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There are 2 versions of the PDF, one that's colourful, the other that's "printer friendly". Talking specifically about that, the colourful one is very printer unfriendly, but it has bookmarks integrated into the PDF. In addition to being printer unfriendly, in the beginning some bits are a bit hard to read - generally dark background of a starscape with white text, as the stars meet the text, the text becomes difficult to read. This knocks the style down one point for me. If the printer friendly version didn't have its own issues, I might have forgiven it. Unfortunately the printer friendly one isn't quite as nice to look at, and it isn't as printer friendly as it should be. There are still pieces of full page colour art that would have to be edited out in printing to save ink. There are also some pages of rules on a kind of aged parchment type background that isn't ideal for printers. For that I'd almost want to give it a 3, but I'm leaving it at a 4 because I really liked how it was written.
The art is very nice, it seems to be in a watercolour painting style, or potentially photographs run through some photoshop filters with some background art drawn in. I'm not sure which, but the people are very realistic. There is some nudity in the art, although it doesn't seem that cheesecakey - partially because they went straight to the point and showed breasts, and also because the artwork isn't brom style. The women are attractive but not exaggerated in Boris Vallejo style. It's also balanced with plenty of bare chested men, also not with exaggerated Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan builds.
Speaking of the writing, it's very well done. I've started noticing that RPGs that I understand easily are written more in prose, with the rules introduced slowly as you read through it. As a contrast, Nemesis gets straight into the rules and is somewhat tiresome to read. One downside to it is that at the beginning I had a very different idea of what the game would be like. I won't go into that, I'll just describe what the game actually is.
Suzerain is a generic point buy system. It mixes aspects from a lot of RPGs I've seen, and seems to do it quite well. In this case the points are called Karma. I like the Karma term, as it gets you some bennies. If you have Karma that hasn't been spent on character abilities, it counts as current Karma, which is a bonus if you're trying to do something purely on luck. The example they gave was that if you had a key ring with a bunch of keys, and randomly shove one into the lock because you don't have time to choose, you'd make a check to see if you succeed, and your current Karma acts as a bonus. If you have lots of unspent Karma, you're just more lucky. You can also use Karma to bribe the GM (called director in Suzerain)
The point buy implementation should otherwise be pretty familiar to people who have used point buy systems before. You have 9 abilities (split into categories of Physical, Spiritual and Mental), all starting at 0. If you want to increase them it costs 5K for 0-1, and 10K from 1-2, and so on. So 2 costs 15K, 3 costs 30K. It's a pretty standard progression, except that it costs the same in initial character generation as in advancement, as opposed to games which make it cheap to start and make you pay through the nose if you want to increase it later.
It has a damage track, with stun and lethal damage that seems to be normal. It also uses 3 types of damage (Physical, Mental and Spiritual again). I find the system to be pretty slick. Characters start with a base of 5 health in each area, increased by their relevant abilities. If they're in the positive range it's just damage. They can take an equivalent of negative damage as they can positive, so someone with 5 health could go to -5. Once you hit negatives, you suffer a penalty to the relevant actions equal to your negative score. If you're at -3 physical you suffer -3 to all physical actions. -2 mental you suffer -2 to all mental actions. It makes sense and works quite cleanly. I like the different types of damage, and how the death spiral is introduced. It also has mooks, as is pretty standard in games these days, and almost required. Mooks have 5 health and will die at 0. Characters or Key NPCs will die when they pass their negative health total.
While talking about health it's worth pointing out that despite being quite cinematic in scope (it goes all the way from 100K for standard characters to 1000K for Gods - which then go out of play, reminiscent of Immortals in BECMI D&D) Suzerain is a gritty game. The death spiral hints at it, but the healing time really sends the point home. Positive damage is healed at 1/week. Negative damage is healed at 1/month. As you can see, without supernatural intervention, a fight will put you out of action for quite some time.
Also, on the grittiness, it uses ticks for initiative. You make a check to see what your reaction time is. It's a number from 1-10, which is the number of ticks. Each tick equals 1/10th of a second, and rounds are 10 seconds, so actions are done up to 100 ticks. Depending on the action, it takes a different amount of time - you combine the time for the action with your reaction time, and you can continue doing actions until you run out of ticks. At this point it's reminiscent of initiative and weapon speeds in AD&D (I never used weapon speeds, too much bookkeeping). I initally balked at the system until interrupts were introduced. If you feel it necessary, you can interrupt an action (such as dodging when someone shoots at you, rather than just standing there and trading bullets). This interrupt aspect makes it worth the bookkeeping.
At this point you may have noticed that I chose to say make a check instead of roll. It's an aspect that snuck up on me, but left me pleasently surprised. Suzerain uses cards rather than dice. You take a deck of cards, take out the face cards except for King of Hearts and Queen of Spades. The number you draw is equivalent to the number you would roll on dice. 10s explode. Aces are failures. King of Hearts is an Exploding 10 +3, Queen of Spades is a failure -4. I would have liked it to be Queen of Hearts as a reference to Alice in Wonderland, but I guess that doesn't matter much and is easy to change anyway. This extra bit of good and bad luck makes good use of cards in a way dice couldn't, unless you can make a d42. It also fits nicely with the Karma for character points theme. Action resolution is draw over with a target number of 8. Combine card + ability and feat modifiers + situation modifiers.
It has a number of rules for combined checks, who in the team does the check, and opposed checks. They all make sense. If multiple characters want to act, just the one with the best score draws. If he fails, they all would fail. They said this is to avoid players getting paranoid and deciding to try again after the first character fails. I like that these decisions were based on what gets tedious, rather than an idea of what seems realistic. Suzerain also allows for re-applying feats in ways that wouldn't be expected. If you do this, it counts at half the level. If something is clearly covered by the feat you get the full benefit, if you have to really stretch it then you only get half of the benefit. I like this method of doing things.
Characteristics bought with Karma fall into either Abilities (stats) or Feats (which seams to cover what most RPGs would call skills and advantages). Strangely, disadvantages are called negative feats, which seems like a bit of an oxymoron, but it does describe what they are. It's a pretty standard list that you would expect from a point buy RPG. The advantage type feats do have some interesting selections. There's beginners' luck, which is free and lets a starting character re-draw an action once. Once it's done, it's no longer available to be used. 200K or higher characters can't have it. It also has a number of advantage feats based around luck, which fits with the theme given by Karma. I kind of like the idea of having a hero who's good at things and gets by because the universe is smiling. The skill feats also have an interesting aspect. Most go up to 5 ranks - each rank has a pre-requisite of stats. Usually the first rank doesn't have one, but the higher ones do, usually in several abilities. So what you end up having is that your skill in something is dependant on your natural aptitude. A rank 3 in a skill is +3, but a rank 3 will probably require an ability at 2 or 3 as well. It's rather interesting as it doesn't allow for someone with average abilities to be an expert at something through training. It also makes some sense though - if you're going to be good at acrobatics, you're also going to have to be physically very fit. Negative feats there are thankfully only 3 of. I'm not fond of them in RPGs, particularly point buy systems where they give you extra points. Unfortunately Suzerain gives you extra Karma (such as 15K for Blind, which I'm glad is one of the 3, if there's going to be a disadvantage that you get points for, Blind is a good one). I do prefer Reign's method of not giving you extra points, but giving extra XP at the end of the session if your disadvantage played a roll in the adventure. I think this would be quite suitable given the Karma idea, and if I were running Suzerain I would houserule in that negative feats give bonus Karma at the end of a session if they came up in play.
The core book mentions different levels. Standard, Hero, Demigod, etc. I didn't talk about it because from the core book it doesn't seem like you could make anything other than a standard character (or possibly a Hero, but the feat selection doesn't seem to fit it that well). The Talisman Studios website offers downloads with additional feats that would be more suitable for higher levels of play, but I haven't looked at them in detail. I appreciate not cramming everything into one book, particularly since it's free and the additional supplements are free too. It's easier to get a grasp of the system when you're not overwhelmed with options.
I think I'd have a very easy time playing this. Familiarity goes a long way. While it doesn't have anything really awesome in the mechanics like ORE, or the really cool conversion chart of EABA, it is slick. If you're familiar with D20, or GURPS, which probably most people are, Suzerain will be very easy to grasp. For running a game, it would also make it easier on me, as I don't have to spend as much time figuring the system out.
I'm giving Suzerain a 4 for substance because it seems a bit incomplete - it has a wide scope that it presents at the beginning, but it doesn't quite deliver and seems like another realistic point buy RPG, not exactly the image I got from the pictures of Demigods and Gods with 790K and 1000K respectively. There's really no way to build a Demigod with the included Feats. I can't fault it much for this, as there is a free supplement that fills in the gaps - unfortunately it shows up in a weird side by side fashion in my PDF reader (I would assume others too), making it quite tedious to read, and of course because of the high colour nature, it's printer unfriendly.
Since it's free, and a very pleasant read, and appears to be a very capable system, I'd recommend downloading it and taking a look.
