RPG Delve: Slugblaster
Skatepunk teen drama FitD
Slugblaster is a Forged in the Dark RPG that was Kickstarted in November 2022, sold out its first print run, and it’s back for second printing in 2023 to celebrate its IGDN Game of the Year award.
What is it?
Sci-fi skatepunk Forged in the Dark about multiverse travel and teen drama.
Why play it?
You want a player-driven game that’s also a dramatic story game. You enjoy Blades in the Dark but wish it took place at Warped Tour. You want to be a teen skatepunk with a DIY laser gun who rips through the time-space continuum to crash a party only to end up grounded by mom for breaking curfew.
Novel features
Nostalgia roots, rich customization, “simplified” FitD, player-driven narrative, in-your-face presentation.
Resolution mechanic
1d6 with mixed success outcomes. Players can spend Boost and Kick to roll more dice or increase the Impact of their actions.
Rules crunch
Very light / Light / Mid / Crunchy
Ease of learning rules
Easy / Okay / Difficult
164 pages
Deadly?
Safe / Dangerous / Deadly
Death is off the table for sluggers.
Character classes?
Yes. 5 personalities to choose from.
Adventure included?
No. Tons of prompts and tables are provided, however.
Setting agnostic?
Not really. The manual offers some reskinning options, but the mechanics establish a setting with multiverse travel and the content is tied to in-universe factions.
System compatibility?
No.
Overview
Slugblaster is a caffeinated shot of worldbuilding and graphic design that disguise a relatively complex set of rules. At its core, it’s Blades in the Dark but smooshed up like putty and formed into something bright and wacky. The primary systems are designed to be a springboard the players kick off of (and often directly steer), but underneath this is a frame that’s a bit wobbly. Character customization is surprisingly deep and varied in service of making characters that are well-realized and emotionally complex.
Beneath the driving bassline of big tricks and daring hijinx the character drama simmers, ready to spill over when the time is right. It maintains the conversational resolution style of BitD but does does it in a new way and with a vastly different attitude.
Nostalgia Roots
Players are a crew of teenage slugblasters. Slugblasting is the art of using modified hoverboards to shred through thin spots in spacetime to explore the worlds beyond. The goal is to become popular and famous in the scene by doing tricks, spraying graffiti, getting in trouble, and sharing it all with your social media following. It’s loud, it’s cinematic, and none of the technology needs to be explained because that’s boring!
Slugblaster invokes the skateboarding scene of the 80’s and 90’s, where teens were the innovators of a burgeoning counterculture that caused a moral panic among parents. The appeal is not just in the sport: sluggers revel in finding new portals and routes to strange new worlds, building and endlessly tweaking nanofriction swords and gravity blasters, crashing parties and yearning for sponsorship and butting heads with other crews.
The game really loves all of this and it is written with an impressive devotion to the theme. Through its fun, slangy text, bold colors, and incredibly flavor-packed descriptions, this sport/scene/culture is presented with infectious conviction. Each one of its 164 pages is designed to get you excited to play.
FitD Simplified (kind of)
Slugblaster sessions are comprised of a run followed by a resolution stage where points are tallied and consequences are negotiated, and then there’s a free-form roleplaying phase. Slugblaster is louder and faster than Blades in the Dark. BitD’s flashbacks are reserved for roleplaying scenes in Slugblaster, though they share the same session structure: one chunk of the game is action and the other is storytelling.
Characters don’t have stats. An action roll is just 1d6. 6 is a success, 4-5 is a mixed success, and anything else is a failure. Players can spend Boost to roll more dice (and only consider the highest result) or Kick to increase the impact of their actions, for instance, hitting a monster harder or marking off more slices of a progress clock. Players have a good deal of control over their risks with this system. They can choose to say “check it” before they make an action roll to do a trick, which they then cinematically describe. Landing a trick gives them style points (XP), but failure brings greater danger.
A character’s personality—essentially their character class—determines the amount of Boost and Kick they have to spend, which are recovered by doing class-related things: the Heart recovers a Boost or Kick by helping a crewmate, and the Grit recovers one when they fail. In most cases this means a character immediately gets back a resource as soon as they spend it in order to encourage resource expenditure.
The core mechanic is fast to teach and grasp, particularly for those who are familiar with other FitD games. While the character sheets have a lot on them, a third of it is cosmetic, and the other third is for tracking story beats during downtime. However, there are a lot of layers that make up this cake that can be easy to miss at first glance.
One must be mindful that three pools of Boost and Kick are available: your Signature gear, your Personality, and the shared resource pool of the Crew sheet.
Another example of veiled complexity: consequences for failure, which come in three vague tiers.
Snags are small blunders or “fail forward” moments, which often come up when an action roll is a mixed success.
Slams are the general-purpose repercussion. Failure can cause temporary slams (like “tangled in vines”) that are quick and easy to clear, or more serious slams that last until the end of the run. There exist super slams (like “super brusied” or “wicked angry”) that take multiple runs to clear or are more costly to avoid.
The highest tier of repercussion is “doom,” which is something that lingers: a falling out with family, a particularly bad peel-back from another dimension, or titanium screws in your leg. The crew sheet has a corollary: a “fracture” represents friction within the crew, potentially even forcing a member out if it comes to a head.
In addition to these, players gather “trouble,” which builds up to cause immediate “disasters” (like suddenly adding monsters or rivals to a scene). Players can “nope” a slam—that is, avoid it—by marking off trouble. They can clear (or gain!) trouble during downtime scenes.
An aside: the rule book uses the word “nope” as a verb, which leads to some confusing sentences. This could have been avoided by noting the nonstandard usage, for instance by capitalizing it.
Slugs in the Dark
While Slugblaster doesn’t really have Position and Effect like BitD, these drama elements and consequences described above approximate them to inform the loosey-goosey “conversation” that John Harper always talks about.
Slams don’t have consistent mechanical effects, but they impact the story. When you show up at the party covered in slime, nobody is going to want to talk to you. The other vector is character drama, which gives the GM (and player) handholds to wrangle the character off track.
I initially thought Slugblaster was a really lean and stripped back game. As I look more critically, however, I find that there’s nothing actually stripped away. Slugblaster feels a little bit like the FitD SRD was chopped up and put into an advent calendar.
For example, consequences are categorized into Problems, Obstacles, Snags, Slams, Worse Problems, Disasters, and Fractures. Some of these are short-term issues and others are more far-reaching, and all are separate from the metacurrency called “trouble”. It took me multiple read-throughs to discover all of these, spread out across the rulebook as they are, and learn what they are. It doesn’t help one bit that they’re all synonyms. I believe these were each distinct pieces of FitD that were repurposed, but then ended up coagulating into vestigial homogeneity.
Having five or more categories for “something goes wrong” doesn’t work for me in game that’s supposed to be fast and crazy.
Slugblaster is, in fact, a game as complex as BitD, only all the parts have been hidden or transformed. Part of me feels disappointed by this realization because I want Slugblaster to be simple and lean. Its presentation convinced me that it was.
That said, the game’s vibe is to just go for it. It’s really not necessary to have a perfect understanding of the rules to play. But the nagging question remains: why not make it as simple as the presentation makes it out to be?
Customization
Slugblaster’s character sheets are lean: more than half of the space is devoted to empty text boxes for vibes, legacies, and dooms. Each personality has a short list of abilities (and you only choose one) that mechanically define the way they play.
Consider the character’s equipment, however, and a wide vista of choice opens. Every slugger carries a board (or BMX, or laser skates) and a raygun, and tables are provided to customize their look and feel. One of these will be a Signature, your slugger’s prized piece of gear. 12 signatures are provided, including a hardlight board and voidwear backpack. Your signature is a separate sheet that provides another pool of Boost and Kick and can be upgraded with mods that provide additional abilities to get out of a pinch or give physics the middle finger.
During character creation, players are strongly encouraged to flesh out their teen: the brands they wear, relationships, after school activities, favorite places to hang out, and more. Rollable tables are provided to customize all of the above.
In lieu of leveling up, players upgrade their Signature gear by purchasing mods. Style is spent to engage particular roleplaying scenes, or spent on the Crew sheet to increase their Fame level, which grants access to fans, merch, and communal upgrades like hazard protection for venturing into the scalding soda lakes of Calorium.
The customization is deep because of the focus on cinematic action and emotional roleplaying. It gets you invested in a character that the game presumes you’ll run through a 6 or 7 session campaign.
You may end up spending an hour or more creating characters if the players are really involved.
The Multiverse
A dozen evocative and flavorful worlds to explore are encapsulated on single pages: each is summarized in a few paragraphs alongside some utilitarian locations, problems, and “checkpoints,” which are setpieces used during chases, like “collapsed billboard” and “coral archways.” This presentation makes it super easy to flip a page and grasp a gonzo, alien dimension in just a moment. This is a triumph of design. A GM can readily throw together a scene or even a whole adventure from here, which is essential; players can jaunt into a totally different dimension essentially on accident.
Also provided are tables to construct your own worlds, as well as a smattering of extra worlds by guest writers as a result of Kickstarter stretch goals. Built into all these worlds are hundreds of adventure hooks, novel setpieces, and complications ready for immediate use. There’s something on virtually every page that anybody, GM or player alike, can point to and say, “this is cool, let’s explore this!”
Breakneck action
Touting itself as a player-driven game, the GM is advised to keep a loose grip on plans and remain flexible. Players choose the goals and storylines they want to explore and the GM tells them where to look; the meat of the game is in the reactions to and consequences of their tomfoolery. GMs who are uncomfortable with improv or inventing complications on the fly will likely find this intimidating. However, plenty of inspiration and content is provided in several modes: tables, descriptions, and direct play examples. The book also contains frameworks and processes for putting together scenes and adventures to help ground and pace the craziness.
The GM uses a currency called “bite” which is gained when players fail or get in trouble, and it’s spent to introduce complications. I believe this is supposed to balance the GM’s ability to throw problems at the players. At the end of the day, though, it’s a narrative game where the GM and characters talk things through together. Complications are collaborative. Players generally have control over how much risk they’re taking; risky players will need less GM intrusion to keep the pace up, and careful players will need more trouble added. I feel this ought to have been an optional rule because the GM already has enough to keep track of to be adding an extra metacurrency.
Worth Stealing
Summarizing entire settings into single pages is a brilliant approach that goes a very long way to make the content playable.
The myriad tables that Slugblaster provides to customize characters are varied and interesting. In particular, I enjoy the page with prompts for naming the Crew because having a name for the party is a useful shorthand, but actually coming up with a good name is difficult.
Giving the players significant control over the narrative and plot is not a new concept, but Slugblaster puts a lot of emphasis into building it into the fabric of the system and offers good advice for its style of play.
While I haven’t tackled it in this review, there’s also Slugblaster Turbo, which is the alternate version created in Google Sheets that’s scaled down for one-shot play. For a campaign-oriented game, I think it’s a useful option to have an alternate structure intended for running one-shots.
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