Five reasons why you should download HAVOC BRIGADE

This week, I released Havoc Brigade – it’s the third game I’ve put out through Patreon, and I’m really excited about it. Here is an arbitrary number of reasons why you, too, should be excited enough to give it a play:

ONE. It’s ready to rock. Unlike my other games, Havoc Brigade has the adventure baked in; it’s a game designed to tell one specific story, a little like the superlative Lady Blackbird. The players take on the roles of a rough-and-tumble group of orcs on a mission in the human city of Freiberg, and the rules encourage stupid plans, dubious “shortcuts” and high-impact combat against the defenders of the town. All characters are pre-generated, and the game comes with a city map that you can scribble all over as you plan your abduction of the much-hated Prince Theodore Holstein; all you need is some dice, a printer, and some friends who are willing to cause a ruckus.

TWO. It’s filled with art. For the first time in Look Robot history, I’ve been able to commission internal art thanks to some GENEROUSLY LOW RATES from my artist, Tim Wilkinson Lewis. Thanks to that, as well as the striking cover art, we’ve got illustrations for each of the pre-gen characters. So that’s nice! I think it really helps to spark the players’ imaginations when you give them six pictures to choose from at the start of the game rather than making them read through paragraphs of background text for each character.

Goblins!
I will never not be happy to see a stack of goblins.

THREE. One of the characters is a stack of goblins. Yeah. In addition to playing a big tough orc, you can play six goblins at once. I can confirm that this is the Most Fun. It’s a roleplaying challenge, because, well, there’s six of you and you don’t get on with one another, but it’s always fun to talk in a high voice and be fatally incompetent when using scavenged objects. In many ways, Havoc Brigade is the spiritual sequel to Goblin Quest.

FOUR. You can each create your own distraction, all at once, and that will somehow help. When I ran Havoc Brigade using Dark Heresy rules, I’d often find that every single player would just run off on their own and cause mayhem under the pretence of “creating a distraction,” although they’d never make clear what it was they were distracting attention away from. In the custom ruleset, I’ve written a mechanic that lets the orcs get into loads of trouble by making a bunch of noise and getting into really public fights, and – assuming it doesn’t kill them – turn the chaos against the city to achieve their own ends. In practice, it works as a pressure-release; the characters get deeper and deeper into trouble as they attract more and more attention, and it’s up to them to decide when to blow the lid off the situation by taking advantage of it. It’s very orcish.

Profanius is a paladin of Bog-Al-Kurruk, the god of the orcs' parnsip-based religion. He's a cross between a Jehovah's witness and a Crusader.
Profanius is a paladin of the orc god Bog-Al-Kurruk. He’s a cross between a Jehovah’s witness and a Crusader in that he’ll kick in your door and murder your family then sit you down and tell you how Bog-Al-Kurruk could have saved them, if only you believed in him.

FIVE. There’s an elite Patreon-only edition. The game, like all my games, is free, but if you want to back me for $10 on Patreon to encourage me to make more games like it, then you get access to the SUPER-BONUS EDITION. It contains 5 extra pre-gen characters – with a one-orc-band Bard, a noble Hobgoblin warlord from the mysterious East, and an Orc drunken boxer on a pub-crawl pilgrimage, amongst them – and a quick guide to making your own,  too, if that’s the sort of thing you’re into.

Is that not enough reasons for you? Go play it!


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4 responses to “Five reasons why you should download HAVOC BRIGADE”

  1. Oran Solus Avatar
    Oran Solus

    I can confirm that this game rocks many socks. Any game that causes me to have a literal spit-take over the nonsense occurring in game is a fine game in my book. Grab some friends, rev up your imaginations and trash a city. You should probably nab the Prince while you’re at it.

  2. That One GM Avatar

    I know nothing about this game aside from the article I have just read. I cannot express how excited I am to try this out.

    1. grant Avatar
      grant

      Cool! Let me know how it goes, I always like to hear from players.

  3. Sam Avatar
    Sam

    Hiya! Just found Havoc Brigade and was thinking of running this as a one-shot for my regular group. Is it still possible to get access to the SUPER-BONUS EDITION?

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