The setting is familiar enough: Corporations rule (the civilized parts of) an ecologically devastated future inhabited by corporate slaves—-some of whom aren’t so badly off, but most of whom are wretchedly poor. Even that majority of humanity that lives outside the corporate towers is tagged from birth with biochip implants, which effectively serve as both tracking signals and identification records; and only productive citizens are allowed to breed without severe penalties. The electronic NET (always capitalized, yes), apparently run by a controlling AI called Mother, links together all services. What’s left of the United States Government exists merely to pamper the Corps. (they’re consistently referred to as “the Corps.”—-with a period—-even in the middle of a sentence), who have divided up the country between them and, according to the introductory section’s notes, are companies which exist today. (If there are any doubts about the game’s apparent politics, the graphic logo on page 36—-a snarling cat jumping on a black eagle carrying a broken arrow, surrounded by the slogan “NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR”—-should put them to rest, for better or for worse.) Along with everything else, the Corps. control the rights to all the water in North America, and to every DNA code in existence; most organic items are actually clones, although the word “cloning” seems to be used here to mean “genetic engineering”; mutated clones-gone-wrong exist out in the mostly-uncontrolled Zone that stretches beyond the corporately-ruled sprawls. The Zone itself serves as a site for the Corps.’ dirty work, and as a battlefield between warring corporations.
That’s a perfectly reasonable outline. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much all we get of the setting; there’s a bit more detail on the makeup of corporately-controlled territory and the setting’s historical background—-with a few pages more of the latter in a separately-available timeline available for free at http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=2202& --but, beyond generalities, there’s little sense of what an average character’s day (or local neighborhood) actually looks like or, for that matter, of what’s likely to have tipped the player characters over into being the sorts of people who end up Fighting The Power, as at least some of the character types here—-Nomads, Hippies, Veterans, Eco-Warriors, Punks, Disgruntled Average Joes, Religious Fanatics, and Gangsters, to go down the list of possible lifestyles offered—-seem intended to do. We’re told, very briefly, of mile-high corporate arcologies, resources mined from the Moon and food grown on Mars and shipped back to Earth; but we never get descriptions of the insides of those towers, let alone the Moon and Mars. (We also aren’t given a reason why cartoon Religious Fanatics of the faith of your choice, who come complete with “a set of robes, their holy writings and a religious icon with which to smite the unholy,” are presented as a viable character type in this setting-—where they feel very out of place, despite the occasional clergy-from-hell in low-budget cyberpunk films like FREEJACK or the JOHNNY MNEMONIC movie—-but Religious Anything Elses are not. It doesn’t help that the Fanatic’s representative quote is from Osama Bin Laden, ranting on about America and Palestine; this doesn’t exactly make me want to play one of these people, you know?) And finally, we’re not given any campaign or scenario suggestions whatsoever, which is odd in a game whose first two pages are taken up with a (quite reasonable) introduction to roleplaying, before the setting material described above even begins.
The setting, in short, is decent enough, but undeveloped. Frankly, it would be quite easy to simply strip it all out and make up one’s own background, and the game might in fact be more useful on that basis, for running original cyberpunk or even modern-day campaigns. But first let’s take a look at the actual game mechanics.
Character creation is joyfully quick and simple. Six fairly standard Stats (Strength, Determination, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence and Perception) are assigned values ranging from 2 to 10, either by rolling dice or via an optional point-allocation method. These in turn determine a character’s Wound Points, Initiative, Intuition, and melee and projectile-combat Dodge values, along with both the basic level of one’s Skills and the number of Skills to which the player may add additional points. The player randomly rolls for one of six possible Childhoods—-all but two of which are Poor or worse, but a Rich or Yuppie Childhood is a possibility-—which further adjust certain Skills and determine the character’s starting credit (i.e. money). From there, the player chooses one of the aforementioned Lifestyles, which again adjusts the character’s Skills and provides with very basic possessions, and character creation is essentially done. (It’s interesting to note that most of these Lifestyles result in characters who begin the game unarmed; the Corps. don’t want most people to have easy access to firearms.)
Task resolution is mostly a matter of rolling below the appropriate Skill or Stat on 1d10, with a roll of 10 indicating a dangerous Botch, and a roll of 1 leading to a Critical Success (and helping to gradually raise the acting character’s Skill or Stat in question). Most steps of the combat system work much like this as well: an attacker hits if he or she rolls below his or her appropriate combat-related Skill, along with any modifiers, and a defender dodges incoming attacks in pretty much the same fashion. Damage depends in part on the type of weapon being used; melee weapons, along with plain old punches and kicks, are mostly dependent upon the character’s Strength, whereas firearms are geared more around die rolls. Armor in the area being hit subtracts from the damage, naturally, but any body part that takes enough damage—-which, in a firefight, is likely to happen fairly quickly—-is not only damaged but destroyed. Even minor wounds continue to affect a character turn after turn, and it’s very easy to die from blood loss. Given the setting, that’s all to the good, and a convenient cheat sheet near the end of the rulebook is quite helpful.
However: Particularly given the setting, the system is incomplete. Despite Skills for Vehicle and Computer Operation, there’s no indication of how they should be used. I have no idea what hacking—-or any computer use, really—-looks like in 2155, or even what a user, licit or otherwise, would probably be trying to do. There are no rules for driving, let alone vehicle combat; given that Nomads (who travel around in auto caravans and get a +3 to Vehicle Operation) are presented as a viable player character type, that seems a fairly major omission! And while the combat system is mostly quite workable, and has the significant virtue of being both nicely crunchy *and* mercifully short, there are places where, for me at least, it seems to break down. The use of bows and crossbows, for example, require a GM-determined “Bow Strength” value, but the rulebook gives no clear method for determining that value; while apparently Bow Strength will be spelled out further in an upcoming GM’s guide, a GM using only this core book in the meantime will be forced to pull Bow Strength out of the air—-assuming that bows come into play at all, of course. And while combat between reasonably competent fighters looks to play appropriately nastily, two incompetent fighters who don’t move around—-say, two dumb guys with a Brawling value of 1—-will mostly just stand there swinging at each other without connecting; as an incompetent fighter myself, I’m afraid I can assure the Gentle Reader, from bitter experience, that this is not what will happen. So there are places where the GM will probably have to tweak a little. These are not insurmountable problems, though; I can easily see using this combat system, with only minor (albeit necessary) alterations, to handle modern-day combat.
The game’s layout is pretty good, although the editing would benefit from another run-through, as misspellings abound. The aforementioned cheat sheets (and character sheets) are solid, and the artwork (by Avatar Z. Brown) is mostly fair-to-decent line drawings, with some good technical drawings of weapons and equipment.
Overall, DYSTOPIA is a pretty good stab at a somewhat satirical semi-cyberpunk system that doesn’t get bogged down in genre toys—-although *some* genre toys might’ve been nice. It does need work, and I think a hypothetical second edition could build a more solid product on this game’s foundation; but the system’s a good beginning, and for eight dollars, you could do a heck of a lot worse.
