Faith No More RPG
Crowdfunding campaign underway for sequels to The Real Thing
When I found out about last year’s Kickstarter for an official Faith No More RPG called The Real Thing, I pledged immediately. Not only was it a perfect example of what Critical Hit Parader is all about (the intersection of rock music and tabletop roleplaying games), but I’ve been a fan of Faith No More for a long time. I remember trying to find a way to get out of work when they were scheduled to play a lunch time concert with original singer Chuck Mosley. I later saw them open for Voivod and Soundgarden at an amazing concert at the Paradise in Boston. After the show, we got to meet bassist Billy Gould.
The Kickstarter raised nearly $70K, and I was pleased when I received the very nice special edition rulebook:
The game is described by the designers as follows:
“The Real Thing RPG is a tabletop RPG that leverages a modified version of the open-source Powered-by-the-Apocalypse system. More importantly, The Real Thing RPG is the first-ever Official Faith No More role-playing game. The game system and the included stories are all based on themes from FNM's music. The themes and content from their music are tightly woven into the character archetypes (Playbooks), rules, and the stories in the books.”
I enjoyed the way moves in the game were named after Faith No More songs, like “Everything’s Ruined,” “Ricochet,” and “Arabian Disco.”
Now the game’s publisher, Accidental Cyclops Games, is running a crowdfunding campaign on Backerkit for two sequels to The Real Thing RPG. Each book is named after another classic Faith No More album: Angel Dust and King for a Day. Here’s the intro video:
Angel Dust adds “a completely new set of rules for creating and populating your world beyond the hyper-local.” King for a Day “is about expanding and exploring the nature of reality” and includes rules “for encounters with the supernatural, and even for creating supernatural characters.”
If you missed out on last year’s Kickstarter, you can purchased the original The Real Thing book as part of pledging for this campaign.
You can learn more about the game and the current crowdfunding campaign on this Games Played Badly interview with game designers Jason Ward and Jason Peercy:
I’ll close this week’s newsletter with a link to this Broadcasting+Cable article, which includes references to D&D and heavy metal when covering the release of the second season of the Netflix anime series Bastard!!. The article references the following description from a first season Decider review:
“…it’s also a love letter to heavy metal and Dungeons & Dragons, with references and puns to bands like Anthrax and Metallica, and character designs and tropes that pull directly from the popular RPG.”
I haven’t seen the show, but the Decider review compares it to the 1981 Heavy Metal animated film, so I’m definitely interested. Over the years, I’ve been collecting autographs from the various bands who contributed songs to the movie soundtrack on my vinyl copy:
