Contenders (Street Fighter - the Storytelling Game)

Rating:
Summary: Some good stuff, lotza junk
Review: The purpose of "Contenders" is to provide GMs of the Street Fighter roleplaying game with more outlandish-than-usual heavies for their players to beat up on, along with some new setting material and, of course, new martial arts styles and special manuevers. Alas, the designers saw fit to include the product line's worst elements, and then went on to add some more.

First, the sample characters. Care was taken to include practitioners of every style in the game line, including the book's new ones. Further, the new character generation rules of the Street Fighter Player's Guide were included. This is a good idea marred by the poorly balanced quality of the additions to the core rulebook. The new styles (discussed below) are terribly unbalanced, and the rules for elementalists, cyborgs, and half-animal characters make them far tougher than they should be. Also, some themes get overused: a third of the listed teams feature only Special Forces fighters, for instance.

That said, the sample characters are pretty off the wall and inventive, throwing some weirdness against the player characters. Examples include an escaped gladiator from outer space, a dragon in the form of a human, an ancient cannibal demon, and a genetic experiment that believes she's a perfectly normal young woman. Other characters are more mundane, mainly to exemplify the new styles, but they aren't ususally bad.

The fighters are followed by examples of supporting characters, such as a groupie, a manager, and a reporter. These are decent additions.

The next section, on new styles, is a frightful mess. The martial arts styles of the core rulebook and the GM's guide "The Secrets of Shadoloo" were fairly balanced; no one style had too big an advantage in special manuevers over others. The styles listed in the Player's Guide were either terribly weak or impossibly strong, and the 10 or so styles in Contenders follow along the path of being impossibly strong. With only a couple of exceptions, these are far and away better than the styles listed in the cole rulebook, made even worse by new special manuevers seemingly designed purely to hose the rules.

The next section offers some new material on fighting with hand to hand weapons. It's not bad, all told, but not especially good by any means.

Finally, some campaign elements are added as a means of spurring GM's adventure ideas. Again, this section isn't bad, but no one should rush out and buy this book because of these five pages.

It's too bad that Contenders was the last product published in the Street Fighter line. Ending on a sour note is a bad way to go. Don't bother to pick up this one unless you're determined to get the entire set.