This review is a shortened and translated version of the one originally appearing on http://dk.groups.yahoo.com/group/rollespildk/

THE BASICS

Fusion is a modern Danish roleplaying game. Modern in that it takes place in our time and in that it owes more to nineties games like Vampire, than to D&D. And Danish in that it takes place in Denmark and is written in Danish.

The game is written by Palle Schmidt and Malik Hyltoft. It’s published by Høst & Søn, an established Danish mainstream book publisher. Several scenarios have been published, and the game has an official homepage at www.fusion-net.dk.

Denmark according to Fusion

“May you live in interesting times”

Chinese curse.

Fusion is set in Copenhagen, not my Copenhagen, but a Copenhagen where law and politics has been Americanised. Private citizen may own guns; private detectives must have licenses to operate, but can take actions not normally allowed; the running of the police has been turned over to the boroughs; the welfare system has collapsed. Denmark is no longer a quiet, well-ordered society, but a place fit for a noir TV series.

There is no explanation for this change, and none is really needed. The setting is simply a fusion between a city that is intimately known to Danish players, and a genre that is intimately known to everybody, the gritty American crime drama.

Think of your home area. Think of the insane asylums you spooked each other with when you were children. Think of the bus stations which ugliness has always fascinated you. Think of the bad parts of town. Now think of using all this, all these details, as a game setting.

THE SYSTEM

Detectives

The basic premise of the game is that all players are private detectives, and that they all belong to the same firm. The game encourages the players to define their own detective bureau, and run it in the game. Truth to be told, the game does not contain enough detail to run a bureau in any kind of detail, and I suspect that the authors have just winged this part of the game in the play tests, and focused on the scenarios in stead.

Task resolution 

Fusion has a fairly standard die pool system. All abilities and all skills have a rating from 1 to 6. You add an ability to a skill, and get the number of six-sided dice that you roll for a given task. A roll of 6 gives you a success. If you roll more 1s than you have in either skill or ability, you get a fiasco. Yes, you can have both a success and a fiasco on the same roll(say you hit with your pistol, but run out of ammo).

You can also take specialties, whatever you can think of really, that ads die to you die pool within the field of the specialty. Because the rule is ability skill specialty = dice pool, Fusion can keep the number of skills low, and players can come up with whatever specialties they like, making character generation both fast and flexible.

Characters

Fusion is focused on private detectives, so the list of skills is short and easy to grasp. The same cannot be said of the list of abilities.

There are 10 (!) abilities. Including both Intelligence and Cleverness, both Agility and Coordination.

Player 1(whining): “Why do I have to roll my Agility, my Coordination is higher! Surely it takes Coordination to…”

Player 2 (confused): “You use Intelligence for THAT? I thought you we used Cleverness. Can I change my character? Because the basic concept behind him is…”

Player 3 (lazy): “Hey, mister gamemaster! Could you just explain the difference between the 10 abilities? I can’t make up my mind as to which of them I should progress in…”

You do not need that kind of confusion in a rules light game.

Other than that, the tight focus of the game makes creating characters a simple task.

Destiny

In crime literature, the main characters’ weak sides are constantly and mercilessly poked. To ensure that this will happen in Fusion too, the game uses positive and negative destiny points. When something good happens your detective may get positive destiny, and if something bad happens negative destiny may accumulate. For each 3 destiny points a destiny trait must be chosen, a trait that defines the character.

Say you have a detective with 3 negative and 3 positive destiny points. You chose to make him a chain smoker (negative) and have good night vision (positive, the effects of such positive traits are left to the GMs discretion). During a nasty case about a series of premature burials, your detective gains another 3 negative destiny points. You must now choose another destiny trait, and what could be more logical than a phobia against premature burial?

Violence

When you have a well functioning task resolution mechanic, combat rules become child’s play. In its core the Fusion combat rules is a neat one roll system. However, the authors seem to think that a roleplaying game worthy of the name should have a lot of combat rules… Most of these rules are not very well explained or thought out, and anyway, even if you want a game full of tactical decisions, you don’t need a lot of rules in a setting where everybody are familiar with every shopping mall escalator, and every public lavatory. Keeping it rules light, like the rest of the system, and using the many pages of combat rules for something else would have better served Fusion.

HOW DO YOU PLAY THE GAME?

Fusion has a solid focus in that all player characters are private detectives and members of the same firm.

Furthermore the book has a couple of pages that gives gamemaster and player alike an overview of fundamental forensics and surveillance considerations. In that way it is insured that everybody knows about rigor mortis and the problems of taping a conversation in the open - it is insured that everybody is ready to play the investigation game.

As a gamemaster, you are also given a host of details and special effect ideas throughout the book, Details and effects that can make your game alive and give it an appearance of realism. This is where Fusion really shines: the heat waves, the Yugoslavian mafia, the waste disposal strikes, the radical left-wing teenage groups, and the new age religions.  

So the Fusion book does everything in its power to support the gamemaster and player alike. But make no mistake, this is a game of investigation, and as such is not suited to players who cannot concentrate, or who cannot remember detail from one session to the next (as is many a players wont, god bless them).

Scenarios

Nearly half of the Fusion book is given over to scenarios (this is a very Danish thing, we seem to have a very strong tradition for writing ready-to-run con type scenarios).

The scenarios are very good (when read, anyway), filled with action, intrigue and scary stuff. But of course, as always with a pre-written scenario, the GM and the player characters are “invisible” in the story, as the author doesn’t know them or their preferences. But if player and gamemaster alike is ready for a backseat ride, the scenarios are fine.

STYLE

The fusion book is very, very well illustrated, both regarding photos and drawings. I can only recommend that you see for yourself, at the website www.fusion-net.dk. The entire look supports the “Dark Copenhagen” concept, and helps to bring this concept across to the reader.

A LOST OPPOTUNITY

The idea that a RPG could be made that would bring a lot of new players to the hobby is sometimes put forth. This game conceivably could be aimed at all those people who watch crime stories on TV, and read crime novels. Such people can rarely take Fantasy and Science Fiction seriously and so they stay away form roleplaying games. But if someone where to put out a game based more on John Grisham than Tolkien…

But Fusion is not that game. Fusion certainly is based on detective TV shows and the works of popular crime writers (not Grisham, tough) but it is in no way a beginner’s game. In fact it is obviously written on the assumption that the reader already knows a good deal about roleplaying games. This saves the authors a lot of explaining of course, and anyway I suspect that their target audience is players whom the authors would like to game with themselves, and not clueless newbies. A fair enough choice of course.

CONCLUSION

If you are a Danish speaker, and you wish to run a series of cool prewritten crime scenarios, I can highly recommend Fusion. If you are a Danish speaker and this is not your cup of tea, you might still use Fusion as a “Copenhagen by night” or “GURPS Crime” type of sourcebook.

If you do not speak Danish, you could still consider using the Fusion method: turn your hometown into a TV Crimestory land, and get down to some gritty noir campaigning.

Oh, and if you are a game designer, you might also copy what Palle Schmidt and Malik Hyltoft have done: write a roleplaying game in a mainstream genre, and get a mainstream book publisher to print and distribute it. Who knows? You might write history ;-).  

Mads Jakobsen