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Introduction

The name's Davenport. I review games.

And if there's one thing I know about – other than games, that is – it's mysteries. Solvin' mysteries in an RPG can be a whole lotta fun. When you can solve'em, that is. When you can't, they're a big pain in the ass. Suppose the players' smarts and their characters' stats can't cut the mustard when they need to figure out where the Big Bad's hidin', or which spell will put the kibosh on the latest tentacle whatzis, or just how to open some damn trick door – what's the GM supposed to do? Let the players keep re-rollin' or gabbin' until someone gets lucky? Drop so many hints that a trained chimp could figure it out? Where's the fun in that?

Well, that's something this game called InSpectres sets out to fix, by changin' up the whole way players relate to the plot and to their characters. Ordinarily, that sorta fancy-pants talk sends me headin' for the john, but hey – in this biz, you gotta keep an open mind, right?

Besides, this one's got workin' stiffs catching spooks for cash. How's that for a swell gig? Somebody oughta make a movie about it...

Content

Premise

In a modern-day setting unabashedly owing much to Ghostbusters, the supernatural is on the rise and publicly acknowledged. While this is hardly a novel concept, the public's reaction certainly is: ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and Lovecraftian horrors are sources of embarrassment and annoyance rather than widespread panic. And where there's an embarrassing or annoying situation, there's a business opportunity.

Enter InSpectres, Inc. – a franchise operation dedicated to "fighting the forces of darkness so you don't have to", and willing to employ just about anyone to do it. It’s a setup at once wide open and instantly understandable.

Characters

Generally speaking, InSpectres PCs are average Joes from all walks of life, with everyday problems and reasons of their own for wanting to wrangle shoggoths from 9 to 5.

Character creation involves dividing nine six-sided dice between four extremely broad “skills”, each rated in dice pools from 1-4: Athletics, Academics, Technology, and Contact. Each character also gets one unique and equally broad Talent that adds a bonus die whenever it comes into play – anything from Car Mechanic to Star Trek Geek. Another trait, Cool, gets no dice at character creation. (More about Cool in a moment.)

Despite the emphasis on everyday PCs, it is possible to create supernatural or otherwise “weird” agents – vampires, ghosts, mages, psychics, and so on. Such agents get ten dice, have no minimum or maximum on skills, and can apply starting dice to Cool. Plus, they get whatever special abilities the player and GM decide are appropriate. There’s one heck of a downside, however – see below.

The players also jointly create their franchise, which has stats of its own: the Franchise Dice, divided between three "Cards" – Library, Gym, and Credit – and the Bank. The number of Franchise Dice depends upon the size of the franchise the players wish to run. Library, Gym, and Credit Card dice can be spent to augment Academics, Athletics, and Technology rolls, respectively, and Bank dice may augment any roll; however, cleverly, the Bank dice are not always there when players need them. A bad roll with Bank dice may result in an overdraft (costing extra dice), but a good roll might result in interest (adding more Bank dice).

Game Mechanics

The rules are the essence of elegant simplicity, with the focus not on the success of individual actions, but rather on control of the story. When characters attempt an action, the players roll dice from the appropriate Skill plus any bonus dice from Talents, Cards, and the Bank, taking only the highest roll. This roll is compared to a Skill Roll Chart that indicates the degree to which the GM or the player can control the action.

The significance here is that the player has the chance to determine not just how well his character performs, but what occurs overall. Getting back to that mystery issue, for example, if a character makes a good Academics roll to find out what kind of creature is haunting Spooky Manor, the player decides what it is his character discovers. This takes a bit of getting used to, since it allows the players to define the reality of the story. On the other hand, it also removes a huge amount of the preparation required for this already rules-lite game – there’s no need for the GM to write out a detailed plot, because the players will help create it as the game goes along. In fact, the game could be run GMless with minimal fuss.

In addition, good rolls earn the players Franchise dice. Each job has a number of Franchise dice required for success. Until they're earned, the job can't be completed. After they're earned, the job can end whenever the players decide they've had enough fun for one evening.

The closest the game mechanics come to actually endangering agents is with Stress dice. When their characters encounter stressful situations – which, given the workaday premise of the setting, could be anything from a vampire attack to a traffic jam – the players roll 1-5 Stress dice, depending upon the severity of the stress, and keep the lowest result. The outcome ranges from a loss of relevant Skill dice and Cool dice (if any) to a gain of a Cool die.

And speaking of Cool dice, each one a character has lets him ignore one Stress die. This works well for “weird” agents, with their starting and unlimited Cool dice, since they shouldn’t be as easily spooked as their mundane coworkers.

There are a couple of drawbacks to this mechanic, however.

First of all, while Stress-related penalties theoretically represent any sort of impairment, from "the shakes" to broken tech to actual physical damage, the fact that Cool is the only defense from Stress makes such threats stress-related in the most literal sense. In other words, if the GM wants to simulate the physical peril facing an agent attacked by a zombie, it's time for a Stress die roll. A bad roll will result in a loss of Athletics dice to simulate physical damage, but the agent's Athletics skill is no defense – only his bravery, in the form of Cool.

And second, because normal starting agents get no Cool, everyday events are quite likely to drive them temporarily insane. That can be amusing, granted, but is also somewhat annoying.

On a related note, characters can spend Cool dice to augment their rolls, and “weird” agents have to spend Cool dice to activate their powers. The latter strikes me as odd: a ghost walks through a wall, and is suddenly more likely to be scared?

Oh, one other thing about “weird” agents: They never, ever earn Franchise dice. This puts them in the bizarre position of being essentially irrelevant in terms of game mechanics: aside from helping to eliminate sources of Stress dice, nothing a “weird” agent does will ever have any impact on the success of the mission.

Playtest: None of these issues seemed to matter during the outrageously fun controlled chaos of my trial game, however – we were too wrapped up in the story to care about such things. As strange as it may seem, this lack of concern for game mechanics almost became a problem in and of itself, in the sense that the nifty Card/Bank mechanic didn't see much use. After all, why bother spending bonus dice for a favorable roll when the story stays equally entertaining regardless of the outcome? There's the job completion incentive, of course, but that felt more like an arbitrary stopping point than it did a goal that was ever in doubt.

A key factor in this gleeful story immersion was one of the most thoroughly entertaining game mechanics I’ve ever encountered: the Confessional.

When invoking Confessionals, the action “freezes” while one character offers past-tense commentary on the events of the investigation directly to the “camera”, reality TV fashion … and thereby helps determine those events, because the commentary becomes retroactively true. For example, a player in the Confessional – which, preferably, is an actual big, comfy chair set aside for that purpose – mentions how fortunate it was that Bill was allergic to codfish, and voila! When the action resumes, Bill is allergic to codfish – if Bill's player agrees, that is. But if he does, the group will get some extra Franchise dice for his trouble.

Playtest: The Confessional was so much fun, in fact, that we ended up using it way beyond the allotted one per scene. If you're wanting to emphasize the more game-like aspects of the game, however, I'd definitely recommended sticking to the rules. It's just too easy to use the Confessional to get around having to actually use a character's abilities.

Style

The art in this screen-formatted black-and-white PDF shows a simple but amusing comic style. The same may be said of the text, in which the humor flows naturally without seeming forced – I literally laughed out loud in a couple of places. (Why does a werewolf get a Cool score of 3, for example? Because "being able to turn into a wolfman is cool," of course.) I noticed no typos.

The pages feature wide margins, large text, and lots of white space. This works great for the .pdf copy, although it might seem like padding in the print version.

Conclusion

I can highly recommend InSpectres, but not necessarily as a roleplaying game – the player/character relationship is such that the game may turn off players expecting the typical RPG format. But despite some odd conceptual quirks in the game mechanics, this game really couldn’t be more fun with the right participants. As such, anyone interested in a quick, hilarious storytelling game of monster-busting action certainly should give it a try.