Kevin and Kell the Roleplaying Game

Game: Kevin and Kell the Roleplaying Game
Publisher: ComStar Games
Series: Action!
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 14th, July 2005
Reviewer’s Rating: 7/10   [ Good ]
Total Score: 7
Average Score: 7.00

I must admit that I certainly did not expect to be writing a review for Kevin and Kell the roleplaying game!

It’s not that that the super popular webcomic by Bill Holbrook isn’t suited to an RPG conversion it’s just that the penny took a while to drop. It’s a clever gamer who would have predicted this RPG franchise.

On reflection, Kevin and Kell is perfect for RPG adaptation. Why? Although the comic is named “Kevin and Kell” it is actually about a much wider cast and a dominant setting. Just as many of the comic strips themselves work without actually featuring either Kevin or Kell, so could your plot.

Domain is a richly flavoured world. It’s one which works without the main characters (unlike, say, Garfield which requires the lovable cat) and you could have Kevin and Kell like experiences by playing a troupe of any sort of furries. Domain also has a plot. It’s a land of the future and of the Great Bird Conspiracy – these are plot twists which players know about and which they can hope that their players find out about.

Furries – anthropomorphic animals – are hugely popular on the Internet and there are all sorts of games tailored for the fans. Kevin and Kell is still (despite being one of the first) fairly unique in that it enjoys a modern setting and features the carnivores versus herbivores conflict in such an insidious way.

As an RPG Kevin and Kell takes us carefully through some of the issues there. Domain is a world where it’s perfectly legal to chase your neighbour down the street and eat her. It’s illegal to hop over the garden fence, club your neighbour over the head, dump the body and loot the place.

It is bad manners to use items – weapons – in your hunting too. In fact, hunting in domestic areas like towns and cities is becoming pretty unpopular and the carnivores get their meat from the shops. Shopping, of course!

Kevin and Kell also have a hugely important plus point for any franchise RPG. Kevin and Kell the roleplaying game enjoys Bill Holbrook’s full support.

There’s a great introduction from the author-comic-creator-guru himself in the RPG. I can’t believe that although I worked out the deliberate juxtaposition of a wolf and rabbit marriage when I heard about Kevin and Kell that it took this introduction to point out the Heaven and Hell play on words. Kevin and Kell – Heaven and Hell. Doh!

I am a Kevin and Kell fan in the sense that I’ll follow links to the site whenever anyone points out a funny strip in a blog or forum. This makes me one of those awkward readers who won’t simply love the RPG because it features Kevin, Kell, Dewclaws and friends or someone with no exposure who’ll be oblivious to any setting/character-related howlers that RPG commits. No. I know enough about the setting and characters to expect certain things from the RPG and to expect a certain style.

I was quite pleased with the translation. I knew bits and pieces about the history of the Lindesfarne Dewclaw (Kevin and Kell’s adopted daughter) to know that I needed to know the truth about her. The RPG gives us exactly what we need here but does not get too carried away with languishing over the comic character’s stats and profile (as I said, I feel that one of the merits of the game is that you don’t need the comic characters).

You could say that the RPG contains spoilers. If you’re reading through the comics slowly then you might not want to know everything the RPG has to tell you. I suspect you’ll be a rare person though. Most people either know nothing/very little about the setting or almost everything. Kevin and Kell the RPG does the right thing by talking freely about all the plot twist up until now (ish) in the PDF.

There’s a lot of talking in this RPG. Or rather, there’s a lot of written history, setting and rules. This is a whopping 225 paged-PDF. The roleplaying version of Kevin and Kell uses the Action! System. It’s good to see this effective and easy to learn the mechanic system get such coverage.

You don’t need to buy an Action! System core rules or anything like that for the Kevin and Kell RPG as it’s all here – one of the reasons why we’ve 225 pages. I actually wonder whether we’ve too many rules here. Do we want a table of contents which begins on page 5 and concludes on page 9?

Actually, I suppose we do; especially on a PDF which opens top up and isn’t easy to dive into the middle of (here Kevin and Kell does this right too by providing bookmarks and hyperlinks contents) and where we’ll want to jump straight to the content we need. Do we need rules for light rubble and different rules for dense rubble? Rules on the effects of being lost, for rivers or underwater combat, do we need those? We have them anyway.

I can’t seriously criticise the RPG for being thorough! I am surprised though. I wonder what percentage of readers will be interested in a Kevin and Kell RPG and will want rules for bootleg turns while hunting, targeted explosive attacks or the polearms skill?

The Action! System isn’t clunky and chunky either, it’s just that Kevin and Kell is thorough! It does mean that the reader does have a fair bit of information to digest before getting into the game, though, and this perhaps is in conflict with the easy access of the Kevin and Kell comic strip.

There is a good deal of help in creating adventures in Kevin and Kell. This is a good call. To be honest, most PDF RPGs will never be the first RPG someone has to learn but Kevin and Kell is a notable exception! Fans may buy this just because it’s Kevin and Kell. The GM’s help begins with helping identify the adversaries.

We’re lucky again in that Holbrook has created such a diverse world; we could have zealous animal groups, evil neighbours, problems with the Great Bird Conspiracy, humans or even natural disasters. We could even have a purely social campaign with soap opera type drama rather than an out and out villain.

There’s no need to set the game at the current point in the comic either or even in Kevin and Kell’s home town. It must be tempting to run a British version of the game (not that this Brit is biased, you understand) and adventure with the royal hedgehog family – or a King Arthur and The Quills from the Tree setting.

One of the highlights from the Kevin and Kell Roleplaying Game is the Kevin and Kell comic strips themselves. Since the RPG is blessed with Bill’s support it is lucky enough to be able to include plenty of the three-panel comic strips.

If you’ve not read Kevin and Kell before then you’ll have read lots of it by the time you’re at page 255 here. In fact, it’s these three-panel strips and the character strip headers and footers which provide all the illustration for the game as there’s no “in column” artwork. The lack of column embedded artwork isn’t something you really notice.

It’s pretty easy to summarise Kevin and Kell the RPG. Although this is not a jaw-dropping game, it’s safe to say that authors Jamie Borg and Michael Hopcroft (HeartQuest) have pulled it off.

This is a good game.

If you’re a Kevin and Kell fan and into roleplaying then you’ll like the game, if you’re an Action! System fan then you have got a good new setting or if you’re looking for something furry then you’re in luck. I think the weakest link might be those Kevin and Kell fans who needed a less thorough and more lightweight game to get them into roleplaying (but all the Kevin and Kell fans I know are roleplayers (and not everyone I know is a roleplayer!)) I think ComStar Games probably struck the right balance here.