KAMSII

THE PLEASURE PLANET

GURPS Traveller Planetary Survey 1

Steve Jackson Games

Reviewed by Brent Knorr, Copyright ©2001

“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 or Historical recreations, ride with Attila the Hon 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 it’s 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 monitered 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.

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

USA

Phone 512-447-7866

Fax 512-447-1144

E-mail sjgames@io.com

Website: http://www.sjgames.com