Kuro, a Japanese horror RPG

So my good friend Bill very kindly gave me a gift card for my birthday from our local FLGS, Games and Stuff.  I love going in there because it's full of exactly the sort of cool nerdy game stuff I love, but I hate going in there because it's full of exactly the sort of cool nerdy game stuff I love.  Thus, having a gift card helped save me from myself.  After wandering for a bit I decided I should get something new and different rather than adding to my Pathfinder or D&D archives.  Then I spotted this game, Kuro from Cubicle 7.

Kuro (exercise bike not included)

I love the cover and was immediately captivated by the blurb:

The year is 2048, and something dark has returned to Japan. With an international blockade set up around the beleaguered country, there is no escape. To ignore the horror will only delay the inevitable, but do you have the strength to face the nightmares?  Kuro is a developing game setting that mixes a dark near future with unremitting Japanese horror.

I was pleasantly surprised because it sounded a lot like a game I ran in the early 2000s I called Neo Tokyo using a mashup of some homebrew mechanics, skill trees ripped from Paranoia, and hacked anthro races from Teenage Mutant Turtles and Other Strangeness.  The setting was a near-future Tokyo in the aftermath of a mysterious catastrophe, full of Yakuza, aliens, robots, furries, interdimensional wierdness, and a dollop of the supernatural.

Naturally I bought Kuro immediately.

The basic mechanics are a d6 dice pool using dice from your attribute plus any dice for a relevant skill.  One very appropriately Asian twist is that fours don't count because the word for the number 4 sounds like the word for the word for death.  (I was a bit surprised here because I thought the taboo on the number four was a purely Chinese thing.  FYI, kuro/黑 means black or dark/darkness.)

Once I wrap up my current Pathfinder-based fantasy game I'll see if I can pitch a bit of Kuro to my group and revive my old Neo Tokyo campaign.