This is Slugblaster. A table-top rpg about teenagehood, giant bugs, circuit-bent rayguns, and trying to be cool.
Welcome to Hillview
It doesn’t have a movie theatre. It doesn’t have a Turbo Taco. But it has a gas station, a curling rink, fourteen churches, and some of the thinnest spacetime fabric on the planet. Thin enough for a growing, underground subculture of resourceful teenagers to hack through into the vibrant planescape of exotic and dangerous worlds just beyond.
Who Do You Want to Be?
Will you be a gutsy rich kid with a modified reality cannon? A chill loser with a lovable robot sidekick and strict parents? A meta-dimensional princess with a negafriction katana? Mix and match aesthetic, home life, personality, and signature devices to craft your character.
What Do You Want to Do?
Blow off school and sesh the abandoned mall in Vastiche. Get the Miper sponsorship by speed-running Calorium. Salvage power crystals from the mossy, decommissioned gundam in the Golden Jungle. Make waves by sneaking into Quahalia without a logic binder. Crash the hottest party in Popularia.
Just make sure you can get home before the demi-plane melts, or a metasaur eats your face, or Rescue scoops you up and hauls you back to the decontamination facility. Or, you know, before your mom finds out and sends you away to troubled youth camp.
The System
Slugblaster uses a stripped-down version of the Forged in the Dark engine, modified to power looking cool, doing tricks, circuit-bending gear, getting sponsorships, getting in trouble, hoverboarding away from monsters, and fast-paced laser-fantasy action in general.
- Punch the turbo on your signature device to build dice pools quickly by ticking off boost boxes.
- Push your luck to try to earn Style Points with any action, adding a nose-grab to your jump over the acid flats, or saying something witty before punching a robot.
- Avoid slams and other problems by just saying so and then gaining a trouble point. As trouble points build, so does the threat of serious, adventure-ending personal disaster. Dimensional peelback. A broken ankle. Bad news from home.
- After each run you’ll get to “shop for scenes”, spending accumulated points to trigger interesting events and arcs for your character. You might spend two style to get invited to a party, or four style to gain a new special ability. You’ll spend trouble, too. One point to get yelled at by your dad, three to get your heart broken. You and your friends can also pool your points to unlock big team-based events such as sponsorships, run opportunities, and inter-crew drama.
