I recently ran a one-shot of Zaibatsu, the old-school cyberpunk RPG from Zozer games. This is a RPG set in the year 2225 in Tokyo. The players are members of the Japanese underworld, recruited by ruthless corporations (the titular Zaibatsu), to undertake dangerous and illegal missions to further the company’s bottom line.
It uses a slightly simplified version of the basic Cepheus Engine (OGL Traveller) rules. It doesn’t use the complex career system that a lot of Cepheus games have, instead using a simple package system to select character archetypes. There are random tables to determine the characters appearance and background, and a nice list of Japanese names.
It adds rules for retrogenics – biological modifications to characters. Characters can advance in rank by completing missions, which allows them to gain skills and get new retrogenics.
This is cyberpunk in the classic Gibsonian style. This isn’t our future, it’s the future as seen in 1980s fiction. At this point, it’s just as much as a retro-future as Steampunk or Atomic Age rocket sci-fi. No one here has cell phones, but cyberdecks are common. Tokyo is the center of the world, and its geography and society is described with enough useful detail to run a game.
There is a character sheet available on the Zozer website, but I wanted to make my own version. It’s fillable, and will automatically calculate the check boxes to keep track of stats, and will auto-calculate the statistic modifiers. I used an OCR-style font to give it that 80s monochrome monitor feel. You can click in the I.D. Photo box to import an image.
This is the initial US letter-sized version. I’ll probably make another one A4 sized. I’ll also make a version with a table tent. ***UPDATE – I’ve added the A4 version and updated the US Letter sized version***
zaibatsu_charsheet_fillable
Polyhedral Nonsense 