Khaotic RPG

Closer Look Reviews

Reviewed by Dirk Dejong

Marquee Press

Khaotic, the latest offering from the fertile (and twisted) minds at Marquee Press, starts off with system mechanics looted from its sister games, Lost Souls and Legendary Lives, and proceeds to build an unusual sci-fi adventure game, touted as the first schizotronic RPG.

I don't know if it's the first (or only) schizotronic RPG (schizophrenic might be more accurate, as you'll see later), but I do know that once More Marquee Press has created a new genre for players to live and die in.

In Khaotic, you play a "volunteer" in a war against an army of cybernetically enhanced monsters that started popping up all over the globe. So far it sounds like any number of other games that have come (and mostly gone) over the past few Years. The twist is they've found a way of sending the minds of the PCs to the monsters' world to stop the invasion from that end. And when they do, the party takes over a monster. That's right, a monster, as in one, only one, monster. With the whole party playing Herman's Head in there and finding that, in addition to having a pet tank to play detective in, they each gain incredible psi-powers so long as they're not the one controlling the body, you open the doors to mass chaos (three guesses where the name came from).

Can you say "big argument time"? Or "watch them fight each other more than the enemy"? How about major trouble"?

You even have a choice of campaigns. You can go to Xenos, the monsters' homeworld, or stay on Earth, fighting the ones that got through. So, if your players keep messing up on Xenos through really stupid arguments, just play on Earth, where everybody has his own body to put on the line.

The system has no stats with the exception of Hit Points, as what are called Attributes are essentially mega-skills, and the regular skins are simply bonuses to the various Attributes. It's a variation on the old Marquee Press house system, using 6 sided dice in a manner reminiscent of such games as Axis & Allies. You roll as many dice as you have points in a skill, and add up the total Points showing 1, 2, or 3 (for exam- ple, rolling three dice, you get a 1, a 3, and a 6 - your total is 4).

You then go back to the old house system where, instead of seeing if that PC-eating monster hit you, you check his combat skill (given as a level) then see how you roll against your dodge skill. If you roll the monster's skill level or better, he misses (or more precisely, you ducked); otherwise, you're adventurer tartare.

This system allows for extreme flexibility in creating characters and removes a large amount of dice-rolling. But not all is to the good as one of the advantages of having the GM roll the dice occasionally was that he could fudge rolls if necessary.

This system allows for some fudging, but it's more complex, as you have to mess with the number needed to succeed, leading to problems if the players remember what they had to roll last time in that situation. For those who've played either of the other offerings from the Williams, Khaotic is different enough that you should take a careful look at the rules. The differences can trip you up if you're not aware of them, especially the shared body experience and new dice rolling conventions. But, like Lost Souls, you'll find that cooperation is the key word.

Nobody can survive without everybody pitching in. Even with the PsYchotronic weapons your monster carries, you'll find the proper and judicious transfer of control (to allow different psi-powers and skins to be brought into play) can mean the difference between living and dying. The bad points are few and far between. The biggest is the layout, with some columns being impossible to distinguish from sidenotes.

Also, there are also no lists of standard equipment for what the average well-dressed monster is armed with. My final complaint is there aren't pictures of what each monster type looks like. If you go through the comic inside the book you can get some Idea but, even then, some of the major types aren't shown, and some that are, aren't described.

Keeping all this in mind, what's my opinion of Khaotic? It really is a new genre, complete with new problems and new solutions to them. The system offers great flexibility in character creation, faster game play, and has the advantage of having major concepts pre-tested in other games so there aren't likely to be unpleasant surprises. It has a good, well thought out background, with potential heroes, villains, and quests built right in. There's also the capacity for problems I haven't run into, as this is such a unique, and new, genre.

My biggest stumbling block is also one of the biggest pluses, that shared body. You can really have some fun, or some major fights over it. All in all, Khaotic is a return to the creation of new and unique experiences by Marquee Press, just as Lost Souls was, and has enough of its sisters' good points added to its own to make this a worthwhile addition to any game shelf.

More Closer Looks edited by Jolly Blackburn

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