It is a universal truth that critics are always looking for a game they can truly advocate for. Play enough and you can’t help but become a little jaded. I do my best to push thoughts aside, but you can fall into funks hoping the next game will truly inspire, and not be merely ‘fine’.
To that end let me tell you about the new sport of Slugblasting! If you are bored and want to get seen on the socials, then why not visit alternative dimensions and pull off sick tricks on your hoverboard. Just be home in time for dinner or your might get in more trouble than you can handle.
This is the pitch for Slugblaster, a game designed by Mikey Hamm. The game has art from Galen Pejeau, Sex on a Pizza, Susanna Wong, Scott A. Ford, Heilie Finney, Rupam Grimoeuvre, Taylor Reese, Mike Perscho, Mikey Hamm and graphic design from Mikey Hamm.
I have run Slugblaster for a 6 session campaign and a couple of one shots at conventions. I have also played the game on the Unconventional GMs channel so this review will have both my impressions as a GM and player.
Like its mechanicl inspiration, Blades in the Dark, Slugblaster cycles through modes of play. The core of a session sess you going on a ‘run’. It might be getting your tag inside that inclusive club in Oparaeblum (cyberpunk world). Maybe your friend needs to impress a crush so you need to get treat from the interdimensional markeplace in Thennis Spar. What about a rival crew challenging you to a race through the Mad Max inspired landscape that is Vastiche. You then come back to reality and deal with drama at home and school before heading off again into the infinite multiverse.
Your characters represent cliches in the teenage drama genre and the character class names should tell you everything you need to know about that: The Grit, The Guts, The Heart, The Smarts, and The Chill. Each class has their own set of special abilities, giving you a good amount of niche protection. The classes represent broad strokes of course, and there is plenty of room for players to bring their own interpretation of what these names imply.
Not only do you get these special abilities, but each character is going to have a signature piece of gear. You could get yourself an adorable robotic companion, a voidwear backpack that always contains just the item you need, or even a negafriction sword that can cut people out of spacetime. These items come with a range of abilities and you get to take one of them from the off. This again gives players the opportunity to put their own stamp
Slugblaster throws out the skill list of Blades in the Dark and gives you just one six-sided dice to roll as default. Your class and signature gear can give you boost, extra dice, and kick, better outcome. You can even ‘check it’ doing a cool trick to get better outcome, but worse fallout. How about taking a dare, giving you an extra dice while accumulating trouble. You take a dice from this pool as your result, the higher the better. Fallout from bad rolls can land your character with slams which could be anything from brusied bodies, to broken hearts. Accumulate too many and disaster can strike, causing your life to spin out of control in the best traditions of the genre.
What I’ve described so far sounds gonzo and over the top, and that is the correct impression to take away. That is in the runs. When the game cycles back round to coming back to Hillsview and downtime, then your troubles come home to roost.
When you get back to your normal life you have the chance to vent trouble on a series of story beats: your parents get on at you about your lifestyle, that person you fancy in a rival crew asks you out, or the new invention is acting up. These beats seem incidental at first. Surely they restrict our creativity do act as we see fit in these downtime sections? I have not found that to be the case as a GM or player. The beats system guides characters along satisfying story arcs. It allows you to vent trouble and spend style to advance along these connected vignettes, giving a ground to a fictional universe where ‘anything can happen’.
These are also happening simultaneously: the Heart gets a partner, the Grit practices their tricks, and the Smarts makes a new toy. It all intertwines giving a rich tapestry of Young Adult (YA) style drama. Everyone around an RPG table is there to tell stories, the beats system just makes sure you have a strong direction and that they come to a satisfying conclusion. As a GM they give inspiration for larger plot elemetns and fuel for the next session. As a player they give direction and encourage you to lean into the highs, and lows, of the genre.
While Slugblaster is great as a one shot, it is in the campaign that it truly shines. Taking the idea of the gang sheet from Blades in the Dark, Slugblaster has a crew sheet. You can pour style into levelling up your crew’s reputation, gaining fans, sponsorship, and gear along the way. It emphasises the social nature of the crew, giving them fame and fortune, and all the troubles that come with it.
Of course being teenagers you don’t always get along all the time. The pressures of fame, relationships, and normal life getting in the way can lead to fractures. Fractures are Slams for the crew. Just as accumulating too many slams causes disaster for an individual, too many fractures can cause the crew to split up! Surely that is the end of the campaign? Nah. The stories that Slugblaster is helping you to tell are replete with groups coming together, then breaking apart, only to mend bridges just in time for the final showdown, whatever form that may take.
During the campaign I ran, the Heart’s relationship with a rival crew member, the Guts jealousy of the easy fame the Chill had come by, and the family troubles of the Grit pushed the Infinite Grind Crew beyond breaking point. They came back together in a race through interdimensional space, helping each other out as the crew took down some hired mercenaries. It was awesome.
The intention in the campaigns is not to just keep going forever, but to run about 5 – 10 sessions before wrapping up your crews stories. Over the course of play the Beats will see characters gain Legacy and Doom. These are both aspects of their personal history they will be remembered for but the former is positive and the latter negative. When your campaign does wrap up the number of Legacies and Dooms you have go towards determining the high and low points of your epilogue: does your high school love last forever, does the crew find fame and fortune, do your parents stop being such losers? This epilogue could be anything from the next summer, as with our crew, to showing what happens to these characters as they move into adulthood. It is a beautiful and bittersweet way to wrap up.
The game provides the GM plenty of grist for the mill to make sessions easy to come up with. Alongside the beats the players will lean into, and the increasing fame of the crew, there is loads of great material in the book. The worlds the crew can visit are evocative with lots of story hooks baked in. Monsters are not stat blocks, but narratively descirbed with what they can do giving the GM leeway to interpret their impact on the players. Plenty of fun tables in there to give inspiration as well. It is a very considerate book, making the game a very smooth experience to run.
I am obvisouly full of praise for Slugblaster, so let me temper that with a couple of niggles. A system called Bite regulates how much pain the GM can bring as they spend it on introducing obstacles, forcing disaster rolls etc. I am never fan of economies that sit between the player and the GM. As these things go Bite is probably the least intrusive I have experienced. It will be useful to some, but I think if you have a lot of GM experience you will likely find it more of a hindrance than a help.
There is also a slightly odd holdover from Blades in the Dark. Blades in the Dark frequently sees individual crew members get spotlighted due to the varying nature of the jobs. It has a system for rewarding players portarying their characters in the way that class is meant to be. As the jobs often involve splitting up a lot, it means these triggers don’t come up every game. Slugblaster has similar triggers for extra style. I always found that crew stayed together more in Slugblaster, making it feel bad to not give someone their trigger. I always just gave it out. It just felt like unecessary administration.
Those niggles aside I think Slugblaster is an absolute masterpiece. Fun to read, easy to run, with mechanisms and subsytems designed to push you in the direction of gonzo action and YA drama. It is rooted in the real, but revels in the fantastic. Get out on your hoverboard, just be home in time for dinner.
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