Vampunks
Genre: Goofy vampire hunting TTRPG
Bundle: Racial Justice
Sabe's rating: 🧛♀️🧛♂️. I guess I'd play it if it's the last day of a convention and it's the only table with open seats?
Making an intentionally humorous tabletop RPG is not easy. The act of sitting around a table pretending that we're hunting vampires is inherently silly by most standards of adult interaction, so even if this were a diehard straight-faced grimdark book, you'd still have laughter at the table. Leaning into that is something you can do, but there's a strip of yellow warning tape marking the crossover into cringe; lean too far and the laughter turns to eye-rolls. Unfortunately, I don't think Vampunks manages to avoid that danger.
The premise of Vampunks is that it's "the near future," things suck in the general way we expect they will in a few years (plus weird additions like "irradiated slums" that are never explained?), and also there are vampires that need killing. Enter the player characters, the "VAMPUNKS", who are "backed by the world's major governments", demonstrating to all and sundry that the author has no idea what punk is or who punks are.
Mechanically, there's very little of interest here. Character creation is of the beer-and-pretzels style where you jot down a few numbers and a name and you're good to go. Most of what happens is by GM fiat. When the GM wants you to roll some dice, it's 3d6, subtract your relevant attribute, hoping for low results. Near as I can tell, the only reason for this unintuitive inversion is so that a roll of 666 is bad, providing further evidence that the author has fundamentally misunderstood punk. If there's a gem to be found in this quick-and-dirty mechanical design, it's in "Embracing Vampirism". That's the option to, when taking lethal injury in a fight against vampires, become a vampire yourself, get cool vampire powers, and keep fighting, knowing that eventually you'll go "full vamp" and turn to the dark side. That, for once, nails it! Definitely crib that idea for use in a better vampire hunter game.
In the end, this would be an amusing space-filler in some off-primetime convention slot. If you've got it from the bundle, keep it in mind! You could read it in the space of a coffee break, then play it sitting on the bare carpet with a few dice and index cards. But the text at least doesn't offer much to get excited about for more involved play than that. If you've seen it in action, I'm curious if it runs better than it looks--@ me on Twitter!
Genre: Goofy vampire hunting TTRPG
Bundle: Racial Justice
Sabe's rating: 🧛♀️🧛♂️. I guess I'd play it if it's the last day of a convention and it's the only table with open seats?
Making an intentionally humorous tabletop RPG is not easy. The act of sitting around a table pretending that we're hunting vampires is inherently silly by most standards of adult interaction, so even if this were a diehard straight-faced grimdark book, you'd still have laughter at the table. Leaning into that is something you can do, but there's a strip of yellow warning tape marking the crossover into cringe; lean too far and the laughter turns to eye-rolls. Unfortunately, I don't think Vampunks manages to avoid that danger.
The premise of Vampunks is that it's "the near future," things suck in the general way we expect they will in a few years (plus weird additions like "irradiated slums" that are never explained?), and also there are vampires that need killing. Enter the player characters, the "VAMPUNKS", who are "backed by the world's major governments", demonstrating to all and sundry that the author has no idea what punk is or who punks are.
Mechanically, there's very little of interest here. Character creation is of the beer-and-pretzels style where you jot down a few numbers and a name and you're good to go. Most of what happens is by GM fiat. When the GM wants you to roll some dice, it's 3d6, subtract your relevant attribute, hoping for low results. Near as I can tell, the only reason for this unintuitive inversion is so that a roll of 666 is bad, providing further evidence that the author has fundamentally misunderstood punk. If there's a gem to be found in this quick-and-dirty mechanical design, it's in "Embracing Vampirism". That's the option to, when taking lethal injury in a fight against vampires, become a vampire yourself, get cool vampire powers, and keep fighting, knowing that eventually you'll go "full vamp" and turn to the dark side. That, for once, nails it! Definitely crib that idea for use in a better vampire hunter game.
In the end, this would be an amusing space-filler in some off-primetime convention slot. If you've got it from the bundle, keep it in mind! You could read it in the space of a coffee break, then play it sitting on the bare carpet with a few dice and index cards. But the text at least doesn't offer much to get excited about for more involved play than that. If you've seen it in action, I'm curious if it runs better than it looks--@ me on Twitter!