Chaos against criminality, as Law struggles to know itself

Here’s the first of three games I led at Gauntlet Con 2018! A Cosmic Zap playtest. When I initially signed on for playing it months ago, I was unsure about how well-developed the game would be, or even how playable/failed at all. But it turned out to be a decisive validator of the project.

I did make pregenerated characters, which I generally don’t like for games of this kind as it borks the necessarily buy-in, and reverses the direction of who is discovering what as provided by whom. In this case, I provided what you see in the attached sheet, but had the players choose where to allocate the 12 free points, to provide them more ownership of the final play-version.

(I lifted the name “Jack Whack” from Ted McKeever’s comic Metropol. Too good not to.)

As for play? Ha! This is a really fun video to watch so I’ll leave it to you. Please comment freely!

I greatly appreciated our post-play dialogue, so have included it as well. It’ll go a long way toward helping me articulate “what is this, why we play” in the text.

One of the strongest points is how obviously further play has somewhere to go. Or rather, not a specific destination, but that it can go somewhere, an awareness that, “all right, this is on,” and it’s not over until events truly explode and resolve. It’s not only playable, it demands continuation – something I find lacking in a lot of recent RPG publications, which are all too often optimized for a completed short-term experience.

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