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Aug. 20th, 2020 11:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretA player was sick last night so I improvised a oneshot for the remaining members of our party. I used Murderhobos, a lightweight rpg designed to encourage the usually unwelcome trope of the adventuring party running around killing things and looting with no regard to civil society. You have stats in Killing Things and Avoiding Being Killed, you literally have a skill rank in Avoiding the Law. There is a very simple experience point system where if you land the killing blow, your enemy drops gold pieces based on their hit die, and your gold is your xp.
It was particularly fun to run because the game I've been running for the past year has been so cerebral, so socially focused, and so low on combat, that just setting loose the players in a cave full of things to kill was a welcome release. And each of my players chose to play a sort of funhouse mirror version of their character from the other game, making for some funny character moments.
The system is only 6 pages long and doesn't offer much hint of the kind of story to tell, other than it involving being murderhobos, so I just did a pretty classic wilderness exploration set-up, which I usually end up complicating with extra layers of story because it gets uncomfortably colonialist fast. I didn't do much of that here, though the point of the game is to embrace the fact that you're playing the bad guys. I invented some neat atmospheric details, like an underground pool of water where a giant octopus's rapidly swirling tentacles were sweeping the water back and forth along a tunnel like a monstrous pumping system. And I dealt with one murderhobo's tendency to set everything on fire by having a bunch of plants emit toxic gas as a defense mechanism when threatened.
It was particularly fun to run because the game I've been running for the past year has been so cerebral, so socially focused, and so low on combat, that just setting loose the players in a cave full of things to kill was a welcome release. And each of my players chose to play a sort of funhouse mirror version of their character from the other game, making for some funny character moments.
The system is only 6 pages long and doesn't offer much hint of the kind of story to tell, other than it involving being murderhobos, so I just did a pretty classic wilderness exploration set-up, which I usually end up complicating with extra layers of story because it gets uncomfortably colonialist fast. I didn't do much of that here, though the point of the game is to embrace the fact that you're playing the bad guys. I invented some neat atmospheric details, like an underground pool of water where a giant octopus's rapidly swirling tentacles were sweeping the water back and forth along a tunnel like a monstrous pumping system. And I dealt with one murderhobo's tendency to set everything on fire by having a bunch of plants emit toxic gas as a defense mechanism when threatened.