Yowl is a storygame for two to six players where you are a Pack of Dogs in the City: not truly domesticated, not truly feral. Most likely none of you has a specific human anymore: you decide what happened to your human and why you are on the streets.
You aren't just a good boi or good gurl: you are a Hero.
Like most Dogs, you still care about Humans. Humans are filling the streets of the City in great Hurting Herds to yell about other humans who are dead because they are sad, and scared, and angry. The political specifics elude you: you are a Dog. But you can tell they are hurting, and giving voice to that hurt on the streets of the City. The hurting herd of them is large, and upset, and needs your protection. Humans in armor, who smell wrong, who smell like the outsiders they are, have invaded your City. These humans, who won't hesitate to kick their fellow humans, let along dogs, are appropriately called Boots.
The Boots do not like the hurt noises that the Herd is making--they remind you of other humans, the kind of humans who would kick a Dog that was yowling in pain to shut it up--show so they are flooding the streets with pain gas and BOOMS and kicking and beating the Herd and anyone, really, who gets anywhere near being "in their way". Worse than the Boots and their beating sticks and their kicks and their BOOMS and the pain gas is that the Boots have brought their own Dogs, armored & muzzled "Law Dogs", who have been perverted and brainwashed and conditioned to act just like the Boots. The Law Dogs are killers. They will kill humans and their own kind w/o mercy. Armor and training have given them an unfair advantage, to boot.
One player plays Man. He is in charge of deciding which City the City is, what the Hurting Herd is upset about, who exactly the Boots are. He is in charge of controlling all humans, including the Hurting Herd and the Boots and everyone else. He also controls the Law Dogs. He is also a "story facilitator" and an "impartial referee". Man should describe what is happening to Dogs in terms that Dogs can understand. Man should remember that Dogs cannot read, cannot understand human language (except for its very basics), cannot do math, and cannot understand abstract concepts, although they can smell emotions and intentions and an incredible array of olfactory details at frankly ludicrous ranges. Man's most important job is providing a "dog's eye view" of what is happening in the game.
On a personal note, my last few releases on here (over like, the last few YEARS) have gotten no engagement and it feels way too often like when I launch a game here I am just hurling art into a void. Alls I'm saying is, if people bought this (Dear God I need the income), read it, played it, and told me what they thought of it...that'd be really amazing. But I guess the "PLAYED IT" part is the most important to me.
If there is a bundle or several bundles to support good causes (at the time I release this dog game, the world sure is on fire) I'd love to have Howl be a part of them.
Have you ever thought "what if Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, but (moderately less jingoistic and) a fast-to-learn, quick-playing Indie TTRPG"? Well, I made that game, it's called SQUAD: Tactical Espionage Action Roleplaying, and you can
The goal was to make a crunchy, easily learned TTRPG of high-octane modern military action and deniable missions. The game's been out for a while but I've done a deeply inadequate job of promoting it, so I'm not sure anyone's actually played it yet, and I'd love to see that change.
Here's more info on it:
"SQUAD is a tactical Tabletop Roleplaying Game for one to six players and one GM. The players control an elite team of two to six Special Forces Operators or comparable Black Ops special forces, engaging in Tactical Espionage Action: dangerous deniable missions against high priority targets all around the globe. The GM controls the rest of the world and everyone in it, chiefly a rotating cast of fascists, Ultranationalists, terrorists, drug cartels, human traffickers, and wackjob fundamentalists that exist mainly to be shot in the face. In the event of two or less players, each player can control two or more Operators, but the more players, the merrier! SQUAD is designed for fast-paced, tactical, mission-focused gameplay, with simple and clean mechanics still designed to provide a maximum of tactical opportunities and options.
SQUAD is designed to generate operators quickly, to play quickly, and to be very easy to learn but tricky to master, with a wealth of crunchy tactical options, Perks, loadouts, grenades and gadgets available to PCs. While it's an apples to oranges comparison as D&D is high fantasy and SQUAD is military stealth action, combat in SQUAD is still designed to be simpler and faster than D&D combat while providing comparable tactical depth.
SQUAD features seven Primary Skills, seven Weapon Classes, 25 Perks, and a whole catalogue of MilSpec hardware for Operators to kit up with. The core resolution mechanic is a d6 dice pool system where you roll 3d6 plus your relevant Skill(s)--squad features a unique skill stacking mechanic--and Weapon Class versus 12. Every two points over 12 on the roll is a 'Raise', with every Raise representing an increasing Degree of Success on the action, more damage from gunshots, more bullets hitting the target with automatic fire, and so on.
The SQUAD Core Download consists of the following files:
SQUAD's default milieu/setting is "modern day special forces", with modern day loosely defined as having started some time around 2014 and extending up until the moment you are reading this. It is designed to be easily configured into other "modes" such as futuristic bughunts in space, cyberpunk scifi missions (think Shadowrun, with very high-level runners), historical Special Forces action (especially Cold War era), or adding a splash of Weird fiction/supernatural horror. That last option will be the subject of the first planned Setting/Expansion pack for SQUAD, "BAD SCIENCE".
