Zaibatsu

Roleplaying the Corporate Wars of the Future, players take on the roles of street soldiers for the world's most powerful corporations (the Japanese zaibatsu): expendable and deniable employees, fighting for profits, power, and their lives. Only the most cunning, streetsmart techno-samurais will survive.

Author(s): 
Game Type: 
Roleplaying Game
Crunch: 
3 - Mildly Crunchy
Players: 
2+
GM?: 
Yes
Free?: 
Yes
Excerpt: 

The system emphasizes speed of play, not nit-picking detail, and uses the common all-garden six-sided dice. Each player will need two of these dice. Before you can jack into 21st century Tokyo every player is gonna need an alter ego to take all the punches, dodge all the blows and be the player's eyes and ears. These are the "anti-heroes" that the players will be using in the game. Always keep in mind the urbanized, high-tech, Japanese setting of ZAIBATSU when creating the PCs (player-characters), most should be of Japanese origin since foreigners (gaijin) are not exactly able to fit seamlessly into Tokyo life.

Every player character is an employee of one of the vast multinational zaibatsu. He or she has been recruited from the dark and murky Japanese underworld to carry out illegal terrorist activities on behalf of that employer. They have one foot in the stylish corporate-minded boardrooms of the zaibatsu, and one foot in the filth and squalor of the criminal underworld. Hired by duty-bound executives who must at all times remain respectable, the player characters are modern street samurai, urban warriors doing the disreputable things that no corporate executive could ever admit to. All the zaibatsu operate this way. The unseen war rages behind factory fences and the mirrored walls of corporate skyscrapers.

Creating these street samurai characters for ZAIBATSU is simple. The player selects a concept, takes the skill and equipment that goes with it, then selects any 5 skills of his choice. Players may want to add a little depth to their characters with the biography tables.