So I had an idea for a game. The gameplay will be tactical dungeon crawling, somewhere between a boardgame and a roleplaying game. The twist is that you’re not fantasy characters battling fantasy monsters, but Christian warriors in medieval times battling back the minions of hell who are spilling over into our world. Even greater than the risk of getting killed is the risk of being corrupted by the horror you face. PCs are constantly given the choice to risk gaining corruption in order to be more powerful. More power means a better chance of survival, but too much corruption and your character is hopelessly lost to the powers of evil!

Here is some cheesy flavor text I wrote up:

Anno Domini 1000. It is almost one hundred years before Pope Urban II will declare bellum sancrum against the infidel in the east, but even now a holy war rages. It is a war more dreadful and more secret than the crusades will be. For it is a war against the devil himself. In dark catacombs, demons try to make footholds in Europe. Holy warriors must hold them back and close their gates so that no more can come. But there is more to fear than claws and fire and gnashing teeth. The greatest weapon that Satan wields is the anger and pride in every man’s heart. For, in the midst of savage and terrible battle, these can corrupt men’s souls and turn them into the very evil they have been sent to do battle with.

The game is called “He Who Fights With Monsters” and, in the spirit of playstorming, I wanted to get it to the table and see how my ideas worked. And that’s just what we did yesterday!

The System

The basic system is pretty simple. You roll dice pools to attack and defend. The better you roll the more you wound your enemy. Your character has a few basic stats and then a bunch of “virtues” (essentially feats, for those of you familiar with D&D) that bend the basic rules.

There are a few mechanics, however, that are experimental and, in my opinion, interesting:

• Initiative: I knew I wanted the initiative system to be different than the standard tactical RPG initiative (roll initiative and go in that order). The Usagi Yojimbo RPG has a system where you interrupt your opponent using “focus”.The initiative system in HWFWM (called “zeal”) is inspired by this. Characters can choose to take less actions in a round to interrupt their opponents. And your can interrupt someone else’s interrupt, so you end up having to decide how much you’re willing to sacrifice to go first. Many of the virtues are set up in such a way as to make going before your opponent more desirable, which adds to the drama.

• Overwhelming: Since this is a tactical game, there needs to be crunchy bits that the players can exploit and use against their enemies, while at the same time avoid having those crunchy bits used against them.  One such crunchy bit in HWFWM is overpowering.  Generally speaking, if you team up on an enemy, you get a bonus.  I brought the game to the table knowing that I wanted this to be fun, but not knowing exactly how it was going to work.
  

• Corruption: One of the most important mechanics in the game is corruption.  As you descend into hell on earth to battle demons, you risk becoming overwhelmed by your own fury and becoming a demon yourself (thus the Nietzsche quote in the title of the game).  Corruption works a bit like sanity in Call of Cthulhu, except in stead of having no control over how far gone you are, HWFWM tempts players with corruption.  You can choose to risk corruption in order to have more power in combat.  The more you risk, the more corruption you gain, the more corruption can help you and thus the temptation grows as the game goes on.

The First Session

I put enough thought into the rules before I brought them to the table that I’m not really sure I could consider this a playstorm. But we definitely playstormed certain aspects of the rules. We tried a few iterations of mechanics for Overwhelming before we figured out what we liked most, and we came up with cool virtues to work with the Overwhelming system. Some characters have the ability to cast blessings (which are basically spells), and we playstormed some different methods of determining range and area of effect and ended up with a neat little system that compliments the zeal initiative system nicely. Also, I had no stats/abilities for the antagonists of the game (demons and monsters) so we worked together to come up with those.

Overall everybody had a lot of fun, so I will definitely continue working on this project. I look forward to writing up the current version of the rules and posting it here on the site!

Tags: He Who Fights with Monsters

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