rolls) and advantages (along with standards like Direction Sense or Luck, my favourite was Aesthetics, which "allows you to make your character one of surpassing beauty or ugliness"; it costs the same number of points to be beautiful as ugly, the best bit being that changes bought with this advantage "[don’t affect] game balance: a character with the aesthetic change of having one arm would not be affected in the same way as someone whose arm was forcibly removed in combat within game play"). To buy skills during character creation, one merely pays the skill’s level, but to buy or improve a skill later the cost of each additional level doubles, up to 16,384 skill points to learn a skill to 14th-level. None of a character’s skills can be more than two levels above his next highest-level skill, so as the PC improves the skills he finds useful, he’ll eventually find himself forced to raise his least useful skills in order to keep advancing the good ones (so if he has Melee Weapons 7, Animal Handling 5, Advanced Medicine 3, and Juggle 1, and wants to improve his Melee Weapons score, he’ll first have to raise Animal Handling by one to keep it within two of the desired Melee Weapons, which will itself require raising Advanced Medicine, which will require raising Juggle).
New skill points can be earned in play for finishing adventures, succeeding at skill use at critical moments, roleplaying well, or by simply rolling the exact target number needed when using a skill (including in combat); essentially a 1% chance of getting a handful of XP each time a percentile roll is made for any reason. One interesting little rule here is that when the GM divides up the experience award at the end of an adventure, "You can also not award all players the same number of points"; certainly don’t want GMs to accidentally give two players the same number of XP after an adventure.
Pretty much any character can learn to use magic, buying spells with skill points, the cost doubling with each spell level up to 8,192 skill points to learn a 14th-level spell (although it’s recommended that PCs be restricted to 13th-level and below spells)(note that the cost for a 14th-level spell is only half that for a 14th-level skill; a 1st-level spell costs 1 point and then the cost doubles from that, but a level-1 skill costs 2 points and then the cost doubles from that point, causing an awkward disconnect between the two level progressions), and casting them by spending Wind Points (one of the figured stats). Most spells are familiar fantasy standards, but one interesting quirk is the fact that darkness spells work by quelling the wind in the area of effect (since moving wind is what creates daylight), so not only is the area dark, but a number of other spells (e.g., Levitation, Gust, Thunder) are negated as well.
Combat is fairly simple: the attacker’s Melee score (even for missile weapon use) plus appropriate skills (here’s where the differentiation between melee weapons and missile weapons would come in) plus situation modifiers gives him a target number he must roll below. If he’s successful, the defender must roll below his Defence score plus appropriate skills plus modifiers to avoid the attack. If the attack still makes it through, and the defender is wearing armour, things then get a bit more complex. If the defence roll was over the target number, but less than the target number plus the current defensive value of the armour the armour absorbs the damage (and thus has its defensive value decreased for subsequent attacks). And if the defence roll is over the sum of the target number and the armour value, the defender takes damage to Endurance, and when that runs out to Life Points. Unfortunately, the result for armour use when the defence roll lands in the range between the target number and the target number plus the armour value is another misstated rule: if it weren’t for the example of combat (in which the rule is applied correctly) nobody would be likely to figure out the author’s intent.
Nothing particularly elegant, and no real advancements over other RPGs in the mechanics. Moreover, the mechanics betray as many design oddities as the setting material and the general writing. For instance, on a table to randomly roll the familiars of Avian PCs, one of the results is "Typical (sparrow, jay)," but the probability of rolling that result is the same as for rolling any of the other seven types, which means that 82% of Avian familiars will be atypical.
And then there’s the matter of linear (but not any other kind of) measure. The game sort of uses the metric system. Distances are measured in hexes that are "approximately 10 meters wide," and larger size measurements are given metric prefixes (kilohex, megahex, etc.). The thought that distances could be measured in metres themselves, with a kilometre being exactly 1,000 metres (instead of being approximately 10,000 metres) seems to have gone right by the authors. A handy chart is provided for those who can’t multiply by 10 without assistance.
At one point in the book, the authors say that they’ve enjoyed playing in the WindZone setting for 15 years and that they hope readers will do the same. Unfortunately, this book supplies hardly a hint of the campaign background one would assume would have been built up over those 15 years, meaning the GM will have to start from scratch without the benefit of whatever it was that made the setting interesting for its creators, and the game mechanics are different than those of other RPGs without necessarily being better and in some ways being rather awkward. WindZone’s production values are low, its focus scattered, and its promise unfulfilled.
