kill puppies for satan is one of the most fun roleplaying games I've played in a long time. It's not perfect, but it's very, very good. The premise of the game is very simple: the PCs are pathetic lowlife losers who get to call on Satan's power by torturing and murdering innocent animals.
The game itself is a 33-page PDF. There is no interior art, but D. Vincent Baker turns this into an advantage. The game is in a fixed width courier font, and completely uncapitalized -- it looks like the late night rantings of someone who has run out of his medications. The text itself is very funny and has an extremely evocative voice. Here's an example, of a description of a magic grimoire:
the yellow grimoire of malthais van orley
van orley now i have to warn you, malthais van orley (1731-1777)
was one cold fucked up mean relentless motherfucker, plus he had a
real gift. he could sit down and write six hundred pages in his
crabby little hand and in all of them not three consecutive words
would make sense. benjamin franklin wrote of him: "if it is not
the pottage of vermin, then it is the covetous glance he fixes
upon my loyal old trey. such a damn'd nuisance is this v. o. that
i find myself quite off my hump."
Despite being about amoral, scummy, animal-torturing, satan worshipping losers, kill puppies for satan is a ferociously moral game. There is absolutely no whitewashing of what the characters are trying to do -- play is opened by writing "I kill puppies for Satan" at the top of the character sheet. The game is focused on how fundamentally worthless what the characters are doing is; the most expensive ability in the game is the ability to cause another person to find the character attractive for even one second.
I ran kill puppies for satan for a group of 5 players. The players immediately seized on the attribute names, and started calling out which form of personality deformity they wanted. ("I want to be fucked up!" "I want to be mean!" "I am sooo cold it hurts!") The attribute naming was one of the strengths of the system. During play, the players would frequently call out which stat they thought was required to resolve an action. ("That's cold -- roll it!")
The players created PCs who were a lot more ruthless and vicious than the game seemed to assume, and they were a lot more eager to fail. One player was weirded out by the hate-people rule: "Why is not disturbing regular human beings a success? I thought the whole point was that the PCs are failures as human beings?" He was mollified when I pointed out that the number of people who hated his PC would go up in play as long as each of his victims lived, and that Satan disapproved of murder.
Rather than relating the play in detail, I'll just mention some of the highlights. The players:
- One PC cut off a guy's fingers, just because she was that cold.
- The PCs stole a corpse from a morgue in order to stuff it full of firecrackers and feed to Gerald Stubbins.
- The PCs broke into a John Deere lot to steal a combine to drive into a chinchilla farm.
- One PC sold her soul to a demon, and promised to kill her sister in exchange for becoming the most popular girl in school.
- Two PCs killed a cat and threw it onto their bosses's front porch When the elderly grandmother on a walker started screaming about poor Scooter, they hotwired a car (using evil) specifically to run her over.
- The two sisters died in prison, under a hail of police gunfire.
- One PC accidentally summoned a demonic Scrappy-doo when she created a fake ritual to cheat a pawnshop owner. Unfortunately for her, the ritual worked. (This was cool, but followed by the single worst GMing call I made all night, though. Sigh.)
At the end of the night, Scrappy had gotten 2 PCs killed, and was sitting on a table asking the survivors who wanted to be next -- and getting interested responses. One player commented that the whole thing played like an episode from Tales from the Crypt. I think this is a net success.
There are a couple of places in which the mechanics could be improved. First, I'm not sure why the mechanic for "How many people hate you" is different from the regular cold/fucked-up/mean/relentless stats. With the how-many-people-hate-you stat (which I'll call hated from now on), you need to roll over your hated total. With the other stats you roll, add your stat, and compare against a target number of 7. The mechanics could be unified, by changing the die mechanic for the cold, fucked up, mean, and relentless stats, so that you need to roll your stat or less to succeed. Then, the interpretation for all of the stats will be the same: to be hated, fucked-up, cold, mean, or relentless, roll under your stat. With this system, you could also eliminate the need for comparing margins of success, by decreeing that in an opposed contest, whoever succeeds and rolls higher wins the contest.
Second, we had some difficulties generating enough evil in the game. The fact that the PCs couldn't get evil except by killing animals meant that they had to frequently interrupt their attempts to get into personal trouble by running off and finding animals to kill. While it was funny when they stole a combine and then crashed in into a chinchilla farm, it didn't seem as organic to their efforts as it should have. I'd like a kind of Guy Ritchie meets Kevin Smith vibe, where pathetic people get involved in some ludicrously complicated scheme. I think that if I ran kill puppies for satan again, I'd allow anyone to regenerate evil on a die roll of 5 or 6, and also rule that some catastrophic disaster will also strike on any roll of 6. Then the PCs could recover evil by hurtling into trouble, and they wouldn't have to take detours away from the downward spiral.
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