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.
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.
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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