October 24

Steve Stone’s Zero

I picked this game up as I was a fan of the biomechanical art style made famous by the late H.R Giger and this little book seemed to be my sort of game.

Two things struck me about the book, the first was its size as it was much smaller than an ordinary game book and full glossy colour; the second thing was that it was expensive, I guess that full colour glossy art came with a premium price.  Despite these details I bought it, read it and admired the artwork before losing it as the small book just vanished.  So I write this overview from memory.

The background for the game itself was promising, all characters belonged to a hive mind and operated together for the good of the  Equanimity.  Even though you were all relatively equal you all conformed to one of the few roles that existed within this community.

The game was almost like playing the Borg from Star Trek, even naming your character involved rolling a handful of d6s and that was your “name”, you could allocate the digits however you wanted to.  I also recall the interesting skill system; you could determine the number of skills you had and the more of a Jack of All trades you were the harder it was for you to accomplish a task.

Moving beyond character creation and into the story of the game.  An event happens which severs your characters from this hive mind and you suddenly have to cope with being alone, an individual lost in their thoughts and unable to reconnect to the Equanimity; worse still, the queen wants you dead and devotes time and effort trying to hunt you down for termination.

There were a couple of supplements printed for it but they became hard to find and the meta-plot died with the game line, which is a shame as this little gem had so much going for it.

Version 2.

I understand that as a result of Lester Smith’s successful Kickstarter for his d6xd6 core rpg, Zero will once more live again and I can’t wait to see the results.

If you want to see this new game then please click here http://www.d6xd6.com/ and have a look.


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Posted October 24, 2014 by GeneralTangent in category "Cyberpunk", "RPG", "sf

About the Author

I've been gaming on and off since about 1989 and during that period have played with numerous game systems. I'm fluent in a few, have a basic understanding of quite a few more and can get by in others. Somewhere along the way I found time to be a playtester, contribute to an unpublished game supplement and be associated with another gaming magazine written by far more talented people than I. This lead to one infamous article being written in which I followed the letter of the adventure and torched the parties river barge. I'm also listed on http://rpggeek.com as a game designer.

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