Slugblaster

Time for a Choice

From each genre, I’ll take a look at the games, their appeal, and, of course, their character creation posts to eliminate some. Hopefully, once I’ve done that, I’ll be able to come to a well-informed decision.

Decisions, Decisions

So, the characters have been created, the conclusions have been drawn, I am as familiar with the 7 games on offer as I’m going to get before actually playing them—its time to make a decision.

Before getting to that, though, I think it’s worth pointing out that this is, far and away, the most effort I’ve ever put into a decision of what game to play next. Since starting to write this blog I’ve spent a lot of time and not a little cash on new games. I’ve never had so many to choose from before. And I’m not even including the ones I’ve only got in PDF form. Long ago, as a teenager, I actually did run a variety of games; AD&D, of course, but also Gamma World, TMNT and Other Strangeness, Beyond the Supernatural, Robotech, Shadowrun. Back then, I just wanted to run the newest thing, the shiniest game, whatever had the bulk of my attention. But, I didn’t have so many to choose from, of course. There was no such thing as buying a game and never running it! I didn’t have that sort of money! These days, we are living in a golden age of tabletop games. There are so many RPGs of so many genres, utilising such an array of play styles and rulesets that it can be bewildering, overwhelming and paralysing. So, as I sail out of my majority-D&D era, navigate my way through the OSR and explore the unknown waters of the story-game, I have found this process incredibly helpful, if time-consuming. It has also been educational, interesting and fun. But there’s another aspect to this too: whatever game I choose, it’s one that my players and I will be with for weeks, hours of play and hours in between sessions thinking about. I want that to be good, or, hopefully, great!

The Competition

There are seven games to choose from, as laid out back in the original post. I could just take them one by one, as I did when writing their character creation posts, but, instead, I will separate them into genre groups. From each genre, I’ll take a look at the games, their appeal, and, of course, their character creation posts to eliminate some. Hopefully, once I’ve done that, I’ll be able to come to a well-informed decision.

Supernatural Investigations

The cover of Apocalypse Keys shows a trio of Omens defending against a humanoid with one eye six wings and a suit. — The cover of Triangle Agency

We’ve got two games in this genre (I suppose this is more a of a sub-genre, but heigh-ho, it’s my blog-post.)

Triangle Agency – this was the first character creation post I made as part of this series. I think, at the time, that was because it was the game I was most interested in. It didn’t hurt that it came in a very impressive box. The presentation is altogether impeccable. This applies also to the text itself, which styles itself as the manual to a game to be played by actual agents of the Triangle Agency. The character creation process taught me a lot about how the game would be played and was particularly successful at making, not just a character, but a personality, history and motivation.
Apocalypse Keys – this, was the last of the character creation posts I did. I’m going to cut to the chase with Apocalypse Keys; I don’t think it’s for me. It might suit some of my players, but not others. I would rather the Triangle Agency’s tongue-in-cheek take on the genre than the melodrama inherent in Apocalypse Keys.

Triangle Agency wins!

Fantastic Voyages

The cover of Orbital Blues — The cover of the Wildsea

I’m stretching the term ‘genre’ here once again. But I’m adding two games to this one anyway. Both of these involve ship creation as part of the character creation process, and a crew of misfits to go with it.

The Wildsea – Its got a fascinating setting, a rich and engrossing vibe and a beautiful presentation. This is very much a fantasy game that’s determined to get you into trouble out on the emerald waves of the Wildsea. You will spend a long time making your character, as evidenced by the length of my character creation post. There are many, many choices to be made at every step and that doesn’t even take into account the ship creation process. For the campaign I’m imagining, a maximum of about ten sessions, I feel like this is too much. I’d rather spend the time playing than making Wildsailors. But, its definitely one that I might return to someday.
Orbital Blues – This is a game set in a far flung future where everyone has spaceships but its grimy, debt-ridden and kind of sad. Its a game that’s underpinned by themes that we can easily all understand, the hell of living in a late-stage capitalist economy, the mental health toll taken by the struggle to just survive from day-to-day in the gig economy etc. The character creation really stoked my imagination and conjured images of my sad space cowboy. And it was the exact opposite of the Wildsea in that it was just so quick and easy.

Orbital Blues wins!

The Others!

The cover of Blades in the Dark by John Harper — Blades in the Dark Front Cover

Death Match Island Cover — Blades in the Dark Front Cover

I gave up trying to come up with a way to link these final three games. Slugblaster and Blades in the Dark share a system, sort of, and Deathmatch Island is based on a system that was originally created by the author of Blades in the Dark, but that’s pretty tenuous. They all do have an important similarity in the way they are played in distinct phases, though.

Blades in the Dark – This is such an iconic game and its the favourite of many an RPG enthusiast whose opinions I respect. The vibes of Blades are also perfect. Dark city, supernatural threats and heists. I think my players would love that shit. Also, the character creation is comparatively straight-forward and gives you a good idea of your character before you even start playing. This is the only game on the list that I have actually played before and, I’m not going to lie, it has an advantage because of that.
Deathmatch Island – This game is on the list because I finished a rewatch of Lost this year and because I backed it and got a lot of really cool materials for it. But it has so much more to recommend it. The premise is great, the fundamental decisions your characters have to make about the nature of their realities are compelling and the rules are simple enough to require very little time to master. However, its strength in this respect is also a weakness. I think I could easily get a small group together at short notice to play this game as a one-shot or very short campaign and I might consider it for that. But I’m not sure I want to run it for longer. Which is pretty much the conclusion I came to the first time I looked at it on this blog.
Slugblaster – Another gorgeously presented book. It has world-building oozing from every paragraph, illustration and fictional ad. The subject matter is not quite my bag though. I have no idea about skater culture. Although I am inspired by many of the touchstones Mikey Hamm names for Slugblaster, it doesn’t seem quite enough for me, I’m afraid. I also had some issues with the character creation process which I went into in that post. Maybe I’ll come back to this one someday. But, for now, it’s a no from me.

Blades in the Dark wins!

The Semis

The Lurk playbook in Blades in the Dark — Nice One Idiot

I’m glad to be dealing with a semifinal now after Ireland went out of the Women’s Rugby World Cup in devastating fashion at the quarter final stage earlier today. We’ll see a semifinal one day!

Anyway, we have three games left:

Triangle Agency – A unique take on the genre of supernatural investigation with an original ruleset and a lightly comedic vibe
Orbital Blues – A space cowboy sci-fi game of disillusionment with the universe and characters who grow through expressions of depression as they journey through the stars
Blades in the Dark – a classic supernatural, victorian heist game that has launched a thousand other games.

I have to eliminate Orbital Blues here. This is a bit disappointing, to be honest, but I have a good reason. I’m already running a Spelljammer game at the moment, as well as Ultraviolet Grasslands. That’s a lot of journeying from one place to another in a ship/caravan. I don’t want to start a new game with a similar format. Maybe if and when either of those two games comes to a conclusion, I’ll come back to Orbital Blues. But for now, it’s got to go, I’m afraid.

The Final

The Triangle Agency Normal Briefcase Edition

The cover of Blades in the Dark — The Triangle Agency Normal Briefcase Edition

So we have two games to choose from in the end, as it should be.

Triangle Agency
Blades in the Dark

I can’t choose between them. I’d be very excited to run either one. If I could find the time, I would run both. If I could find the time, I’d run every game on this list! But as they say in Highlander, there can be only one. Fittingly, It’s going to come down to a dice roll. 1d6. 1 to 3, its Triangle Agency, 4 to 6, Blades in the Dark.

Here we go!

Its a 4!

It’s time to sharpen your blades and take that Devil’s Bargain with the rest of the crew. We’re off to Doskvol…

Slugblaster Character Creation

But what is the aim of this game? Well, its to be the most teen teen you can been.

This is the second in a series of character creation posts I’m using to figure out which game I want to schedule of our next campaign. You can find the last one here.

Kick-flip Over a Quantum Centipede

That’s it. That’s the game. This is the kind of weird shit your character should be doing, or, at least, trying to be doing. “What is a Quantum Centipede?” I hear you ask. If you have to ask, you’re just proving you’re a dork. Not like me and my crew. We’re Slugblasters and we go Slugblasting across the frikkin’ multiverse on our boards. Or, like, it will be me, after I get finished making this character.

Slugblaster is a game by Mikey Hamm. It was released by Mythworks in 2024. It uses a Forged in the Dark system which means it’s based on Blades in the Dark. I will be making a Blades character as part of this series too, but for some perverse reason, I decided to do this one first.

Essentially, in a Forged in the Dark system you build a dice pool of D6s through various means. When you roll your dice pool to try and achieve something, the highest roll is generally the only one that counts. A 6 is a full success (and, actually, if you get more than one 6, in Slugblaster, it gives you 1 Style point.) A 4 or a 5 means you succeed but introduce a problem of some kind. Anything else is a failure.

There are other rules, of course, but that is the essence of it.

But what is the aim of this game? Well, its to be the most teen teen you can been. You have to do kick-ass tricks on your board, hack gear, get into drama with your teammates and rivals, and have “touching narrative downtime arcs.”

And the “classes” available to us reflect all of that so well.

Pick Your Personality

In this game, Personality is the closest thing to a character class or playbook. Here are the available Personalities:

The Grit
The Guts
The Smarts
The Heart
The Chill

As the book tells us, “Your personality isn’t about what you can do, it’s about how.” Which seems appropriate in a game about teenagers. It also means that any PC can do anything, as long as they describe it in terms of the way their Personality would handle it. I like this a lot. It’s a strong foundation for a heavily narrative game. Anyway, I’m going to roll a d5 to see which Personality I go with. I got a 5, which makes my character the Chill. This is, by far the most important decision/roll you make regarding your character. The Personality itself defines most of the things that make you you.

The Chill

“Play as the Chill if you want to crack jokes, eat some snacks, let problems solve themselves, and not think too much.”

Maybe the Chill is just lucky or maybe they notice things the others never do. Things work out for the Chill, that’s all.

Here are some of the things the Chill gets:

Extra Gear

1-2 Something You Found on Your Way Here
or
3-4 A Pet

I rolled a 2 on a d4 so I’m going to take Something I Found on My Way Here. That is incredibly wide open. Could be anything at all. I’m going to say it’s something that all adventurers should have, a long length of cabling. It was just lying there on the pavement in front of Old Swenson’s ‘shop, wrapped in plastic and taped up. It took a while to get it open with my Swiss Army knife to see what it was. It adorns my shoulder, cross-body.

I think, technically, this item is whatever you need at the time during the Run. I don’t think you need to actually decide what the item is until its needed.

Style Bonus

I get 1 Style after a run in which I express “ease or flow.”
Style is a currency that you gain by doing cool stuff and playing to character. You can spend it during downtime to gain Beats, propelling the story in the way you want it to go.

Attitude

I get to add an extra d6 to all actions! Ad infinitum! This is massive. If I could otherwise only manage 1d6 for an action, this immediately doubles my chances of a favourable outcome. Don’t forget, it’s only the top result on your dice that matters.

Traits

You only get to pick one of these to start with. As you hit your Trait Beats, you get to choose more. For now, let’s take a look at what’s available. There are five to choose from:

Steezey – Gets me an extra style if I roll doubles
Umm… Guys – I happen across the stuff nobody else does
Button Masher – I can utilise a “locked mod” but only for one action. You can normally only mod your devices when you have the correct set of components for them. You can also normally only use mods that you have on your own Signature gear. This would let me momentarily yoink a crewmate’s mod and use it for my own nefarious purposes
Lucky – I can use this to have one thing go my way that otherwise would have gone south. But I could only use it once per Run
Quirk – I would get to choose one thing that I’m inexplicably proficient in doing. If I can relate it to the action I am taking, I can upgrade any 1-3 roll to a 4/5 instead. What am I good at? Could be practically anything.

It would obviously be better to choose the perfect starting trait for the character you want to build, but I’m going to roll for it again. I rolled a 4 on my d5! That makes me Lucky! I’m quite happy with that. It is very thematic for this Personality and can be used in almost any situation.

Beats

So, you don’t start with any of these, since they are all about the advancement of your Slugblaster. But, I thought it would be fun to introduce the concept and some of the Arcs they can lead to. This system of Beats is heavily inspired by its namesake in Heart the City Beneath, which I discussed in this post last year. In Slugblaster, the Beats are a little more focused and you have to spend currencies like Style and Trouble to buy them. That allows you to play out a scene and send the story off in a way that you and your character want it to. This might be something to do with your Traits, like introducing your Origin Story, it might be something to do with your Family, showing your Trouble at Home or the Final Straw for your parents. It might be more to do with your Personality. Here is the Chill Arc:

Caught in a Plot – this costs 1 Style. Wrong place at the wrong time? Right place at the right time? Somehow your luck makes sure you discover some sort of plot.
Serendipity – this costs 2 Style. The plot thickens. Your crew might have something to say about it. This one gives you +1 Legacy. Legacy goes towards your ultimate Epilogue, deciding the type of life your teen will have in the future.
In Too Deep – This one costs 4 Trouble, which is quite a lot. The corner you painted yourself into with this case of mistaken identity has gotten very narrow and claustrophobic. You get found out. Things are going bad and one of your teammates notices how bad. This one gives you +1 Doom, which has a similar, if more negative effect on your Epilogue.
Somehow Works Out – The last Beat in the Chill Arc costs 3 Style. As the Chill, everything always works out in the end. Why were you ever worried? -1 Doom, +1 Legacy and +1 Trait.

Like I said, I can’t pick any of these at this stage, I just wanted you to get a feel for the types of Beats available to a Slugblaster character, dear reader.

Vibes

This one is an actual d6 table. Nice.
Here are the options:
“

Space cadet
Just woke up
Laundry day
deadpan
Always eating a bag of chips
Kisses their mom on the lips and isn’t weird about it” (!)

Here we go! That’s a 3 on a d6. That gives my Laundry Day. Just out there wearing the punishment underwear and the ripped jeans.

Look

There is another table, this time a d6xd6 table that will help me define this Slugblaster’s looks. The first roll is a 1 and the second roll is a 5. That gives me the result, “ballcap.” I think this a baseball cap given to me by my brother, who has left for college.

I’m going to roll again on this table, because just “ballcap” isn’t much of a look. This time I get a 4 and a 4. That’s “chains.” I’m imaging a lot of different sized chains hanging off a thick leather belt connected to a bunch of different things like keys, that Swiss Army knife, a little flashlight, an oversized Garbage Pail Kid keyring.

Family

Another d6xd6 roll here: I get a 5 and a 4, which gives me “sheltered.” Maybe that means they are a family who distrusts the rest of society, and they just want to be left alone to do things their own way. I imagine this could lead to an interesting Family arc! You are supposed to roll on this table twice, so I rolled again and got a 6 and a 2, “relaxed.” This seems to be at odds with the first one, but maybe it just refines the story a bit. Maybe the family has been sheltered for so long that they have become complacent about the outside world. Maybe, when to comes back to bite them, things will change.

Bond

This one is not really possible for right now. It requires there to be other actual players. The book suggests that everyone should choose the PC of the player sitting to their right to have a bond with. This is a nice random way to conduct this sort of thing. Sometimes, you find that a player is most likely to choose the other player that they already know best for this sort of bond. In my car, I am going to just roll a d4 to decide the other Personality type that I am Bonded with. I rolled a 2, which gives me the Guts. That’s the Personality with lots of confidence and “sass.” There is a d6 table here that you can roll on to better define the type of relationship you both have. I rolled a 1, which means we were childhood friends.

Gear

Everyone starts with a phone, a raygun and a hoverboard as well as the extra gear provided in your Personality description.

Since the Phone section suggests that it doesn’t need to be phone shaped, I think I will go for a wrist-console

I get a Raygun… There are two steps to making it. Step A and Step B, each of which involves a d6xd6 table. I got a 1 and a 3 for Step A and a 3 and a 5 for Step B. This gives me a Particle Blaster.

And then there’s the Board. Obviously the average Slugblaster’s most price piece of kit. The “Your Board” section of the book has a nice intro to the origin of the Nth Gear Hoverboard and how it revolutionised the world. The section also has several tables to help you design your board. So here we go!:

Grip Colour – 2 and 3 gives me “red.” I’m thinking gaudy, tie-dyed red
Grip Cut – 4 and 3 gives me “logo.” The stylised face of a little gremlin
Deck Graphic – 2 and 5 give me “name of a sponsor.” The sponsor is called “Gremling”
Type of board – I got a 5 and a 1, “oldschool”

You also get two pieces of gear from the list on page 66 of the book. I’m going to check that out right now.

Here are the two items I have selected from page 66:

Grappling Hook – it has 100 feet of cable, can stick to almost anything and has a handy winch
Pro Camera Gear – This could be anything from a decent DSLR camera and tripod to “shoulder-mounted 3D rigs”

Pick Your Signature

This is the item you are probably going to use to solve most of your problems given half a chance. People know you by this item and it’s your most prized possession. I’m going to use the table to help me describe it! 3 and 3 means its dirty/worn.

But, what exactly is the item? There are twelve listed so I’m going to roll a d12 for it obviously. That’s a 10, which gives me a Kinetic Deck, which allows my oldschool board to go faster over solid ground and make it super-heavy at will.

I get one mod to start with, although there are five listed. I’m going to go for the Stasis Anchor which can make the board totally immovable until its deactivated.

You get some more tables to add flavour to your Signature.

Origin – 4 – made it myself
Form – 3 – There’s an enamel pin made by my best friend, the Guts, stuck to the front of the board
Slogan – 26 – “ALT” and its got a holographic face that keeps changing as the angle changes

Name Yourself

My parents know me as Benji McWhirter. My friends call me Bench and I call myself Alter.

Conclusion

And that’s it, that’s the whole character creation process. I imagine, if you’re not writing about every step, it is probably quite quick to roll up a new character. There are a lot of fun ways to customise the base character but the fun seems to be in advancing, gaining Beats and Traits, Doom and Legacy and Fracture (another type of currency which is used to break up the crew!) But it starts you off with the tools to make things really awesome and dramatic as the game goes on, and that’s what it’s all about. I have a couple of gripes and they involve the gear. What you get to start with is stated in a couple of different places, but in each one, the list of things you start with is different. Also, there is an element of confusion around the Signature still. I am not sure if my Signature is my oldschool board that has this Kinetic Deck upgrade, or is that another piece of equipment on top of my board? It’s not super clear.

Otherwise, I have one more mechanics-related complaint and that is about the jargon used in place of more (for me) understandable terms. Boost, kick, turbo, slam… is it because I’m not a skater? The meaning of these slides off my brain, unlike the terms used in Blades in the Dark: goal, action rating, position, effect, harm.

Maybe I would get used it in play.

It is a gorgeous book, I have to say. The artwork is colourful and creative and inspiring and the writing is witty and just right, theme-wise.

Have you any experience with Slugblasting, dear reader? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Time for a Change

If you had to choose one, dear reader, which one would it be? If you are one of my potential players, which one would you like to play?

Anniversary Posts

More anniversary guest posts coming soon. In the meantime, have some musings.

Old School Rut?

I’m not sure how it happened but, recently, all I have been playing is OSR, trad and adjacent games. With the exception of Dungeon World, which is about as close to D&D as you can get while also flying the PBTA banner, its been wall-to-wall, dragon games, Borgs and Troikas. And this week? It’s Dragon Age, DCC and maybe some Black Sword Hack or UVG (which is pretty trad in its ruleset to be quite honest.) Am I in a rut or have I just naturally gravitated towards these games? Maybe I have found my niche and I’m occupying it. I don’t think that’s it. I think it has more to do with the ease with which I can roll out one of these games, if I’m the GM, at least. It’s also pretty easy to fall into one of them as a player when you’re familiar with the overall concepts, rulesets and themes. And, don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m not enjoying them. But it is time for a change, I think.

Options

So, I have a few options of non-OSR, non-D&D, non-trad games to try out in the near future. My current game of Troika! will be coming to an end next week and Dragon Age probably only has a couple of sessions left in it, for a while. So, some calendar spots are opening up! I’d like to fill them with something completely different.

Triangle Agency – I’m reading this at the moment. I have to say, so far, I’m loving the way the game is presented, the really original ideas, the surprisingly bare-bones ruleset and the way it treats the GM (General Manager) as as much of a player as the Agents. It has gotten me excited to play it and I am trying to get potential players excited about it too. The downside is that I feel like I still have a lot to read before I can think about getting it to the table.

Slugblaster – I got this great boxed set for Christmas and have yet to crack the spine of the rulebook in anger. But I have been listening to the excellent My First Dungeon actual play of the game over the last several weeks. It has made me want to try it out despite having little to no understanding of skate culture. I know at least one player who would be very interested in playing so I’m sure I could get a few more. Once again, the difficulty is that I have not even skimmed the rules yet. This is somewhat ameliorated by the fact that I’ve been learning how to play while listening to the podcast.

Blades in the Dark – Although I was a player in a campaign of Blades last year, I still haven’t run it as the GM. I think I would enjoy doing it and it is such a classic, it would be a shame not to put a game of it together. And it is the basis for games like Slugblaster and The Wildsea, which also feature on this list. I have been nicking enough rules from it for my D&D game, also, that I feel confident I would mesh quite well with the ruleset. At least I have read this one cover to cover and played it before, so that’s a big tick in the “pro” column for Blades.

The Wildsea – I wrote about this already last year and still haven’t managed to run it! Essentially, this game imagines a world where the entire surface has been covered in a vast forest and your players are sailors across the canopy, using boats with giant chainsaws attached to sail. Take a look at the last post about it if you want more info. I have rad a lot of this and could probably run it ok, but I am afraid of doing another game where my players are sailors as I am already doing that with Spelljammer and kind of, with UVG.

Deathmatch Island – I also wrote about wanting to play this around this time last year. I having been feeling the urge to scratch the Lost, Severance type itch over the last few months. I watched both of those shows in the last half a year and they have stuck with me a lot. I think Deathmatch Island would be perfect for that. Also, I have read it completely and would be very excited to try out its mechanics. Here’s my post about it from last year.

There are a couple of outsiders as well, Orbital Blues and Apocalypse Keys, both of which I purchased on something of a whim (and a sale.) I’m curious about them but have barely opened either. I know Apocalypse Keys is a PBTA game and that it is beautifully illustrated, but that’s about it. And I know Orbital Blues is a game of sad space cowboys ála Cowboy Bebop and Firefly so that is a big tick in its favour as far as I am concerned.

If you had to choose one, dear reader, which one would it be? If you are one of my potential players, which one would you like to play?