Edit this Review | Unlink This Review from The Dominion Tank Police Role-Playing Game and Resource Book

The Dominion Tank Police saga covers manga and two OAV series as is mentioned in this game. Unfortunately, the game only focuses on the first OAV series. I won't go into detail about the introduction as it would be redundant considering the other reviews already on RPGnet. The narrow focus of the game is the reason it received a relatively low substance rating from me. Though information presented in the game is very good, it simply does not give enough specific details about the Dominion milieu as a whole. This is the game's one fatal flaw.

I did find the character creation system to be easy to use. My players had little trouble in creating characters after they decided on the general concept designs appropriate to their characters. I do like how the Tri-Stat system has been fleshed out over its Big Eyes, Small Mouth introduction. Several players mentioned that they enjoyed applying the system to specific rules like Dominion Tank Police over the generic application in Big Eyes... The defects addition in character creation (and mecha creation as well) seems to add realism to a genre where many characters seem omnipotent.

The character creation section includes all the major and minor characters in the original OAV series including the tanks. It would have been nice if "Mr. Big" would have received his own character profile, but I guess some things need to remain a mystery. I suppose I have gotten spoiled with games like Bubblegum Crisis because I thought there would be more "behind the scenes" information in this game. The reason the substance score is not higher is that little information is provided that a viewer could not glean from watching the OAVs a few times. The game's forward calls the game the "definitive resource bible" to the original series. The world of Dominion section could use some development.

Immediately following the character creation section is a color section of the characters and tanks in the series. This was a very nice touch to add to the game. It's hard to visualize characters in black and white pictures. I had one player in my playtest of the game who had not seen the OAVs yet and the pictures helped her to visualize the world of Dominion. Kudos to Guardians of Order for this section!

Game mechanics follows the color gallery and also is presented well. I found the mechanics of combat to be fairly easy to use. The whole combat section encompasses only a few pages, Hallelujah! I found that the five steps in the combat procedure didn't bog down the story much which is in stark contrast to many systems I've tried. While maintaining the simplicity of the system, the mechanics section includes sections on crashing, ramming and destroying buildings. Including detail while keeping the system simple is not an easy task but Mr. Pulver and company have done it well in this section. I found the destroying building section especially helpful in my playtest of the game.

The world of Dominion is the next section. The bacterial cloud that requires all inhabitants of Newport City to wear protective masks is covered in good detail, even to the point of providing damage checks at varying intervals depending on the density of the cloud. I wish everything received as much detail as the bacterial cloud in this section. All the major players from the Tank Police to the Buaku Gang and the Red Commandos are only given short writeups. Buaku's motivations are covered slightly but once again the main flaw of the game is the lack of indepth information. Even the people and places of Newport City only receive a few meager pages of coverage.

The gamemaster's section, sample adventures, and reference section are all presented well. There is nothing of particular note in any of these sections that caught my eye with the possible exception of the background information on Masamune Shirow.

The mecha design section is very well laid out. I created a mecha which appeared in the New Dominion Tank Police volume three for my playtest. Please note this video is not part of the orginal series. WARNING****If you have not seen the above mentioned video and don't want to know about the mecha shown in the video do NOT read the following!

I gave the "mobile weapon" weapon ratings of 30 for the two machineguns, 60 for the laser, and 100 for the atmos exposive missle(even Britain was afraid of it!) The defects were the crew requirement of the operator, not so tough and the weak point. The subattributes were armor, flight, jumping, sensors and stealth. Yes, I know I didn't mention any levels or point values. I don't like rules lawyers and these stats represent basic information about the mecha, nothing more.

My players had not seen the video that I mentioned but by using their Tank Police Special (resurrected of course) and Bonaparte were able to figure out how to destroy two the previously mentioned mecha. The players also found the perpetrators behind the enemy mecha and destroyed the building they were in (a common way to dispose of criminals in the Dominion saga).

A good time was had by all who played this game. I recommend the game to fans of the series and hope it creates new fans by encouraging people to play the game and watch the OAV series. Guardians of Order is improving with each game they release I'm sure that the Demon City Shinjuku game with be proof of that.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 3 (Average)