Marvelous Mutations & Merry Musicians is a post-post-apocalyptic weird wastelands tabletop RPG from Wendi Y. It’s on Itch.io, name your own price, and it’s great.
I paid the suggested $2 for this pleasant surprise.
It’s not perfect; I’d love an example of how and when you roll Beats, but that aside, the game put such a smile on my face. So I’m going to quote a little from the 26-pages and see if it does the same for you.
Playing The Game
Do whatever you want and deal with the consequences.
The rules it then provides only take two short paragraphs. Roll 2d6 if facing danger or uncertainty, modify by your tags, and aim for high.
Here’s what it says about the consequences you have to deal with;
Consequences
Whenever you fuck up, get hurt or something else with consequences that can last for a while, take a consequence tag.
Two short paragraphs later, and you know the rules.
In Marvelous Mutations & Merry Musicians, which is shortened to mmnmm, characters are in a band. It might be a band of heroes, adventurers or outlaws, but they’re also musicians, and there’s in that sort of band too.
As a band, you travel around in a caravan and, well, do whatever you want. Characters might explore the mysterious ruins that date back to before the long-forgotten apocalypse, get into fights or help out in the booming but weird towns.
In this future, guns are forgotten, war is forgotten, and instruments are everything, given how highly prized live music is. However, people can still be dangerous.
Characters are defined by two tags for each “Be, Have and Do”. You can pick the rest. You’re a human or a monster warped from whatever happened to bring about the apocalypse. You’re not an elf; this isn’t fantasy with guitars, but you can be a skeleton in a top hat. It’s the weird solar-punk-esq future.
mmnmm layout
As refreshing as the language, as startling as the concept, is the layout of Marvelous Mutations & Merry Musicians. Each page is a work of art. I’ll include examples yoinked from the Itch.io page.
Text appears woven around photographs and illustrations, often in boxes, always easy to read.
The art is cosmopolitan but always appropriate. I don’t think it’s possible to read more than a few pages into mmnmm without having at least one character idea.
I’ve a slight concern about how hard this is to read if you’re colour blind but a text version is included with the download. Single and double-spread options are also included. Wendi Y has done amazingly well here.
Overall
Marvelous Mutations & Merry Musicians is worth the money. It really is. If you’re especially fond of indie RPGs, then I think there’s hardly any excuse for not grabbing the download straight away.
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