My finding NEMESIS was, perhaps odd considering it's 1/3rd Greg Stolze, the result of a Google search gone pleasantly awry. When I found it it was still being ransomed, which led to me waiting impatiently for its release.
Ransoming is a swell thing. Basically, one "holds ransom" a product--in this case, the NEMESIS RPG--and then releases it when a certain ammount of cash is paid. Releasing a ransomed item means it's available for free to everyone. Thanks to the fellows who paid the ransom on NEMESIS; it was worth it.
Kilobits and Pieces
So, what is NEMESIS? The gist: it's designed to be a more modern, action-focused game of Lovecraftian horror than C_ll of Cth_lh_ (note: the old-school-tabloid celebrity-name-hint fill-in-the-vowel thing doesn't work with L_v_cr_ft__n names). The heart of this is a new and rapid system, a focus on a modern setting (ala Delta Green), and no extended essays on foreign nomenclature smack in the middle of the book. I'm glad to say that NEMESIS hits a home run on all of these.
Detwiller is a swell layoutist, so finding your way around NEMESIS is easy. While there's no art, it has a rather cool-looking font, and the actual writing is great at getting the point across. The game kicks off with its basic system, a smart move.
I do have a gripe about layout, though: character creation is effectively split in half across two parts of the book, with ability scores, skills, and the madness meters (more on that later) in Part I, and traits, point costs, and magic in Part II, right before the monsters in Part III. It seems kind of arbitrary and weird, really the only mistake in putting the thing together.
While there's no index, there is a comprehensive table of contents, which is fine, given you can type where you want to go at the bottom of the screen (at least in Adobe Reader).
System Shock
NEMESIS runs on ORE, the One Roll Engine; it's a neat system, so we'll take a fairly extended look at it. It's one of the more aptly-named RPG systems out there: not only can you tell if well you've done on a skill check, but how good and how fast. This is particularly obvious in the combat system, where you can tell if you hit someone, how much damage you did, and where you hit them all on the same set of dice.
Characters are made up of several familiar mechanical bits: statistics (here, they're the atypically-named Body, Coordination, Sense, Mind, Command, and Empathy), skills, traits, and the madness meters (these get their own section below).
The game uses a d10 dice pool, superficially similar to the (new and old) World of Darkness games, but with a critical difference. Instead of reaching a target number, one finds matches. Results are stated as X by Y; a (for example) 2x4 result means you've rolled two results of 4. The number of matches is the "width;" the numbers matched are the "height." Width is degree of success, while height is how fast it got done.
Interestingly, the game prohibits a die pool larger than 10. Statistics can raise higher than 10 for supernatural prowess, but 10 dice is all you can ever roll in a pool. This is a statistical thing--in a system that looks for matches, there's always a chance of failure if you only roll ten dice, no matter how improbably it gets when you're rolling enough. But if you roll 11 dice, you can't help but roll at least one match. The cap keeps a chance of failure.
The entire system fits together brilliantly around this concept. You can attempt multiple actions and use different matching numbers for each action. Your damage in combat is equal to width, while where you hit is set by height. Resisting the onset of madness requires rolling a height at least equal to the stimuli's intensity. (More on that in just a second...)
Equipment and combat rules are robust without being at all difficult or exceedingly crunchy. Here is where the system has its most obvious comparison to the BRP system used by Call of Cthulhu: while classical CoC describes combat as the arena of the desperate or those unaware that bullets ammount to precicely nil against the monstrocities they face, NEMESIS characters get fancy combat manouvers, martial arts abilities, and multiple action rules. If they're going to go crazy facing the Mythos, they're gonna go down kicking, screaming, and shooting.
Speaking of Madness...
NEMESIS makes use of an updated Madness Meter from Unknown Armies, Stolze's seminal postmodern horror/fantasy/action/what-the-hell? action game. The madness meter is to sanity systems as tracking damage conditions is to hit points.
There's four meters: Violence, The Unnatural, Self, and Helplessness. If a character is stressed by a stimuli--say, shooting someone for Violence, hearing a friend die over the telephone for Helplessness, seeing a shambling zombie for The Unnatural, or betraying his family for Self--he must check against it with the Equilibrium skill and a different attribute for each ability. If he succeeds, he gets a hardened point ("notch") for that meter; if he fails, he gets a, err, failed notch.
The more hardened notches a character has, the more resilient he is to losing more; a CSI well versed in seeing dead bodies is unlikely to get in a tizzy over spilled blood. However, if he has ten hardened notches, he simply shuts down a significant portion of his emotions, becoming sociopathic. Failed notches lead to that good ol' spiral of insanity resulting in mental collapse. It's a vibrant system that, if not entirely realistic (what is, really?) feels close enough to the real thing to sting.
Accompanying the madness rules are rules for recovery. In Call of Cthulhu's sanity system, San 0 is the theoretical it. Here, as in Unknown Armies, anybody able to put in the effort can come back from craziness, a somewhat more uplifting mechanic than one associates with Call of Cthulhu.
Magic and Miscelleny
Late in the book (file?), we're given a look at how characters are made; their point cost is given in spendable dice. The ammounts are ranked by power level: average Joes and Janes have 50 or so dice, experts have 75 dice, and powered super-folk have 150 or more. Characters in NEMESIS may take traits--from mundane traits like having a good childhood or having authority to supernatural niftiness like flight, superior abilities or skills, and natural armor--depending on the campaign. It's a good system for Hellboy-style games, and, incidentally, is listed as an example of high-powered play.
The game reccomends buying traits before skills and statistics, which I heartily reccomend (it helps you from having to reshuffle your math if you buy too much of anything else). You can also take voulentary failed or hardened ranks in madness meters to get extra dice (and make your character ready for murderin' and spell-slingin').
Neat dice tricks abound here in the form of Expert and Trump dice, both of which are granted by GM-permission-required traits. Expert skill dice are either set by the player, each at a different value, or they cancel out a penalty and are rolled like normal dice. (For instance, a character has 3 expert dice and 3 normal dice, and faces a -2 penalty to his check; he rolls 2 expert dice like normal, sets the third, and rolls the rest of the pool without it being reduced in size.)
Trump dice are rolled last and are set to whatever number the player wants; in essense, a character always succeeds so long as he has at least one die and one trump die. These are quite powerful, hense the "GM permission," the trait requirements, and their costing more dice to purchase.
If your character starts off a little wrong in the head, Unnatural-ly speaking, you can pick up a spell or two. This is really the only part of the book that's a little unclear--while the prerequesite (at least 1 hardened Unnatural notch per die in its pool, or 1 failed notch per two), it doesn't say the limit you have at character creation. (I personally rule it as having up to the character's total hardened + 2xfailed notches in spell dice.) Casting a spell is the only thing in ORE that requires multiple rolls--one to confirm a spell's casting, the second for its Unnatural stress, and the third the spell's actual pool. Spells, interestingly, have their own pools, a neat way of handling spell power.
Rounding out the book is a small selection of miscelleneous fiends--CoC traditions like shoggoths, ghouls, and deep 'uns. Their presence is appreciated.
Not All Roses
(If you know what that's referencing...)There's just a few hiccups with the system; while not exceedingly bad, they keep NEMESIS from being a straight-up 5. First of all, skills are just too damn granular for my tastes. I can do granular skills--I'm cool on GURPS, for instance--but it's not my preference. It's possible to houserule them as being less grainy, 'course.
The statistics start at 3 and (normally) cap out at 5. While this isn't a bad thing in itself, it seems a bit pricey, particularly for point totals; a 50-die normie with all-average statistics spends 36 dice, 72%! of his dice. Mind, madness notches can help, but it still seems a bit much.
Last, the Equilibrium skill is, well, a bit good for a skill. If characters expect to last long at madness, they'll do good to sink at least one die into it. If nearly everyone's going to end up taking it, it might as well be a discounted statistic.
Postarithmatic
There's just not a lot of games this good and this free. Hasten yourselves and pick it up--you've got nothing to lose but a few megs of space. Here's NEMESIS itself and Project Nemesis, a thurough fansite. I highly reccomends it.
Concerning its comparisons with BRP: Call of Cthulhu is, well, Call of Cthulhu, and it does what it does well. But what does it do well? ...Call of Cthulhu. It's the definitive Lovecraftian RPG, not to mention the first, and defined horror roleplaying. How does NEMESIS relate?
NEMESIS takes over where Call of Cthulhu d20 started: making Call of Cthulhu, and the Cthulhu Mythos itself, better suited to non-Call-of-Cthulhu-style modes of play. NEMESIS does action well, is scalable in power--even moreso than Call of Cthulhu d20--and alloys to other genres much easier than out-of-the-box CoC. It's not pure gold like Call of Cthulhu d20--naturally, because the authors don't have ample ample cash to spend on a stable of artists, thus somewhat waylaying its maximum Style potential--but it's definitely a dire statue hewn from a single massive block of jade.
For a clear layout and (almost always) clear text, it gets a 3 Style. For a kickin' game system that still needs a little nudging and customization to reach unadulterated awesome, it gets a 4.
So, those links are up there, waiting to be clicked. Get to clickin'!
