THE KAZARIM ROLE-PLAYING GAME

Kazarim are the in-world name for what most fantasy role-playing games call "adventurers." The word “kazarim” refers to someone of “great renown, a hero of old.” It is both a subculture and the people who live within that subculture. Perhaps the best analogy in our world is the Chinese genre of wuxia, the sort of stories we find in the martial arts epics of Chinese cinema such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or The Swordsman. Other examples of this class of literature can be found in the gunfighter or itinerant sheriff of the Western genre, or among old European stories such as the Icelandic sagas. “Kazarim” refers to a world of glory, honor, justice, revenge, and plunder. It can refer to revolutionaries, sorcerers, sell-swords, barbarians, high inquisitors, swashbucklers, assassins, and knights. Mostly, it refers to the larger-than-life. A mercenary who spends their days standing guard or enlisted as a simple soldier in the army is not a kazarim, nor is a scavenger who scrabbles through the wreckage of a bandit raid and flees at the first sign of danger. Adventure is at the heart of what it means to be kazarim, and while altruism or greed may motivate the character’s escapades, it is this thirst for the unknown and the act of adventure that makes someone a kazarim.