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There’s a careful balance that needs to be walked when making RPG sourcebooks that build on earlier sourcebooks. If your book requires the use of too many previous books, you severely limit its potential audience. If it tries to shy away from utilizing previous books too much, then it can end up reinventing the wheel in an effort to be self-contained; even reprinting earlier material is fraught with peril, as you can end up irking readers who feel like they’ve paid for the same material twice.
There’s ultimately no right answer to this particular conundrum, and it’s ultimately a hard line to walk no matter how you choose to walk it. That was the thought I had in mind as I read through Fursona IV: Fur of the Yokai from Skortched Urf’ Studios.
Fursona IV is (self-evidently) a supplement for the Fursona sourcebook on anthropomorphic character creation. Despite what the numerical suffix suggests, it is not necessary to own Fursona II or III to use this supplement; though Fursona II does get a few references for some of the new racial orders’ favored traits, that’s the extent of the references to the previous two books.
Fursona IV is fairly forthright in stating that its goal of bringing material from the Races of the Tatakama sourcebook into the Fursona system of character creation. I should note that I haven’t read the latter sourcebook, but it does seem to bring a fair amount of material over. The book does reference some material from Black Tokyo, but fairly obliquely, and it is possible to use this book with Fursona without Black Tokyo, though some places will need to be glossed over.
The book opens with a quick suggestion on mechanical alterations to make if you want the characters generated with this book to be more spiritual creatures than just funny animal-people, before it moves onto several new racial orders based on races from Races of the Tatakama. Three (the daughters of kirin, the kitsune, and the tanuki) are given before a further seven new orders, based on Japanese folklore (though the “slime” order seemed inspired from contemporary video games and art books).
After a quick examining of how these seven new racial types fit into the Tatakama’s feudal-Japan-esque society, we’re taken to new racial traits, first the minor ones (about twenty) and then the major (about ten). Perhaps surprisingly for a Black Tokyo product, these aren’t all explicitly sexual or otherwise perverse in nature…though make no mistake, a fair number of them still are.
It’s also here where I feel that I need to restate the ubiquitous caveat about Chris Field’s works – you need to keep an eye on the power level of what’s written here. While most of what’s here isn’t dramatically out of line, there are some things that are more powerful than I know I’d be comfortable with at my game (and, for some of the disadvantages, more crippling). Now, this isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, as I think “balance” is more about how the GM and players conduct themselves than about game rules…but it remains true that some of these issues can be swingy, at the very least (though no less interesting for it). The Masterful Performer major trait, for example, lets you once per day make a d20 roll when making a Perform check – on a 15 or better, roll a d100; if you get more than a 15 on that, that’s your Perform check result! By the book, that’s overpowered, but as for your home game…maybe.
Following the traits is a section on converted feats from Races of the Tatakama into racial Fursona racial traits. Now this I just flat-out didn’t like. Why? Because the author lists the conversion material only, and not the game effect of the feat in question, making this section fairly useless unless you also have Races of the Tatakama. You know how many points the Blood Breeds Monsters trait costs, what orders treat it as a favored trait, and have a quick description of what it does, but not the actual game mechanics. If you’re going to reprint these here, then you should reprint enough to make them useful on their own.
About a dozen disadvantages end the book, and what I said about the traits applies here. For example, a holy-inscribed boulder can become impassible to your characters for a half-mile in every direction. Is that crippling or an opportunity for more role-playing a solution than roll-playing? I think that this is another area where it depends on the group.
Ultimately, Fursona IV is perhaps best judged on how well it achieved the goals it set for itself. As a sourcebook designed to allow for more specific options for flavoring your Fursona characters with a mythological-Japanese theme, including the erotica therein, this book handles itself fairly well. Of course, you’ll need to keep a close eye on the options you want to allow, and be prepared to adjudicate for builds that are stronger, or weaker, than you were expecting. But overall, it does exactly what it sets out to do, no more and no less.
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