But to the Stalker. It is a licensed roleplaying game, from the Arkady and Boris Strugatsky book Roadside Picnic - its Finnish translation is called Stalker as is the movie based on the book, so the RPG is called Stalker. The basic premise of the story is an alien visitation to the Earth which leaves six Zones with strange effects and items. Stalkers are people who go to the Zones, illegally of course, to fetch items to sell. I read the book the first time when I was a bit over ten years old and it made quite an impact. I have read the book a couple of times since and it still is a very good book. I saw the movie once when I was about fifteen and I think I'd appreciate it more now.

The game is about the stalkers, of course. They are people who do very dangerous stuff for a living, mostly outside normal society, and therefore are a good subject for a roleplaying game. The mood is a modern horror game, and it succeeds in creating the atmoshpere, at least from the text. The character generation starts with group generation, which is a good thing. This way you get a coherent group with people who have reasons to work together. I like the trend in modern roleplaying games of creating more than just the bunch of numbers and with connections.

Speaking of numbers, Stalker has an original mechanic. There are skills, and they don't have any ranks. You just know a skill or you don't. A new character gets to pick ten skills, which seems a bit low, but I haven't played this so I'm not sure about that. After the skills are picked, they determine the attributes. Each skill has an associated attribute, and that attribute is half of the skill, rounded up. This is somewhat roundabout compared to the usual rpgs, and seems like a fresh idea.

Stalker is a diceless roleplaying game. There is a system, though. It's a diceless version of Ville's Code/X system. The GM decides a difficulty level for important tasks, and then grades the idea of the players and the roleplaying of the idea. This gives a number and if it's greater than the difficulty, the character succeeds. Skills help and if the character has a skill, he can do things without even a formal resolution even when an unskilled character should describe what he's doing. This seems an elegant system but it needs a GM who can judge things on the fly. The game says that you can use a die to generate randomness if you want.

The book has three section. First is the player's which describes things a player should know. The second and third sections are for the GM. The second one describes the system in more detail and gives and overview of the world. It also has one of the best GM advice I've seen in a roleplaying game. Ville runs his games in a way different from mine, but his guide here is a good one, even describing the responsibilities of the GM and how to run a fun game. The third section is a guide to the French Zone near Toulouse.

The world is described well enough. The main setting is our world, so the description is more of the Zones, the artifacts and anomalies found in the Zones and their effects on the world outside. The description is specific enough for GMs to whip up a game on short notice but general enough that I didn't feel very restricted. The four other Zones are not
described much, mostly there are just general outlines, so a GM can very easily modify them according to their wishes.

All things considered, this is a very fine roleplaying game in one book. It doesn't really need supplements, the item list is long enough and there is enough material (and random thingie generator tables) for long campaigns. There were some problems with the first printing and only 17 copies were delivered to the stores, so if you want to buy it, you probably have to wait. If the game was written in  English, I'd say that every roleplaying reader should go and try to buy it, but as it's in Finnish, I just have to say that buy it if you can read Finnish and are interested in roleplaying games.