itch.io

Oppai Sluggerz is not, despite its name, horny. It's a pulp riff on 80s OVAs with the feeling of an old console brawler. Pink and the word oppai aside, there's no adult content here.

The PDF is 64 pages, with a bright, punchy layout and a lot of characterful illustrations. The cover is rad, but again plays into the false impression that this game is in any way about sex. The interior illustrations are consistently charming.

I do think the super-horny aesthetic as well as the words of the title may be a barrier for people who want to play or recommend OS (in a way that I don't think Below Dwelling Sewer Mutants really had to deal with.) I also don't personally vibe with the way the Japanese words are integrated here---the Japanese translations next to the text are neat and add a bilinguality, but stuff like "otaku joshi" as a class name and "oppai sluggerz" as a title feel very 90s American anime ttrpg core. There's a superficiality that, while stylistic and intentional, feels alienated from the material it's riffing on, and I like the material that it's riffing on.

Mechanically, OS is a bit weird. It's light and rule-of-cool-y and class based, but it's also got a check system where you're picking a number of d4s to try and roll an average result within a +/- 5 range of the TN. D4s rolled are expended, and you only get a d4 back on a success, so you can end up in an attrition pattern.

This "roll and hope you hit a specific number" mechanic also shows up in other parts of the system. Combat has a juggle system that uses it. I think the math is solid, but the dicefeel may be a bit strange.

Expanding on that juggle system, combat in OS is quite interesting in how loose it manages to stay while still having detailed juggling and combo mechanics. I'd compare it to something like Project X Zone, where basic enemies are fodder for combos and elites are where you spend the points you farmed from those combos.

The game outside of combat is also very mechanically loose, which leads to some fun 'yes and' abilities for PCs but also kind of funnels gameplay back towards combat because that's where the mechanics are. This isn't actually a problem, but it is a tendency the GM may wish to remind themselves of.

In terms of GM tools, there's a bestiary, some guidance on making your own content, and a sample adventure. The system is also simple enough that after a readthrough you should be able to run it without issue.

In terms of safety tools, there's a sidebar about the X-Card that also feels kind of strange because it talks about the game being fan-service-y, and I don't think it is. Again, there's sort of an aesthetic blare of presumed sex when you look at the cover and branding, but there's nothing behind that blare. The closest the game gets to talking about titillation is in that safety section.

For game designers, there's a very friendly license attached to OS, and it's got an interesting system. If you like working with push-your-luck and rule-of-cool, you may want to grab this just to tinker with it.

Overall, I think there's a solid game here that people may miss because they're either looking for a horny game and it's not, or they're not and it looks like it is. Grab it if you want something with an arcade-y cartoon-y feel and a parental advisory sticker for aesthetic reasons.

Minor Issues:

-p. 34, Enemy Attacks, "Eachenemy" missing space

Happy it resonated.

LMAO always happy for my games to have unplanned use cases.

Also thank you for the review! And big congrats for the Vincent Baker praise, that does sound like a rad system

Dang. Still, that gives me hope that there might be some tech I can do post export. I'll experiment a bit and see if I can find a way to correct the numbering.

Thank you for the incredibly kind review!

Also, yeah, the PDF counts the cover as the first page, so the PDF's page count will always be one off from the actual page count.

Both knights depicted are, in their own way, atop the World Horse.

Yeah, that challenge is way harder with longer books. I would've taken one look at Strays' pagecount and set it aside for a different occasion.

Whoah, that's a heck of a challenge. Good luck! I'll be rooting for you!

Thanks!

Darkwood Pines is a cozy modern supernatural setting for Original Finish.

The PDF is 6 pages, well organized and cleanly layed out, with a good text size, a lot of whitespace, and an excellent illustration of a cat.

In terms of mechanics, Darkwood Pines gives different supernatural templates you can add to your trainer's breed card (fey, vampire, werewolf, witch) and lets you swap out a more conventional horse for a cat familiar (this is clever and I really like this.)

In terms of worldbuilding, Darkwood gives a quick outline of its environment, complete with a few adventure hooks and NPCs, and a lot of these hooks are tasty. The rideable bramble bears, the phantom hanoverian that wants one last good race, the werewolf support group, it all feels perfectly calibrated for a good oneshot or long-running drama.

Overall, if you're craving some warm small-town supernatural, I would definitely give this a look. It's got a structure and vibe that feels like it could easily have had a multi season run on Syfy in the late 2010s.

MacGimmick is a beer-and-pretzels tabletop rpg about being a certain 80s action tinker guy.

The PDF is 7 pages, with a dense, well-organized zine style layout.

It begins with short fiction, which is a solid tone setter---if you're not familiar with the source material, you'll get the gist immediately.

Mechanically, MacGimmick is a one player multiple GMs game. The player is MacGuyv---immick, and the GMs play background characters and judge whether our hero's stratagems succeed.

There aren't dice here, instead the difficulty of checks is how many pieces you need to incorporate into the device you build.

You can't fail (it wouldn't be interesting, and it wouldn't fit the show,) but if you need to consult a web resource to figure out how to build your way out of danger, you give the GM a resource they can spend to introduce plot twists.

In terms of GM tools, there's some roll tables and good advice throughout, but no canned adventure or support for solo play.

Overall, this is a mechanically clever system that doesn't dwell on being mechanically clever because it's too busy having fun. The engine here is really novel! But more importantly you can turn a t-shirt and some rubber bands into a catapult and use them to launch you over the castle walls to break the scientists out of the dictatorship's clutches.

As a side note, I do think the style of this game could work for a lot of television of this era. Like, you could do Airwolf without a lot of modifications, just with "use a helicopter in increasingly unlikely situations" in the place of "contrive a contraption."

Minor Issues:

-Page 6, Exotic Components, "would might involve"

That said, the mechanics here are more of a jumping off point for engaging with the game's strange vibes. I've edited and tested them, but they're still at least a little ramshackle.

I was worried this might confuse folks! You always roll a d6, and if you have any skill dice you roll them as well. So a d6 skill means you're rolling 2d6 on the check.

Very kind of you to say.

Truly I am haunted by the Magical Horse College books.

Heck yeah! Thank you!

Ball Game is a Blaseball-styled storytelling ttrpg with a baseball card visual style and some good heft.

The PDF is 40-ish pages, with a clean and well organized layout. There's art or graphics on most pages, and the illustrations pack a ton of charm. They definitely understand Blaseball, but they're also not bound by it and their riffs on its style are interesting.

In terms of contents, Ball Game is a self-professed look at baseball from the outside. Whereas ttrpgs like Dead Ball are born from a passion for the sport, Ball Game talks in its intro about how it had to figure out that passion for itself. And I don't think this is a bad thing. It gives Ball Game a different angle, and it means you get lines like "Baseball is a constant to me. As constant as the moon. As summer. As death."

Speaking of, Ball Game's writing is great. It knows how to pivot from one idea into another. It gets Blaseball's dire and surreal humor at a bone-deep level. The team descriptions are fun to read, which I think might be the bedrock of a good Blaseball-like.

Mechanically, Ball Game is pretty straightforward on its baseline level. It's GMless, 3d6 pool, any 4+ is a success. Contested rolls are highest number instead. You can appoint a coach as a kind of pseudo GM who's more of an expert on the rules and a tiebreaker, which is interesting. 

However, Ball Game also builds on that structure by having you play seasons of baseball, and on different teams, which you can switch between during drafts. Teams give you an aesthetic and a mechanical effect, which when combined with your playbook sets you apart from the other PCs. 

Playbooks are structured as always, sometimes, never. Which is a neat format. The vibe is Belonging Outside Belonging, but a little more informal and with dice instead of tokens. The "never" also isn't a hard ban. It's just you succeed freely when you use your always, and you take consequences when you use your never.

In terms of GM tools, the game is a little light. There are clearly defined events you can choose to drop into play, but the narrative heart of Blaseball is a kind of freestyle, and so Ball Game doesn't have a set scenario to get in the way of that.

Overall, if you like narrative games, eldritch sports stories, collaborative worldbuilding, and solid mechanical choices I think you'll like Ball Game. It wants a few sessions of play, maybe a mini campaign, and shouldn't be hard at all to add to your gaming rotation. It's also as friendly to baseball fans as it is to baseball outsiders, and is a solid introduction to telling stories with the sport.

Oh, you could definitely change that to "after X fishing attempts" where X is the number of PCs. I playtested the adventure with 4--5 people and did some solo testing, but didn't check larger group sizes.

The big advantage of a large group size is that it gives you more freedom to absorb exhaustion, tag in, use the right fisher for the job, etc, but this is counterbalanced by some fish and animals (and specifically the Great Dreamer Challu) scaling off of the party size. A large enough group might make Challu very very difficult without everyone getting more time to fish.

Good catch!

Whoah, thanks! Always happy when a game resonates.

And the re-edited edition sounds cool! Definitely happy to check it out when it's ready!

No worries! It's a really cool game. Thank you for writing it!

Workhorses No More is an Uma Musume with a bit (a lot!) more intentionality behind what it wants to say. Uma has some thoughts about loneliness, friendship, competition, the meaning of success, etc, meanwhile Workhorses is screaming, firing an uzi, and doing donuts on your lawn. If you've ever thought for more than a minute about that throwaway line about how an uma's body is basically a lethal weapon, you are in the right headspace to begin reading Workhorses.

If not, other plausible touchstones are Revolutionary Girl Utena and Madoka Magica. No I'm not kidding.

The PDF is 20 pages, with a banger cover and a plain but entirely readable interior layout. This has a side effect of highlighting how (positive connotation) batshit the text is willing to get. There's a surreal, hotblooded dreaminess that runs through Workhorses like a spinal column. It's a *fantastic* read, but you'll also be kinda clinging by your fingernails to where you think the setting is going---and I think to vibe with it at all, you've gotta be able to understand destruction as an act of transformation.

"This horsegirl game examines hegemony" is a thing you can say about Workhorses and it will be true. It's also implicit and deft in how it talks about the topic. Your character has traits like Yoke (your primary obstacle) and Truth (a thing you believe unquestioningly) and you are a student at the Sisters Of Mount Sinai Academy For Young Girls which forces you to race---and also you rebel from it by racing in secret. There is a lot you could unpack about this.

There's also a good light crunch to character creation. Everything is small numbers, but there's a lot of unilateral powers and bonuses that create a complex game environment. Workhorses' dice are simple but also weird and smart in a way I haven't seen before---2d6, drop highest, add stat, and one die is negative while the other is positive. This means you'll usually get a stat modified by a low amount. Even a total of 1 is a success, but higher numbers translate into more effect. Plus you have a spendable resource called boons, which come back on high rolls, so you can kinda combo high roll into high roll or rescue yourself from bad failures.

Added to this light crunch are some good, quick rules for contests, combat, and a thematic mechanic about speaking in red that is heavily intertwined with the lore and allows you to reverse bad failures into heroic successes. Essentially, red is the color of absolute reality, and if you speak in it, your words are truths stronger than your environment.

For GMs, there's some story seeds and NPCs, but I think the real secret sauce is the writing. Workhorses is a game you have to feel, and reading it does a great job of putting you in the right headspace.

Overall, if you like hotblooded indie ttrpgs and have an even passing interest in umas, this is a strong recommend. This is a stellar game to read and I think will be even more memorable at the table. 10/10 I enjoyed it immensely.

Minor Issues:

-p 8, Social Studies, "a breast" should be "abreast"

-p 8--9, Abilities, the Favorite Subject and Club and Lineage subheadings blend into the rest of the list. It could be worth centering / underlining the text to make the subheadings pop a bit more.

-p 10, I think you can just freely boon every roll that's 0 or better and get the boon back. This might not be intended play. Restoring boons on sufficiently negative rolls instead of positive ones might add some more dynamism.

-p 11, this talks about "rolling on an appropriate stat" such as "Might" but I couldn't find either of these things in the book. Are these holdovers from the core system?

I've been using "this is a ttrpg" in increasingly outlandish circumstances to see when I finally get pushback. Also yeah, the physical dictionary is a bit of a limitation and I couldn't figure out how to adapt it gracefully to wikipedia. Although, I do kinda like that it uses archaic tech. Maybe my next game will require a rotary phone.

Thanks! This one isn't really by me, but I'm happy if it's liked.

This is the kindest thing anyone could have said about my nonsense.

Thanks! I think there's other larpish stuff out there that uses this mechanic, but I wanted to keep it kinda lighthearted while still meeting the technical definition of survival horror.

I was a playtester on this, and can speak pretty roundly in favor of it.

Haghorse Run is a classical style train adventure that is complicated by the fact that it's running in Footfall, so when the turn does come and Things Happen, everyone involved is a physics-ninja.

This both means that Haghorse Run can go more literally and metaphorically off the rails without imploding, and also that the suspense leading up to that moment feels more interesting. There's a real sense of tempo as the PCs and NPCs start exerting more and more influence as they get a sense for the social and physical landscape of the train, and there's a lot of little mysteries to solve or entirely miss. Genuinely, this is one of those adventures where it'll never run the same way twice.

In terms of polish, the version I playtested was pretty full of features but there's been a lot of small stuff added since then. My favorite bit of enrichment for a train scenarios is a period appropriate menu, and Haghorse has one. For maximum immersion, you can try to cook it yourself.

In terms of who this adventure will resonate the most with, I think people who play Footfall like it's Outlast might not vibe as much with the more gradual pace, but if you like mysteries and pseudo-historical RP and stuff like Horror On The Orient Express you'll have an excellent time.

A friend asked specifically for a class about eating gods. I wasn't working on a class pack at the time, which is why it ended up as a small standalone.

You can also use it when you're not being attacked, but during an attack the teleport is slightly slower than the attack, so you still get partially got.

The problem here might be that I called it blink, which implies it's a lot faster of a process than it is. 'Fade' might've been a better word choice.

It doesn't fully evade the attack, you're blinking out as you get hit.

This is incredible!

Thanks!

Thank you! Happy to have made something cool.

All effects are intended to stack, so if you take multiple Specialties that affect your Social Standing, they should all apply. If you take multiple Specialties that randomize your Social Standing, you choose which of them applies last.

The Woods Mother's Mother's Care tokens are not meant to last past the end of combat. If a Complicit copies the passive, those tokens are discarded when combat ends.

The Rabid and Soldier can be effective in limited situations, but struggle a bit outside of them. The Fiveacre just does a lot, and can leverage their powers in unusual ways. Having a mob of followers is already plenty strong, but they can do a lot more than that without too many downsides.

Thank you! Hope you enjoy!

More Cthork is planned for the year! I have a handful of ideas I want to get onto the page.

These are really good mechanical additions! Progressing the time to sunrise in particular is a really good way to keep tempo during a scenario's finale.

Guaranteed damage I assumed would have a place in a meta, but I did my testing individually for this game, so I might've missed how good it is on a team. I'm not sure I have an idea for how I want to calibrate it yet, but I'll do some thinking about a patch.

Also a saber salute to Viney Vinnsauce! His memory shall remain!

Feel free to hack or do whatever with this! Glad you liked it!

EepEepRPGs

Happy to enable!