A one page free download that I found thanks to the handy, dandy, slicing-julian-fries RPG.Net forums, located at:
http://www.mysticages.com/santa/
At the author’s request, Mr. Nathan Hill wanted somebody to do a review. So, hey—why not?
"THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!" In this world gone mad, Santa Claus is actually a billionaire/happiness elemental that desires to make all the children of the world happy. However, he can’t do it alone. Turns out that Santa actually runs most of the world’s toy companies, like a jolly old Rein-dot-Hagen Ventrue with a jelly-belly.
Like all forces in the universe, there is an opposite. One night before Christmas, Santa worked on cloning himself. Sadly, all twelve clones died—except for the last one, who became a skinny, chess-playing bearded billionaire genius…EVIL SANTA! (cue trumpets and lightening)
Evil Santa desires Christmas to be destroyed, and Santa to go with it. He fled with a group of renegade elves to the South Pole, and now they work tirelessly to stop the joy that happens every year this time.
“There is no Santa Claus?” Yep, that’s Evil Santa’s propaganda machines. “Santa has nothing to do with Jesus?” Evil Santa destroying the real biblical texts in the Vatican Archives. The one where there were four wise men…one of them dressed in red and really fat. Evil Santa…he’s evil.
THE ELVES So who fights this eternal Jihad of good versus evil, fat versus skinny? That’s right…Santa’s Little Helpers. The Elves.
That’s who you play, being Santa’s little Spec-Ops helpers, fighting the good fight against Evil Santa and his robot hordes.
THE RULES Rules are childishly easy. You have four attributes (Strength, Nimbleness, Craftiness, and brains), and character creation is a simply “go down the page and check” mentality. Heck, there are more rules on the character sheet than there are in the Rules section.
There are a few other things you work on as well. Your Elf’s size, it’s skin color (green, blue, or white), and pick a specialization (Gadgeteer, Snoop, Bouncer, or Sharpshooter—bonus points for that!), you’re done. Takes maybe two minutes, which is great for kids and keeping the action flowing.
For action tests or whatever you want to call rolling the die, you roll a D8 to get at or under the attribute in question. If you have a specialization, you roll two dice, picking the lowest one (as the game itself says “it is virtually impossible to fail). Lowest number wins in contests.
See? Told you it was simple!
COMBAT...SWEET, DELICIOUS COMBAT Combat, or actually damage, is a cute mechanic. Instead of hit points, everything is rated as “cookies” and “bites”. Each time your elf gets hurt, take a bite of a cookie. Each time a bad guy gets a hit, the GM takes a bite of cookie. The game suggests getting a cold glass of milk as well.
Problem with it: I once had a GM in a Changeling game give us all Skittles at the beginning of the game. We were chomping away for twenty minutes until he told us the candy was our Glamour pools...Food as a mechanic has a problem of possibly eating yourself into oblivion. But you are eating cookies, so it's not that bad.
THE GOOD First, it’s free. Which is great, and very in the spirit of things. Secondly, for only having maybe three pages of text (at large font), it actually gives you enough for a GM to run the game. Heck, you could probably guess some “difficulty mods” or whatever, but the game is simple and straightforward.
The game also has some game ideas to start you off on, and works so simply that the entire family could play. It’s also a cute idea that I think a lot of gamers could run with—most of us have our “Christmas episodes” in one fashion or another, so this could be a blast to play, especially with most of us loosing some or all of our game troupes to family this time of year.
THE BAD Biggest problem—it’s short. Really short. I really wanted to go into detail with the world, see what this Christmas Cold war was like, learn more about Evil Santa, etc. Heck, a brief description of why Blue elves are strong but dumb, and white elves are smart but wimpy, would have been nice. A bit more world would have been fun, and I can see a great comedy RPG coming out of this concept. Really cute, claymation elves fighting a life or death struggle with a candy cane masquerade…
Heck, I’d like to work with them on it….
But really, I can’t complain too much. It is free, and it is Christmas.
IN SHORT Well, it’s short (I think my review is longer than the game). But it’s funny, and it works (which is more than I can say for a lot of systems). And since it’s free, and it’s the holidays, I say everyone should take a gander at it. Right now. I said go!
Style: 3 (Good concept for a holiday themed game) Substance: 3 (Enough to use, but it could be so much more!)
Happy holidays!
