RPGaDay: Favour/Flavour

And here I am without my favourite tale of manipulating PCs into owing a favour because I already used it for Lever...

Wait, there's a different word on the dungeon map graphic to the hex map graphic!

Flavour then.  The thing that separates otherwise similar games.

I've been playing Mutant: Year Zero a lot recently.  It's my first post-apoc game, and as my write-ups might suggest, I'm loving it.  Flavour-wise it's pretty grim and gritty - after all we're living in an abandoned tube station surrounded by the ruins of London in a dying society that's struggling for food and in the grip of violent bosses and fanatic cultists.  And I nearly died at the end of the second session.

But at the same time, there's a glimmer of hope.  Our characters have a childlike innocence at the same time as their world weariness, and there's an element of building a new home.  Our characters dream of finding fame, love and peace.

And then there's my second post-apoc game, PunkApocalyptic.  I played a one-shot called 'Two Dead In Shit Town,' and between those two names I knew I was in for something very different to Mutant: Year Zero.  Another hint came from the objects we were carrying.  While Mutant characters seek out artefacts - useful if poorly understood items from the past - PunkApocalyptic characters carry...well, mine had a diploma from Trump university and another had a bag of assorted sex toys.

In Mutant: Year Zero, our characters struggle against the physical and psychological hardships of life in a post-apocalyptic world.  In PunkApocalyptic we struggled against filthy toilets, stinking rotten corpses and houses full of mutant cannibals.

Both are immensely fun games using similar archetypes in similar settings but are so unlike each other because they have such different flavours.  And that's something important to get across when pitching a game.  Fortunately I'm not running either Mutant: Year Zero or PunkApocalyptic as apparently those take me several paragraphs to describe.

Of the convention scenarios I've been running this year, two are based on other media (Alien and Firefly) so are pretty easy for people to get the flavour of.  Liminal needs a bit more explanation, but 'urban fantasy and folk horror, inspired by works like Rivers of London and The Dresden Files' seems to tell people everything they need to know.

Both the Mutant: Year Zero campaign and the PunkApocalyptic one-shot are/were streamed by Chambers of Roleplay and can be found on on YouTube.  I'll be running Alien at GrimCon and Liminal at AlbaCon.