Kuro

Kuro is an English translation of a French game set in a future Japan. All suitably cosmopolitan. You can almost tell this is a French game as you have involved character creation with secondary attributes and skill trees with pre-requisites.

However to the credit of the French I have often found that while they require a lot of effort up front the character sheets are often all you need to play the game compared to the American and British tendency to require you to dive back into the main book and look up the sub-systems for whatever you are trying to do at a given moment.

From appearances Kuro would seem to be Akira crossed with Ringu. A sci-fi future of biker gangs and cybernetics shadowed with supernatural horrors. Its biggest problem though is that it badly fails the Crane-Sorenson questions.

What is Kuro about really? It says that it is about ordinary people in the near future who are dragged into supernatural situations that question their perceptions of reality. But how is that supported in a system that for the most part is a conventional cyberpunk game with the emphasis on guns and tech?

The sample scenario in the book is no help, as despite having some creepy moments the PCs are mostly passive and railroaded through a violent series of events that seem to make impossible for the characters to return to a normal life without yet more GM fiat and railroading.

I love the idea but I'm not sure this is the system to do it is justice and I'm not sure the game designers really knew what they wanted to achieve either.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A New Era

Valiant Girls & NanoWorld

Beakwood Bay