Kamen Rider: Masquerade Style

The other week I went to a local convention here in Nagoya.  A couple of guys were reading through this bad boy here and its supplement.  I’d had a friend of mine pick me up a copy of all the books available for this dojin game last year at Comiket, but I’d yet to be able to play it, so I mentioned that I would love to play.  The guys at the convention seemed to be waiting for someone to say that, and immediately put a game together!  Finally!

My good friend Dan back home is a huge Kamen Rider fan and got me into the 555/Faiz series when I was in college.  I haven’t watched much besides Blade since then, but Faiz was dramatic, intense, and way badass.  When you look through this book, you can tell that the people who wrote this amateur game are immense fans; the book looks better produced than most professional rpg books in America.  The core book allows you to play as any sort of human, Unkown, Orphnochs, Gurongi, Lords, and the following “types” of kamen riders: Kuuga, Agito, Faiz,  and the G3 armor.  The supplement allows players to don Blade, Ryuuki, and Hibiki armors.  The game uses a custom set of cards that players can pull whenever they do something dramatic and use for special effects, but all actions are resolved with a dice pool system.

When creating characters, a player must decide if their character is going to be a Battle, Drama, or Support type.  Battle characters are, of course, the Riders and Orphnocs, etc.  The Support types are the various policemen, detectives, reporters, or professors that appear in each series; the important people that actually are the ones moving the story and helping the Riders.  Drama types are the people that the Riders are trying to protect, etc. (Think Mari from Faiz)

Each character starts with an empty slate and 14 Fate slots.  Each facet of a character costs Fate slots: being an Orphnoch may cost something like 5 Fate, G3 armor takes up 6, Rider Gear (Faiz) only takes 4.  But Rider Gear can also access Accel and Blaster forms, which each take further Fate slots.  You can take badass bikes, too, but they cost Fate slots, too.  Each player takes enough facets to fill up between 7 and 12 Fate slots, making sure to leave at least 2 slots open.  The reason is that each session is split into 3 acts, and at the end of each act, a Fate slot must be spent; any characters that don’t have any remaining may participate in the next scene but must die at the end of it.  The Fate slots may be spent during the game to take another action, increase the probability of success, recover HP, or a few other effects.

In the game I participated in, the game called for 2 Support/Drama types, 1 Orphnoch and 2 Kamen Riders.  The 2 Support types were policemen, one of which wore a G3 suit.  The other Kamen Rider was a Kamen Rider Amazon sort of wild thing, and mine was Kamen Rider Mu.  With the help of the GM, I made a pretty powerful guy who can drill punch through just about anything.

The game started off at a school run by Smart Brain, where a series of mysterious disappearances and deaths have been occuring.  It turns out that the victims were actually Orphnochs, and by the time we figured it out, a bunch of Unknown attacked.  We destroyed a few Unknown, but the 1 Orphnoch in our group got separated so we had to save her.  In the end, the Unknown was destroyed by the “real” boss, a powerful Gurongi.  We joined battle in our most powerful forms (I was in Blaster form) and with the power of Kamen Rider Mu’s consecutive Exceed Charges, the heroes made short work of him.

Though I am not a huge fan of dice pool games, I think that the character creation alone gives players a huge amount of leeway as to what sort of characters they can make, and any Riders end up being very faithful to the show.  I’m looking forward to playing this again.

~ by mattgsanchez on April 21, 2011.