I managed to read the entire Corporation booklet over lunch today. It is a dystopic view of future Earth set in the year 2500 where corporations rule the world with an iron fist and the PCs are agents working for one (or more) corporations to accomplish the goals of the corporation. I love the concept as it is very cyberpunk-ish in nature, and that is my all-time favorite genre to read and game in. There are just so many possibilities out there when you introduce super advanced science with super degraded society.

Free RPG Day 2009 - Corporation Cover

The booklet started with an overview of the world and the five major corporations. Then there was a single page packed with details regarding the “other antagonists” of the world, which I really liked. Following this was two pages outlining the basic rules. I could tell the main system was more complex than the basics revealed in the book, but the core system presented is excellent, simple and elegant in its execution. Anyone could skim these two pages and jump right into the game. They did a top-notch job of giving just enough rules to run the game out of the booklet.

The center of the book contained four fully created and fleshed out characters complete with backgrounds and motivations.The latter half of the book was a short adventure through which to run the sample characters. The adventure is very linear in nature, but it was designed to show off the strengths of the system in and out of combat. I like it as an intro adventure, so a group could see if they wanted to move forward with purchasing the full game. The designers did an excellent job with setting things up to keep the game going well.

The last page contained a section of “Also in the core rules…” which really made me want to run out with what remained of my lunch hour and buy the game. I’ll probably wait a few weeks until after a conference I’m going to leaves me with a little spare cash, and I’ll see what I can do about adding this book to my cyberpunk collection (both fiction and RPG books.)

Grade: A. No ‘+’ on this one because I think the game system and weapons are a little too deadly. I think I’ll have to wait and see what the core rules present, and how long it takes to create characters. The character creation system was left out of the booklet (which is fine since they provided sample characters.) If it’s like Mythus and takes four hours to make a single character, then I’ll probably skip buying the book. If it only takes a few minutes to whip out a new character to replace the freshly dead meat, then it might be worth considering.