Rookie Jet Studio has released the follow on from Over Arms the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure inspired RPG.
Gimmick Zero is a free to download RPG inspired by shows like Bubblegum Crisis, Megaman Zero and Katana Zero. The Gimmick Zero Quick Start is marketed as free, but the indie publisher has set it as Name Your Own Price, and I gave them $5. I don’t regret it.
The system is very similar to Over Arms, except you don’t add your stats to those of your Anima; you add two of your own stats together and roll both those dice. So, if you’re making an INT+STR check (punching someone in what you think is a weak spot), roll your INT dice, your STR dice, add the two and see if you can beat the target number.
Gimmick Zero is designed to be different each time, with tables to roll (or modify and then roll) to see what happened to your world. There is always one common theme, though.
Huge monsters known as Aberrations appear and threaten the world. To defeat the Aberrations, humanity invents massive war machines known as Gimmicks to take them on.
By and large, the Gimmicks are successful, and many of the possible worlds in the metaverse Gimmick Zero covers are not post-apocalyptic ones.
However, Gimmicks can go rogue. Sometimes they get overloaded by energy, or malfunction, or hacked by the strange powers of the Aberrations.
Rather than invent even larger machines to take on out of control Gimmicks, humanity invent Weapons. Weapons are people with Nano Armour built into themselves and therefore gifted with powerful abilities.
While Weapons can’t take on monsters like Aberrations, they can cooperate in dealing with a renegade Gimmick. They might be able to get inside the machine and power it down, defeat the controlling influence or just cover it with explosives.
In Gimmick Zero, Weapons work together on missions to avoid Aberrations and takedown Gimmicks. They hunt the protectors.
There are classes; The Gunner (who can transform limbs into cannons), The Switchblade (who manifest knives), The Swordsman (who summon Gimmick armour opening swords). There are powers too, from the Nano Armour, and just as Over Arms invites you to create your own Anima power, so does Gimmick Zero invite you to come up with abilities granted by your hi-tech machine-hunting power-up.
As noted by Rookie Jet Studio, the world design is engineered around giving characters reasons to be working together and then flung straight into the action.
The full release of Gimmick Zero is later this year, and Rookie Jet Studio suggest it’ll have a 16+ rating when it’s finished.
Quick Links
- Rookie Jet Studio’s Gimmick Zero Quickstart.
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