Tonight, Tonight: FORCE BLADE PUNK 2.0

Physical backers! This is the last of the current batch of three games, the others being There But For The Geese Of God and Pub Crusade. I'll write the back pages for them in September and get 'em sent out once they're good and funny. 

I've been playing around with the idea of dice placement as a mechanic; the challenge is making sure that the little mini-game of choosing results doesn't detract from the excitement of the narrative. I had a little system I was working out with dice placed to activate abilities but I couldn't come up with anything a) concise or b) good enough to warrant publication.

(There's a whole big game in there somewhere, I reckon. Dice Throne does really interesting things with it.)

But: the first one-page game I ever published on here - a freebie, almost a decade ago - used it. Force Blade Punk was a finalist in the 2015 200 Word RPG Challenge which I did a drawing about and then pritt-sticked (prittstuck?) it over the top as a test for what a one-pager could look like. Here it is:

Eagle-eyed readers will note that none of the following 90 or so games did, in fact, look like this. I very quickly took to covering the entire page in text and editing backwards from there to make it fit, rather than trying to make a concept as short as possible as I did in the 200w Challenge.

(200 words really doesn't give you much to work with; you have to be terribly clever to get something playable out of it, let alone anything good. Most of them wind up as curios - something neat to think about - rather than the sort of thing you'd bring to a table. I've taken a few stabs at the medium and, like, they're fine but they're not my best work. I like a bit more wiggle room.)

FBP was a Monsterheartsy sort of thing. I'm fond of it, but there's not enough there to get a game across. Not like GHOST/ECHO, which I when I read it back in 2013 was the coolest fuckin thing I'd ever read. (It's still up there for me tbh.) It was really concerned with what the other characters thought of you and not much else. I think it's a product of my madness at the time: I was desperate to be perceived positively by everyone around me. It comes across as quite desperate upon re-reading.

I wanted to revisit it and play around with the dice placement bit - a trick which I keep stealing from Psi*Run, over and over, and will never stop. I used it in Nice Marines, and Dogmasters of the Wasteland, and two of my three unreleased cyberpunk projects, and several drafts of 2016's THE DOOR which never made it past Kickstarter backers. (I think? Let me know if you read it.)

So I changed all the resolution statements to active, shorter negative ones that you had to avoid, which reads better. The core mechanic is basically GHOST/ECHO (I realise, now I reread it) but with an emphasis on self-destruction, which I hope makes for some stories of no-good punks trying to achieve redemption at the cost of their own lives and reputations. I like the way that the default outcome to attempting an action is YOU FUCK IT UP, YOU GET HURT, YOU LOSE FACE and you have to buy your way out of that.

I struggled with the layout (I printed it out and everything) because I wanted to do something interesting with the statements and I couldn't make it work with my feeble scalpel and glue. I asked RRD's in-house layout artist to help out, and so you can all thank Minerva McJanda for making this one look much better than the others.

And yes: it's a Smashing Pumpkins reference. There's Metric and Kidneythieves ones in there too. Allow us old folks our indulgences.