Havoc Jam WINNERS
We ran the Havoc Engine Jam last month. I’ll be fully honest with you: I wasn’t expecting to see 52 entries, given that the task was to design an entire, fully-fledged roleplaying game (and probably a bunch of pre-gen characters and a scenario).
The general standard of entries to this jam has been tremendous. Not only have the games often been nicely produced with proper layout and art, they’ve also done some very clever things with the system and push it in interesting and unexpected directions. As such, picking out entries as winners of the jam – in addition to those chosen by voting amongst the contestants – was a tricky prospect.
Before I read through them all properly, I messaged Jim – our Community chap, who ran the jam while I pissed off to bounce repeatedly off the Salt manuscript trying to write rules for fishmen – and said:
Reader: I managed to get it down to eight.
So, in lieu of prizes – sorry folks! You were too good! Try to team up with some no-hoper spods next time – I’m going to write about those nine games here. All them are more than welcome to update themselves (if they’d like) with the Official Grant “Havoc Engine” Howitt Seal of Approval:
You’ll be pleased to hear that Chant and Jim have both drawn their own seals, which are attached to their recommendations below. In addition to our picks (my picks, really, with which I bombarded the rest of the team) we also had a much more measured and balanced voting process between the participants themselves. The (official, peer-reviewed) winners are:
1st Place: Bone to Pick by Lucien Rain
2nd Place: Father Octopodes by RollForThings and Magicalflyingart
3rd Place: Red Star by Last Minute Panic Games
Huge congratulations of all of them. (Eagle-eyed readers will note some overlap between our picks and the proper voting, which shows that a) we have excellent taste and b) we maybe picked ours before official voting ended.) You can view the full rankings here.
On with our personal selections:
FATHER OCTOPODES
Father Octopodes puts you in the role of one of three octopuses that are attempting to infiltrate the Catholic church. This is a solid bit – who doesn’t like infiltrating a church? Who doesn’t love the idea, if perhaps not the execution, of 2010’s Octodad: Dadliest Catch? Who doesn’t enjoy being a stack of something under a trenchcoat, or in this case, a cassock?
But Father Octopodes pushes the idea further with some clever division of play roles; the octopus on top of the stack is the lead player, the one on the bottom is the GM, and everyone in the middle gets a say in what happens in loose sort of way. When the lead player messes up a roll, they’re shuffled down the stack, so everyone gets a chance to steer the action (by which I mean the stack of octopuses).
It’s brisk. (It’s one page long!) It’s immediately easy to grasp. And you get to be octopuses. Lovely. Glad to see the proud tradition of animal crime being continued during my extended sabbatical from one-page games.
ASPHALT OVERDRIVE
I have written two Fast & Furious fan games, and I’ve been trying to write a third for the last three years. (The idea is that you’d recreate imaginary trailers for the first, fifth and tenth films in your version of the franchise and thus show the ridiculous escalation and rise to international prominence of a gang of LA street toughs who used to steal TV-DVDs off lorries. It’s too high-concept.)
Asphalt Overdrive is a loving, well-thought-through, and comprehensive emulation of a latter-period F&F film: you’re on the run from the CIA. Or you’re chasing after the CIA? Kind of both. Point is you’re doing car chases and fights and talking a great deal about Fambly and generally acting the fool.
Asphalt Overdrive also introduces Pit Stops, which are defined breaks in the action, and honestly looking back this is something I feel Eat the Reich is missing.
SEARCH AND RESCUE SECTOR 22B
Surprise hit for me, this one. I struggle with nature games, given that I spend my life behind a screen and occasionally leave my house to briefly regard a bird. But upon reading the honestly quite pretty document – lots of smart use of copyright-free landscape shots – it’s done a lot of good stuff to establish a near future setting in the wilderness. It’s hopeful; later on in the adventure there’s an abandoned but still dangerous autonomous weapons factory that you come across, and the general vibe is that these are the hideous technologies of a lost time that we are no longer making. We’ve moved on. We’re helping each other. It’s nice. (I mean, not that nice. You can still get torn to pieces by wolves.)
It reminds me of Earthborn Rangers, but with more teeth. (I played the first scenario of ER with some mates and I didn’t enjoy myself, despite the clever mechanics – I couldn’t marry what I was doing in the fiction with the rules, and it started to feel quite muddy. Plus the mission was “hand out these biscuits to the village” and, kinell folks, why not just have me play a cosy witch searching for my missing cat in the alps) Good stuff. Elegant worldbuilding. Lots of things to do that aren’t kicking people to bits.
FREE LIKE THE MOON
Free Like The Moon is not quite finished; it’s got barebones layout, only four of the six pregrens are written, and there’s not a drop of art in the thing. BUT. It immediately struck me as charming, and has a good line in taking big over-the-top action and pairing it with human emotion and motivations. (Again, something that’s missing from Eat the Reich, I reckon.)
Here’s the pitch: the moon is owned by a lunatic robotics manufacturer and you, his rebellious daughter and her entourage, are going to get the fuck off the moon. You have one main edge in the form of Belief, a sentient drug that gives you limited superpowers, that you stole from said lunatic – and the more you take it, the more pronounced the effects become.
Like Asphalt Overdrive, this doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it takes what I’m used to seeing Havoc do and does it really well. The characterisation is strong, the robotic horror is strong, the gags are strong.
BUMP!
Super-Cool Monster Hunting Club took me ten years to write and it wasn’t all that great when I finished. (I mean: it’s fine. You get to play dress-up with things you find around the house, in classic HEY KIDS: LET’S ALL MEET THE GIN WIZARD fashion, but there’s also like a roleplaying game stuck to the side of it? And I’d rather just put a saucepan on my head without the artifice of having to pretend I’m a child doing it.)
BUMP! Is a better version of Super-Cool Monster Hunting Club which takes place in an absurdly ominous scout camp. After telling stories around the campfire, one of them gets too real, and it’s a horror movie from then on out. It has a really good portrayal of kidness, or at least youth, that brings Sleepaway to mind: these characters are people, but they’re still working themselves out (and they’re always on the back foot given their place in society). In contrast to the expected complete “capsule” game nature of Havoc, the nature of the threat is left undefined and guidance is provided to bring it to the table. Good stuff.
JAMS!
Another four-letter title with an exclamation mark, JAMS! (I keep writing “JAMES!”, apologies if I miss a correction or two) is a fascinating thing. A non-violent, and almost non-action, interpretation of the Havoc Engine systems that simulates the slice-of-life adventures of an up-and-coming, and then really quite successful, punk band. What began as a system for charging six orcs headlong into a heavily defended barracks has been moulded into something heartwarming, generous and friendly.
The game is about making friends, and being part of a community, and earning your punk stripes. Most of the action takes place before a gig starts, and the music itself is a single roll at the end – I like this, because it’s quite tricky to make a game about music terribly interesting if you’re not actually making music during. (Due respect to Gemelli’s FTLpunk, which manages to make the music bits interesting thanks to anchoring them in the history and personalities of the band that made it.)
Plus it’s queer as hell and I like that. Trans rights are human rights, fix your hearts or die, etc.
KILLER CRIPS 3000
Jim picked this one as his stand-out game, so I won’t go on about it too long. But it’s the sort of anarchic grimy provocative weird manky goofy brutal fun I’m very much into, and you play disabled people infiltrating a fucked-up and broken reality (our future) from their own utopian reality where they’re treated like, you know, people.
All the characters are framed around their disability (and whatever means they use to manage it), and it’s here that I found the funniest bit in any game I read during the jam: an optional seventh character with no disabilities is available, and one of their abilities is ASSUMED COMPETENCE where they’re just allowed to write whatever ability they like and use it.
I love a game mechanic that’s a joke and still a game mechanic. Beautiful.
Jim says:
I gushed about this game in a long comment, so I’ll keep it brief: this game recognises the pain and loss that’s brought you to the brink and then plays with the alchemical transformation of anger into cathartic, sometimes gleeful, sometimes silly anti-oppressive violence, and I think it carries on and develops these themes from Eat the Reich in a really cool way. I love how thoughtfully and knowledgeably it’s put together, and how much fun it sounds. Good game.
BONE TO PICK
Of all the games I read, I probably enjoyed BONE TO PICK the most.
You play a resurrected skeleton, dragged back from beyond the veil to avenge slights against your honour – but they’re all incredibly petty. Things like “they pissed in your helmet” or “they said something mean about your tiara,” etc. The layout is playful, the gags land, it’s a really fun sell, and you can win. Each character has a different win condition. The Princess’ is to get all four of Her Things, at which point she just gets back in her grave and stops playing.
I love petty revenge – I love obsession, and mad grudges, and overblown reactions. So BONE TO PICK is right up there for me, and the fact that it’s funny helps too. Huge recommend. As you can tell, I might have run out of clever things to say about clever games after describing them for a thousand words, so here’s fellow jam runner and RRD Producer Chant to weigh in on it:
Sometimes, when I was reviewing entries to this game jam, I just hit a submission that made me go “oh, yeah. This person gets it.” Lucien Rain’s Bone To Pick is one of those.
It’s clever. It’s tight. It’s well-defined (“You’re a skeleton. You have sunrise till sunset to settle scores, spit on rivals, and dance in the rain. Make it count.”). It’s petty.
It is one very good gag, beautifully executed, constructed from the ground up with loving attention to detail. It’s doing exactly enough.
Producer Chant sez:
This single diagram (right) tells you so much about why this game is great. You’re pursuing vendettas (I am powered by spite; this is an immediate winner for me), your own actions define how much the opposition (the town) can throw at you, and the mechanics are very skeleton-oriented (bits of you break, so you get worse; you collect and spend teeth as a consumable resource).
And the characters? The characters! Havoc Engine games are at least half made of really good characters that you want to play. And of course I want to play the Poet, with their Heart That Yearns to Break, or the Princess, who has Servants instead of hit points, or the Witch, who is either going to finish that blasted summoning circle or throw a shitload of townsfolk into a cauldron on wheels.
Beautiful stuff. Thanks all for taking part, and for rating and offering so much useful feedback on one another’s games. I’m very proud to be part of it.