Brutal Games has a new RPG out in the market. It’s called Stickmen RPG. This blogger isn’t going to tell you much more about it – a review is coming later. Right now we’ve James Norbury of Brutal Games under the spotlight. The brave Mr Norbury has agreed to the spotlight challenge.
Here’s how it works; there are four questions which James has to answer. He is allowed only 100 words per answer. Why? The spotlight is a quick way for you to decide whether the Stickmen RPG will be worth any of your valuable time. These two paragraphs? 100 words.
Spotlight 1: What’s the premise of the Stickmen RPG?
You take on the role of a group of brave stickmen who are making a stand against the doodle horde. Every time someone scribbles on paper in our world, they make monstrous doodles in the Stickman world. So few stickmen are drawn relative to doodles and scribbles that the little guys are getting overrun. You have to help these brave souls before they become extinct.
Spotlight 2: How is this different from other RPGs?
You play a lot of the game on paper using realtime mapping as you go. Whatever the GM (doodlelord) draws appears in your adventure and you must overcome it, even notes and illustrative diagrams take on a life of their own and may attack or help you. The mechanic is truly unique and creates bizarre and hilarious results.
Character creation is also extremely free, there are no set traits so you can choose to excel at being angry, licking the floor, snide comments or throwing fruitcake. It’s a very silly game.
Spotlight 3: Why should gamers bother with it?
Because it is radically different to anything you’ve played before. It takes only a few minutes to learn the basics and can be moulded to suit anyone’s play style. It’s an excellent game for playing with friends when you cannot be bothered to prepare something serious but it lends itself equally well to a long, well-structured campaign. Stickmen has the bonus of being genre-free; you can play in any setting you choose from gothic darkness and cyberpunk to fantasy and film noir.
On top of that, we’ve kept the price nice and low to encourage people to try it.
Spotlight 4: Predict the future for the Stickmen RPG
The basic stickmen system is so versatile that we will be using to make other simple, quick to learn RPGs. As regards the game itself, we will be bringing out expansions for it later in the year. These will include more adventures, equipment guides, suggested settings and a few parody campaigns so you can enjoy the features of some of your favourite RPGs in a silly, sticky manner. We have already had a great response from players and are now arranging to print in hardcopy as well as the existing PDF.
Even if you don’t buy the game, please draw a stickman, these little guys need all the backup they can get.
Thank you Andrew for letting us talk about Stickmen.
Stickman is available exclusively at RPG net.
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