This is a story about teenagers. Not kids, not adults, but that time in between, when anything feels possible, everything feels important, and nothing feels quite right.
Slugblaster - published in 2021 - is a roleplaying game in Forged in the Dark tradition1. It’s about teenage skateboarders - except these boards portal through to radical dimensions, so the drama, the light adventure, the sometimes a little scary but never fully adult danger, and all the rest of teenage life always has a cool backdrop.
This is not a very medieval game, it has a very fixed campaign loop2, and you can’t even die. Still, it has some fascinating aspects that we could mine inspiration from - plus it’s just good to see a game that knows its intent so clearly.
Taking or Noping Slams
When you hit a problem in Slugblaster, you might get a Snag - which is just a change to the situation - but you might also be hit with a Slam with a lingering effect on you. You get a bit bruised or anxious, something breaks down a little, etc.
Slams build into Disaster and might sometimes impair you a little - but not much and in the end they’re ephemeral bumps and scratches only.
If you don’t want to take a Slam, though, you can Nope it. This increases a different meter - your Trouble, but completely avoids the Slam.
Getting too much Trouble can also push you to Disaster - it’s a nice catch-all for things going wrong - but more importantly it sticks around.
The interplay of these two kinds of harm mechanics is interesting to me.
Disaster Strikes
Disaster is expected every “run”3 at the end, but also can be expedited if you’ve built up too much Slams or Trouble. When this happens, the more Trouble you have the worse the outcome is likely to be - specifically, it’s a d6 dice pool based on how empty slots in your Trouble track (so inverse to your Trouble and it has 8 boxes total - so 8d6), following the same 1-3, 4-5, 6 separation of outcomes.
This builds a third harm resource when it goes bad - Doom - which sticks and is hard to clear.
Downtime Beats
Slugblaster has a very designed downtime built on Beats. Beats are story elements that happen to you that you “buy” based on two currencies - the Trouble you got on your runs, and a positive trait you built up called Style.
At its basic level, this is an à la carte way of taking consequences and rewards for your actions. Positive Beats can clear bad effects (even Doom), advance your abilities, give you cool benefits and long term effects for your crew or you individually - and negative Beats can start you out a little off-balance, cause drama for the crew, and break you down.
Many Beats also follow story arcs, so you may want to actually buy some bad ones (not just to drain away your dangerous Trouble or even because it’s fun - but because you want to get to a juicy end of an arc), or buy good ones to get ways to spend a lot of Trouble in big climactic beats.
I really like this purchase method of downtime events, even though I find it daunting to apply to The Great Pendragon Campaign. I also have some positive and negative pools of resources gathered during the game (Fame and Doubt)…
Opportunities, Challenges, Factions
It’s not the craziest innovation, but Slugblaster also has a clean system of tracking relationship with factions, having that steer into rolls influencing your journeys each run, etc.
For a game of family relationships, this is an interesting place to look.
Footnotes
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Though it’s a slimmed down and especially focused version of these rules. ↩
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Which… partially fits The Death of Arthur because it also uses it to handle time, but is also stricter in its conventions. ↩
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Roughly meant to be session shaped, similar to Pendragon and our assumption of the yearly cycles. ↩