Before I begin this review, I want to be upfront regarding my relationship with the company that publishes this book. Black Tokyo is published by Skortched Urf' Studios, under the Otherverse Games imprint. While I personally am not affiliated with the imprint, I have freelanced for Skortched Urf' Studios several times in the past; in fact, as of the time of this writing, I have another product in production through them, to be released relatively shortly.
I honestly don't believe that any of the above compromises my ability to review this book fairly and accurately. I'm not attempting to act as a shill for the publisher; I just want to say what I think regarding this book. Some may be inclined to that think my opinion is skewed, or simply untrustworthy, due to my having worked with the publisher before (and currently); I can't really change anyone's mind if they think so, but I maintain that that isn't so. Either way, I wanted to be upfront about it.
Now, on to the review.
Introduction
For those who don't know, Black Tokyo's subject matter is best described by the book's subtitle, "The Hentai SRD." For those of you who don't know what "hentai" means, it's basically anime porn (and if you don't know what anime is, go Wikipedia it real fast). The book is a d20/OGL sourcebook regarding sex. No wait, let me correct myself: it's a sourcebook regarding sex as depicted in hentai anime, which means rapacious demons (usually with tentacles) are par for the course here, along with things such as perverted catgirls, lonely nerds who "get" girls with weird powers, and all manner of fetishes.
As a note, while I've endeavored to keep this review as clean as possible, it's impossible to talk about this product without dealing with subjects that some people might find offensive (see above). As you've probably gathered, I'll be frankly discussing them in the course of this book; discussions about even the most perverse of acts can still be done without vulgarity, after all.
When I first a description about what Black Tokyo was, I was honestly very excited. I don't believe that any particular subject in RPGs should be avoided out of hand, and as such the fact that sex has always been given exactly that treatment has always slightly irked me. "At last," I thought after reading the product's description, "this will be like the Book of Erotic Fantasy, but done right!" And though the price tag seemed a bit high for a PDF (even considering the book's length), I quickly fell upon it once it was released. When I finished reading, my enthusiasm had been curbed, and I had to wonder if perhaps my expectations had set the bar a bit too high, or if my thoughts of the final product were fair based on its own merits.
Artwork
Regarding its visual presentation, Black Tokyo does a good job with its artwork, the majority of which is color. The cover depicts a sexy woman of asian-descent lying on a futon in her underwear, giving the reader a smoldering look as one hand reaches towards her crotch, though it's hidden by her raised legs. The back cover has the obligatory blurb, with a picture of a girl cosplaying (that is, in a costume) as a cat-eared maid, smiling as she lifts up her skirt with one hand to show herself off, her panties having slid down to mid-thigh. Most of the interior art follows more closely with the back cover than the front, showing various pictures of people who are not only naked, but more often than not engaged in some sort of sexual act. The quality of the art ranges from just okay to being rather good, but in several places the pictures are unfortunately pixelized, which is rather unflattering, to say the least.
Each page has, on alternating sides, a vertical line of Japanese text bordering the edge of the page. The is a mixture of red (and slightly messy, as though done with a large brush) mix of hiragana and kanji, though I can't determine if it's spelling anything out in particular. A red page number appears next to the border on each page, and a black header with the product's name and subtitle is across the top of each page also. There's no printer-friendly or clean version of the book that comes with it, so that might be a drawback for some, though the owner of Skortched Urf' Studios has said that those interested in such a work - and have already bought the book - should contact him to discuss it more.
Content
The book opens with a section from the author describing the hentai genre as a whole, and it's place in RPGs. Specifically, Black Tokyo focuses on horror-themed hentai, which contain aspects of the supernatural that, oftentimes sexually, plague humanity. In this case, the demons might still be out to invade our reality the way they are in a lot of RPGs, but here they'll be forcibly breeding with human women to raise an army, or need the sexual fluids from a certain virgin girl to open a gate to their realm, etc. Horror hentai is like most other dark-adventure genres, but with a distinctly erotic focus.
After giving us this overview, the author then specifically calls out some of the aspects of hentai that are both the most pervasive, and most likely to offend: incest, lolicon, and rape. Regarding incest, he notes that while the book does touch on it, it's fairly subdued, only being used with a handful of powers and abilities. Lolicon, however (the sexualization of girls that appear/are prepubescent) is something that Black Tokyo completely ignores; it may certainly happen, but the book doesn't mention it past this section. Regarding the subject of rape, however, the author admits that it's simply too large a staple of horror hentai to be minimized or ignored. His suggestion is that, after discussing it with the players, determine which are comfortable with such a thing possibly happening to their characters, and for those who aren't, simply make sure it never happens to their PCs, no matter what's going on in the plot. Likewise, if a player decides he's not comfortable with it, the GM should accommodate him to preserve the fun of the game.
This section was where some of my zeal for the book began to diminish. For a product that calls itself "the hentai SRD" and focuses specifically on horror hentai, immediately zeroing in on some things as being in bad taste seems somewhat hypocritical, particularly compared to some of the things this book deals with later. It handles the incest theme pretty well, giving it some few specific feats and powers, but ignoring the issue of lolicon seemed like overkill. Is it really that hard to, say, design a flaw (a la Unearthed Arcana) to have a character be one size category smaller than normal, and have the physical attribute modifiers of a child (from the MSRD)? You do that, and there's your nod to the lolicon aspect right there, without having it be gratuitous (not that gratuity should be an issue here).
Likewise, the section where the author talks about rape deals only with the possibility that the PCs themselves could become rape victims. This glaringly ignores what I think it a much greater possibility: that the PCs themselves could force themselves on some of the NPCs they come across. Virtually no mention is made of this possibility (though it could be inferred, as some magic items, equipment, etc. have special powers against rapists), which seems to leave DMs who run into that situation out in the cold. Again, dead minimum, a set of clarifying rules regarding what kind of combat action it is to rape someone would have, at the very least, helped to manage that before it becomes an issue - because if the PCs are at all inclined to do that (and if they're playing less-than-morally-stellar characters in a horror hentai game, where rape victims often can't help but enjoy what's happening to them, then that's a real possibility) then it will become an issue (particularly when the DM decides that the schoolgirl the PC is assaulting is actually a mage, and she unleashes a lightning bolt right in his face as he's raping her).
After this, the author spends a little bit of time talking about some of the other products he's written that could conceivably be useful in a Black Tokyo game. While rather shameless, there are some good ideas here for related material (and some of Chris's other works are quite sexual anyway), and besides, this book isn't one that's too concerned with being shameless anyway.
The first crunch portion of the book is over sixty feats. Almost all of these are new, though I recognized a few from elsewhere. Most of these are exceptionally smutty, and many are downright filthy in what they describe. A feat to let you control the women you impregnate via your demon spawn? Check. A feat to let you remotely cast spells on someone after you've masturbated into their clothes? Check. A feat to let a woman pull someone into her womb and kill them there? You better believe it (that one had one or two related feats, as well). This part of the book was excellent in giving new abilities that perfectly encapsulated the feel of what it's shooting for. These are horror erotica at its finest.
The prestige class section maintains the high bar set by the feats section. There are only seven new prestige classes here, but they do a great job of truly delivering not just erotic character ideas, but innovative ones as well. The Ghostkiss Investigator lays the undead to rest...emphasis on the "lays." The Harem Mage is a modern-day Pygmalion, bringing his artistic creations to life for a short time (or a longer time, at the cost of some of his soul). The Freudian Oni is a sad little man who is unconsciously projecting his anger at women into a psychic construct which he only has partial control over. These and the others are really great ideas, and the mechanics for them are top-notch. My only complaint here is that Chris reverts to type by listing the class abilities alphabetically, instead of in the order they're gained, which is much more useful and easier to reference at-a-glance.
The next section is hentai magic, and this is where the wheels started to come off the wagon for me. This section opens with the author introducing a new set of item creation feats. After that, he presents almost four dozen new items, all of which have their magic item creation information given just with those feats. This certainly isn't bad, as it's not that hard to convert them back to the standard ways to make FX items in Modern d20, but it was a bit irking to see the author's new system being shoehorned in like that. That said, the items here are quite colorful, ranging from new guns that do extra damage to rapists to living suits of armor that must be masturbating in to take effect to a kimono that protects virgins from demons (something that'll be in high demand in such a campaign, no doubt).
Magic spells were the next section, and this is the first part of the book about which I don't really have anything good to say. There are only fifteen new spells here, and calling them "new" is stretching it. Almost all of these are spells from Fantasy d20 retooled to be used in Modern d20. Some are new, and these are conspicuous for how they have a "Level" line for both Modern and Fantasy d20 (save for charm person, which is also reprinted here). Moreover, almost none of these spells are sexual in any regard. The major prerogative for this section just seemed to be translating select spells over to the Modern version of the game.
After this, we start to see more of a focus on Black Tokyo as a campaign setting. This starts off with the cosmology for such a campaign, outlining the mortal world, the world of demons, and the world of benevolent spirits. Beyond these three worlds is a mystic wall which can be penetrated, but once you go through it, you never return. While interesting, this section is too brief before the book goes to new races.
Fifteen new races are introduced, from the nekomusume (catgirls) to ohaguro (blind, undead children) to succubi-kin, and more. All are ECL +0, and have several paragraphs of descriptive text before their PC information is given. This section was good, but it seemed a bit sloppy in layout. Small errors began to creep in, and the way the stats and information were arranged seemed like it could have been cleaner. Still, this part wasn't bad, it just didn't wow me like the first half of the book did.
Then I came to the monsters section. The best way to summarize how I felt about this section as I read it, is to say that this is the part that made me go back and look at the credits page to see who the editor was who fell asleep at the wheel...only to realize that the book apparently had no editor. Incorrect hit point totals, questionable CRs, abbreviated reprints of feats introduced earlier in the book, all made me cringe as I read through this section. While there were some good ideas here, they were almost totally dragged down by the mechanical and formatting problems that plagued this part of the book. More than anything else, this section highlights the need for an editor, and raises questions about why there didn't seem to be one (or at the very least, if there was one, why isn't he/she listed)?
The last part of the book deals with nine new organizations, covered in about as many pages. Groups that inhabit the eponymous Black Tokyo, these range from a Sisterhood that works to protect the women who are too often victims of all sorts of monsters, to a haunted abandoned school, and more. These were good, but again formatting errors kept cropping up, with text randomly being emboldened, italicized, underlined, superscripted, or sometimes more than one simultaneously. It wasn't so bad as to render the section unreadable, but it happened with disheartening regularity.
The book closes out with a listing regarding inspirations and a brief bibliography. Surprisingly, not all of these are for horror hentai works that this product is meant to embody. The author gives explanations for why these works are referenced, and many are simply to try and get a better feel for what it'd be like to run a Japanese-themed game, rather than to help get a clearer grasp of the raw sexuality that a Black Tokyo game demands (though there are some inspirations in that regard too).
Conclusion
Ultimately, Black Tokyo is a good work that dares to go further than any RPG supplement before it. For the first half of the book, it (for the most part) throws caution to the wind and unabashedly lays out sexually-themed crunch that's as twisted as it is erotic. However, the second half of the book is where it falls down, over and over, to the point where it drags the entire book down, and when this is a $13 book, that's a harsh criticism.
Black Tokyo is a book that isn't for the faint-hearted, nor the easily-offended. But despite that, it could still have been more than it was, which makes it, in my mind, fall short of being truly worthy of calling itself "the hentai SRD."
