Imperio #1

This issue has a beautiful, profession cover by Russ Nicholson.

There’s no particular theme running through the various pieces in the zine. There are two adventures, a starship floorplan, an alien species, a random name generator and a collection of personalities for use as NPCs.

The starship plan is perfectly functional but not my thing, ditto the name generator. The alien species is a bio-mechanical floating turtle or space tick, it’s genuinely unusual and has an interesting premise of what would happen if a creatue committed to living in zero gravity but they don’t solve any kind of game related problem for me.

I found the NPC portfolio interesting as it took the central thrust of the character and presents them as both a potential antagonist and ally of the player characters. I am going to be stealing the idea of presenting different aspects of a character depending on whether their needs align with the player characters or not.

Similarly the scenarios present a situation, a background check on a potential son-in-law by a worried parent and a rogue robot on a space station, and offer a number of variations on the situation. The variation can be rolled for but I actually just found the different interpretations engaging in their own right.

Imperio isn’t anything other than it claims to be, a collection of notes and material from someone’s game. For me only half the material was interesting but it was interesting enough to make the zine a worthwhile purchase.