I think it was the “Yahooey” that got me.
Being the sort of person who had already been drawn to review several Hot Chicks books already, I knew exactly what “yiffy” and “yaoi” were. But that last one was ill-defined enough that I couldn’t help but check the book out, if for no other reason than to satisfy my curiosity. Looking the book over, I not only found not only what the book meant with that last part of its title, but something else as well: a truly excellent, well thought-out supplement that adds a new dimension to the Hot Chicks RPG game. Talk about good furtune!
Before anything else, though, let’s go over the technical aspects. One thing that needs to be made clear is that this book has nudity. A LOT of nudity. Almost all of it is, of course, of furry characters (rarely there’s a human; more often the exceptions are the smileys, the new villains introduced here), and quite often it’s full-frontal, of both male and female characters. Moreover, because the tactics of the slimeys tend to involve sexual predation, a significant amount of the artwork consists of furries in bondage, something that I suspect my revealing will result in most readers either running for the hills or purchasing the book before they even finish reading this sentence.
Most of the art is in Dakkar’s signature CG style, being full color and in 3D. Rarely, there’s a pencil drawing, black and white or colored in, but by far most of the art is computer graphics. Perhaps short-sightedly, there’s no printer-friendly version of the book, by which I mean a file that keeps all of the text but omits the artwork. I really think Dakkar should start offering art-free versions of their books simply because a lot of people might not want to carry around sourcebooks with naked people (particularly naked furries) with them. I realize that this may sound hypocritical since the name of the game is Hot Chicks, but better to have it and not need it, I would think. Somewhere out there is a gamer who isn’t pulling out a page with a rule on it that he wants to reference because it also has a picture of a topless woman.
My other beef with the book’s technical presentation is that the PDF lacks bookmarks. At seventy pages long, this PDF has no excuse for not having bookmarks for easy navigation. Why they were left out is beyond me.
One final warning is that the book itself says that it requires the Hot Chicks supplement Inner Darkness for the references to things such as the trauma rules. Make a note if you don’t have that sourcebook yet. In point of fact, I didn’t find that supplement truly necessary to use that one; rather, it seemed like it would come in handy, since that covers things such as rape (and its after-effects) and in a campaign where the enemies are tentacle monsters, that’s going to come up eventually.
But enough about that, what’s this book actually about? Well, the mainstay for the Hot Chicks RPG is that humanity is seriously screwed, since decent people (primarily the eponymous hot chicks of the world) are being preyed on by demons, aliens, and other people who are just thoroughly corrupt, with a few heroes fighting the rising tide of evil. YYY (I just love that abbreviation for this game) adds a new aspect to this dynamic. There’s a fourth group of evil out to prey on people: the slimeys (on a personal note, it was rather funny how I kept misspelling them as “smileys”). Tentacle monsters right out of Japanese pornography, the slimeys quite literally feed on terror and pain, and are equipped (both naturally and psychologically) to do so sexually. What makes this interesting is the in-game portrayal for how these monsters came about – slimeys are essentially spiritual germs for the entire Earth. Like viruses, they attack the cells (humans) of the healthy body, causing damage and reproducing harmfully. It’s the reason why an ordinary human can look at a slimey and only see a human.
On the other side of this equation are the furries, the Earth’s response to the infection. Furries come into being fully-formed, with hazy memories of training, and naturally gravitate into small teams that are perfect for attacking slimeys. Being of all species, types, and sizes, furries are pretty much what you’d expect them to be – I had the image of them being a lot like those talking animal heroes from the Saturday morning cartoons, except a lot more “furverted.”
The book does a nice job of discussing some of the finer points of how furries operate, and the dynamic of this “shadow war within a shadow war” before moving on to the new crunch. Surprisingly, there’s comparatively little here, a handful of new spells, super powers, and psionic abilities mostly. A much larger (about twenty pages) section is given to pre-made character sheets for furries.
The latter parts of the book are the GM’s sections. After discussing the importance of making sure the GM and players are all on the same page as regarding in-game sexual activity, it goes over the slimeys in detail (including their character sheets), their equipment, how to run games with furry and human characters, and adventure seeds. I was quite pleased to see greater flavor text here (often with the authors addressing the reader directly) in regards to HOW to actually run a game with this slant. I found it to be much more valuable than new mechanics, and was quite pleased with the tone of the book in that regard. This is a delicate balancing act, even for Hot Chicks, since the heroes are creatures with high sex drives and the villains are rapacious monsters (literally), but I thought the book did a great job.
Ultimately, I really liked this book as a campaign option for Hot Chicks. The flavor and presentation was highly evocative, and lent an interesting new aspect to the campaign setting. The new rules were good, and mixed in lightly with a strong amount of flavor text and advice on how to use the material herein. The artwork was plentiful and high quality. Really, my only problem with the book was technical, since the lack of bookmarks and printer-friendly material seems to be an unnecessary loss. If I had the option, I’d give this four-and-a-half stars out of five, but since I can’t I’m rounding this up to 5/5. If you enjoy Hot Chicks, pick this book up and really let the fur fly in your game.
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