Friday, May 31, 2024

Weekly Book Recommendations (May 31)

Bad Trips: a monstrous RPG road trip across America by Finn Gallagher: this was something I picked up during the big Kickstarter event in February. I've never, ever, been a fan of FATE (every exposure I've had since it first came out has been negative) so Monster of the Week was never on my radar, — EDIT: friend of the Blog Joshua Kronengold pointed out that MotW is a Powered by the Apocalypse game and not FATE so maybe I will pick it up — but I love my some cryptozoology RPG ever since I ran a one shot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer set in early 1900's Yale with a "raised by wolves" boy as one of the heroes fighting a cryptid, so I figured I could repurpose this to some other system. Gallagher has produced something truly fun here, and if like me you're not a FATE fan it'll be trivial to convert to a GUMSHOE or d6 system or any other game. The concept here is 12 "episodes" of monster hunting across the US, and each episode is clear, clean, thematically distinct, and immediately feels playable. None have a ton of detail, but that's a plus for me since it makes it easy to work out the specifics. Highly recommended. 

2 comments:

  1. Wait wait MotW is PbtA, not Fate.

    Did the fact that it's Evil Hat fool you? I mean, Evil hat is hardly Fate-only -- aside from MotW, they did Girl by Moonlight (Forged in the Dark), Apocalypse Keys (PbtA, but wonky and inspired by Brindlewood Bay), Blades in the Dark (technically PbtA, but obviously inspired its own set of descendands), and Bubblegumshoe (Gumshoe).

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  2. Also, I rather like Fate Core/Fate Accellerated (much more than earlier versions of Fate). That said, it's a high-skill game with a specific narrative focus, so it's easy to have a negative experience with it, sadly.

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