Next in line on the shelf, cue up your DragonForce Pandora station because we’re headed for the World of Synnibarr, second edition. For the few out there unfamiliar with the legend, World of Synnibar is a multi-genre-ish RPG roughly contemporary with Rifts. In Synnibar, various fantasy, sci-fi & comic book martial arts heroes live on & in a hollowed out Mars that has been turned into a generation ship by an alien god to preserve humanity from … I’m not entirely sure what. Fifty thousand years of mayhem ensue leading up to a present day of super high-powered PCs running amok across two planetary surfaces along with neighboring worlds, other dimensions & the realms of the gods themselves. I really can’t explain, or even sum up, so let’s jump straight into character creation.

Have a lot of bookmarks handy, because you’re gonna be doing a lot of flipping back & forth.

There are six stats, but chargen begins with rolling 7d20, rerolling 7 or below, drop the two lowest & re-re-roll until you get a number higher than the two you dropped. It occurs to me later that you could save yourself a raft of re-rolling if you were just to roll d12+8 eight times & drop the lowest two scores. But then rolling dice is kind of a meditative exercise in & of itself, so you may want to hold on to it. A dozen or so rolls later the numbers we’ve got are 15, 13, 14, 19, 15, 12, 16. The 14 & 12 drop & get replaced by another 16. (You’re probably getting your first inkling of where Synnibarr gets its reputation as a power gamer’s dream. It’s only an inkling.)

Oddly enough at this point you don’t assign the stats to anything. That comes considerably farther down the line.

There are four different methods of proceeding from this point, each more intricate & convoluted than the last. I’m old & tired so I choose the easy route, method 1. That involves making three rolls on the Character Class table. Reroll duplicates & any class whose requirements you don’t meet. Note that since you haven’t assigned numbers to any stats yet, those requirements are completely abstract. You need, for instance, two 17s & a 12 to be an Amazon, but it doesn’t matter what in yet.

I get a 12, a 7, & a 15, which makes my choices Ninja, Dwarf (what you’re expecting but also keepers of the Akashic Record, each a wielder of their own Mjolnir, 25% of whom can teleport), or Shadow Warrior (magical Yojimbo). We all know that the general rule in this life is be yourself, unless you can be Batman, in which case be Batman. The gaming analogue is, of course, if you can be a ninja, be a ninja. So ninja it is.

Class selected, it’s time to note your skills. All members of classes begin with a set of standard skills:

• Balancing & Juggling
• Climbing
• Combat, Dodging & Blocking
• Combat, Hand-Held Weapons
• Combat, Hand-to-Hand
• Combat, Projectile & Throwing Weapons
• Computer Operation
• Cooking
• Detect Traps & Secret Doors
• Fishing
• Math, Basic
• Medical, First Aid
• Navigation, Air
• Navigation, Land
• Navigation, Water
• Piloting, Boats
• Reading
• Running
• Sewing
• Survival, Wilderness
• Swimming, Basic
• Weaving
• Wood Carving
• Writing

Each of the classes gets an additional set of skills. In the ninja’s case, that’s:

• Acrobatics
• Biology
• Biology, Marine
• Biology, Xeno-
• Climbing Walls & Ceilings
• Combat, Grappling
• Combat, Martial Art Disarming
• Combat, Martial Art Empty-Hand
• Combat, Martial Art Throwing
• Combat, Martial Art Weapons
• Disarming Traps
• Lockpicking, Advanced
• Lockpicking, Basic
• Meditation
• Moving Silently
• Nerve Pinch

Each class gets its own set of abilities of various types. A ninja gets Beam Attack Advantage (all their attacks are treated as projectile attacks & thus are harder to parry or dodge), Beam Attack Dodge Advantage (ninja, on the other hand, dodge beams as if they were normal attacks), Poison Creation, Heightened Awareness (detect all life within 30 feet), Shadow Vision (see 100 feet in total darkness), & Telepathy (sadly this only works with other ninja within a 1 mile radius, but it’s better than a poke in the eye with a sai). They also get a small starting armory: three pairs of sai, two katanas (phear my skillz!), nine shuriken, a staff & a bow.

The combination of sci-fi, fantasy & scouting skills gives a pretty good foretaste of what Synnibarr itself is like as a setting.

It’s only at this point that we assign the numbers to the stats! This is also the first mention of specific stat requirements for some but not all of the classes. Help is at hand in the form of bonuses to the requisites. An alchemist, for instance, needs a Dex of 15, but also gets a +2 to Dex so the character can still make the cut if they have at least a 13 to put into that stat.

To say the modifiers aren’t consistent is putting it mildly. Our ninja (who oddly enough doesn’t need to meet a minimum in any stat. So that’s a +2 to Agility, a +2 to Dex, & a … +d4x10 to Strength. The caltrop hates me for this roll & our ninja nets a paltry +10 to strength. Well, it is what it is. A little juggling produces our set of stats:

Con 15
Str 24
Agl 21
Dex 18
Int 16
Wis 15
Ego 31 (Int + Wis)

Once your stats are assigned there’s still a chance for members of most classes to begin play with “random mutations” & “random psionics”. Our ninja turns out not to have either, which I can’t say I regret. That’s two things fewer to keep track of. Because hoo boy is there a lot coming up.

Our Agility of 21 nets us 2 attacks per turn & an advantage bonus of +1. What’s advantage bonus? As in so many more cases to come, we have to wait to find out. Two attacks per turn means the ninja acts on segments 6 & 11. What does that mean? See above.

Dexterity influences pretty much what you would expect it to. An 18 is good for another +1 to advantage bonus (running total of +2), a +4 Shot Bonus (BAB, essentially), a +10 Dodge Bonus, & a -7 Surprise Adjustment. Now we calculate Dodge. Did we not just read that from a table? We did not; that was just the bonus. Dodge = 2Agl + Dodge bonus, in our case 2×21 + 10 = 52. we just noted is for melee weapons or bare hands; Beam Attack Dodge (which is for everything from throwing knives to rifle fire, not just beams) is 75% of Dodge: 39. Our Block is the same as our Dodge: 52. Why choose to use one rather than the other? We won’t find that out until the combat rules.

Strength determines your damage bonus, how much weight you can carry, & how far you can jump. A strength of 24 means a damage bonus of oh, come on now … +10 x 4. Add ten to the damage you roll then multiply by four. Weight limit is 700 pounds. Payload hinderance, whatever that is, equals 25% your weight limit, so we note 175 for that. From a standing start the ninja can jump 24 feet vertically & 12 horizontally.

A Wisdom of 15 gives us a 31% chance to locate traps & find secret doors.

Your Constitution influences your number of Life Points, your Fate Rolls (saving throws, of which there are only two), & the Metabolic Shock Roll you make to resist stunning attacks & to stay active if you lose more than half your current Life Points at once. Our ninja gets d6 x 100 Life Points (again, this is not the most extreme example) plus 150 for a Con of 15. This roll goes well enough; ninja ends up with 550 LP, a Fate vs Magic/Psionics/Earthpower (one of myriad energy sources for Cool Powers) Roll of 6%, a Fate vs Alchemy/Chi/Mutations of 10%, & a Metabolic Shock of 40%. Oddly our Ego comes into play here, a 31 providing a +4% bonus to Fate vs. Alchemy/Chi/Mutations for a final value of 14%.

Ego for some reason also influences NPC reaction. Our ninja’s 31 gives a Reaction Adjustment of 2, whatever that means. But wait! There’s a roll to make on the Ego Flux table. Yes, you have force of personality, but is it winning or repellent? Luckily for the ninja a roll of 11 gives a Personality result of Good. The Adjustment is positive.

There are four, count ’em, four different classes of surprises you can experience. All members of a character class have the same percentage for each class. (Percentage to benefit from? To detect? It doesn’t say.) For a ninja, the values are Class AA 99%, Class A 73%, Class B 69%, & Class C 62%. I don’t know whether to be happy about that or not yet.

Eight more tables determine various physical appearance traits for those who care to use ’em. I do, so after a few more rolls we learn that our ninja is (d6 = 4) female, (d6 = 4) indigenous American (the table actually says “Indian” but I’m gonna make an executive decision that actual Indians fall under “Asian” & there needs to be a place for First Nations people since literally everyone on Earth was transported to Synnibarr as part of the back story), (d6 = 2) blonde, with (d8 = 8) white eyes, (d100 = 06) right handed, & (48 + 6d6 = 48 + 32 = 80″) stands a towering 6’8 tall, weighing in at (d100 + 150 = 77 + 150) 227 pounds. She’s a bit of a beanpole for that height, but I suppose you expect a ninja to be lean. In general terms she’s (d6 = 5) below average in attractiveness, which nets her a -2 Reaction Modifier. Finally, we learn her starting age is 30 + d4 = 31 years. Each class has its own typical lifespan; for a ninja it’s 140 years, which I guess is a testament to exercise & good diet.

Your social stratum determines your starting money. All classes roll on the same table for that, & we learn that our ninja is (d100 = 87) Well Off, so she starts her career with … dammit. Between $40k & $100k, the table says. How do I roll 4-10? My best guess is d8 where 1-2 = 1, 3-4 = 1.5, 5-6 = 2 & 7-8 = 2.5, four times, so I’ll run with that. The final result for the ninja is $75,000. That sounds like a preposterous amount until you consider that item costs running into the millions are commonplace.

The equipment list runs the gamut from daggers to literal starships, assault rifles, surface to air missiles, submarines, ox carts, power armor, you name it. Our ninja may have a few fallback weapons but nothing that makes anyone say “whoa!”. So she drops $20k on a laser saber that does 1000-10,000 damage per hit (did I mention the number inflation in this game?). It won’t work in special anti-technology areas & it burns a half unit of energy from a 10-unit reservoir with each strike or parry, but what the heck. She’s got those sweet twin katanas for backup. Besides, she’s a damn ninja. One hit should be good enough. Her Dodge is pretty good, but just in case she drops $15,500 on a hadrathium (what’s that? at this point we don’t know) chain mail shirt that reduces her Dodge by a mere 2% & has, I swear I’m not making this up, 2.7 million LP of its own while providing One Tenth of protection. That doesn’t sound like much, but each Tenth of protection an armor or ability provides divides the damage done to you by ten. The Tenths stack, too, so if you’ve got Two Tenths you reduce damage by a factor of 100, of 1000 if you have Three Tenths, & so on. (Did I mention the number inflation?). Another $10k is good for a life-support belt that protects the wearer from extremes of temperature, vacuum, submersion in water & so on. The belt needs power clips, so there goes another $10,000 for 100 energy units worth of charge, good for the laser sword & the life-support belt alike. That still leaves more than enough dough for a riding drake or antigrav bike, but sadly starting ninja don’t know how to ride or to operate any vehicles other than boats, so she’s left walking everywhere unless she can bum a ride with a comrade.

Our last step is to select one of nine Auras, color-coded alignments. There are three good, three neutral & three evil, as you might expect. We’re talking about a ninja here – her purpose is to flip out & kill people, but strictly professionally – so let’s go with Amber, a person with a broad “mischievous” streak who places no value on anyone but herself & her personal friends.

As befits a Palladium-alike, it’s at this point that we would go through each known skill individually & note the Chance to Accomplish each one, each determined in a different way. But as I mentioned earlier I’m old & tired & I’d like to get this character out the door before the end of today. So let’s just assume that we’ve figured out the percentile chance for each of our ninja’s many skills. At last, we’re done!

Korroth Aithcyn the ninja is ready to set out into the World of Synnibarr.

I’m not gonna lie. World of Synnibarr is kind of a mess. But unlike the actual worst game ever written, it’s a mess born from the wahoo spirit & love, not hate. It’s everything & the kitchen sink, but there’s a party in the kitchen & everyone’s welcome.