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Kamsii - The Pleasure Planet
GURPS
Traveller Planetary Survey 1
Reviewed by Brent Knorr, Copyright © 2001
Edited by Suzanne Campbell for The Guild Companion
"Welcome
to Kamsii, a World of Fun! Take
in our wonderful Nature Parks, from glaciers to tropical jungles, or
try a ride on the Supernova roller coaster in the Natassia Valley
which travels slowly along the canyon with beautiful rocks and
fossils on one side and a mile-deep drop on the other, then plunge
down that drop in a half a minute, swooping back up again to leave
the tracks for a hair raising six seconds as you leap the Canyon! For something a little more laid back, try one of our
wonderful museums, admire ancient treasures such as the Gutenberg
Bible, X-Men #1 or the Giivaash parchments. Or live the excitement of ancient times in one of our
Historical recreations, ride with Attila the Hun or Eneri the
Conqueror, travel with Amundsen to the Antarctic or with Cleon II to
Thutmos IV. Want to
have fun without the kids? Send them to Camp Kamsii, where our
skilled counsellors will keep them so busy with exciting activities
that they won't miss you, for day or a month. There's no end to the excitement and entertainment that can
be found on Kamsii!"
GURPS
Traveller Planetary Survey 1: KAMSII - The Pleasure Planet
is the first of a new series of 32-page books, each of which will
take a detailed look at a single planet. This is a comic book size format, with a colour map of the
planet on the inside front cover and a half page colour sector map
on the inside back cover. The
book has next to nothing in the way of game specific rules, focusing
on background material and descriptions. It's designed to fit into the GURPS Traveller setting
but could be adapted to any other game system very easily. Kamsii is
a world dedicated to its Guests. They must be entertained, educated,
and have as much fun as possible in a completely safe environment,
and woe be it to anyone who interferes with that design! Everything is constantly monitored to ensure things run
smoothly, should an accident or unpleasant incident occur, highly
trained teams are dispatched to ensure that it is taken care of
quickly. Damage control
on Kamsii is quick, massive and leaves most witnesses (and even
victims) feeling that they've been lucky! Even the animals in the Nature parks are safe; they've all
been implanted with specially designed Kamsii chips to ensure they
behave! As it says on the back cover "The Kamsii Company
says everybody will have a good time, and nobody crosses the
Company. Not twice."
I found
this book to be well put together. There's not quite enough information to run a whole campaign
on Kamsii, but more than enough to run several adventures with a
little preparation time by a Gamemaster ahead of time. It's sort of like Disneyland as run by the Illuminati on a
planetary scale. It strikes a good balance in that you could take
the material that's presented and go several directions with it,
from very comic to very dark and probably be successful with either
approach or anything in between. The $8.95 price tag is a little
high for 32 pages of material, but not unreasonably so. If this is a typical example of what the Planetary Survey's
are going to be like, I'll keep buying them.
Editor's Note:
GURPS Planetary Survey 1: KAMSII- The Pleasure Planet
is published by Steve Jackson Games. Their contact details are as
follows:
Steve
Jackson Games
PO Box 18957
Austin TX 78760
E-mail: sjgames@io.com
Web: http://www.sjgames.com
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