Review: Mecha vs. Kaiju

The short version: I so wanted to like this ...

I read this back before Christmas. Then I set it aside to give it some time to percolate. Then I went back and looked at a few specific things that were bothering me and ... they're still bothering me. Time to talk about it on the blog.

I have a huge soft spot for pretty much all of the kaiju movies - Godzilla, Gamera, King Kong Escapes, etc. They are one of those rarely obtained fruits from childhood back before everything was on-demand or even at a local video store. When one of them showed up on the Saturday afternoon movie listings (or one of the late night Saturday listings) it was a big deal. For many of them, watching on a big hi-def screen doesn;t really recapture the experience  - you have to watch them on a 19" tube TV, possibly even a black and white TV, to really go all the way back.

Nowadays, like so many nerd things, they're almost respectable, but back then while some kids loved them, most adults thought they were stupid. To a point, they are. But sometimes I don't want drama, or witty dialogue, or tastefully done nudity - I want to see a model city get crushed into rubble by some giant clawed feet. Not nuked and destroyed in one shot. Not a matte painting wiped clean by disease or a CGI background reduced to the near-silence of shuffling undead feet. I want to see models being viscerally, literally, stomped flat.

For that, there's one section of the movie universe that you go to. It's based out of Japan and subtlety is not listed on the ingredients.

As much fun as it is to watch, how much fun would it be to play as one of those things? Or even as one of the many human attempts to take one on in a giant robot? One of my earliest and fondest  Battletech memories is at a local con where 30-something players took our mechs against Godzilla. An RPG on the subject should be awesome!

Enter "Mecha vs. Kaiju".

It's for FATE - that's good, because that's a game I really want to like but I keep not finding a setting that really pushes me into saying "we're playing this next week".  A lot of them look good, seem like a fun concept, and then I dig into them and there's just not much there. I don't know if that's a signature of the system, of Evil Hat who publishes most of them, or just what other fans of the game prefer, but so far it's not helping me get into the game.

MvK, thankfully, does not have this problem. There's a pretty solid setting in this book though, much like a superhero setting, it's core is "now + some alterations". Nothing wrong with that - it's what I would want and expect in a Kaiju game.

The first part of the book is great. It starts with a tone-setting short story (and I mean short - less than 3 pages), a discussion of the inspirations for the game (everything you might expect), It then dives right into character creation - archetypes, skills, alterations to basic FATE to fit the setting - there are about 20 pages of this stuff and it's fine.

Then we start digging into the setting: a history of Japan with Kaiju (lots of nods to kaiju movies here), there's a discussion of the Mecha Assault Force (the central focus of the game - it's what your players will be a part of), rules for mecha in FATE (both designing them and playing them), sample mecha from the MAF (it's not Battletech or Mekton but it's plenty interesting for a system like FATE and I think it would be a lot of fun).

Then we get into the gamemaster section. There are spoilers below so be warned.

The first section for the GM has a bunch of sample kaiju and rules for creating and running them in FATE, much like the mecha section earlier. This is all good.

Then we get into the Secret History of Japan and this is where it falls apart for me: It's all supernatural. We get Kami vs Oni in pre-history. The Oni create Ogres and train humans in the dark arts who become ninjas, and they fight Kami-trained humans all through history.  The origin of the kaiju is tangled up with a demon-summoning ritual at the end of WW2 along with the traditional atomic aspects and this really derailed the setting for me. I don't mind supernatural elements being a part of the setting - they've certainly been a part of quite a few kaiju movies - but I really didn't want them to be the core of it and they are. The included campaign has ninjas (cool) and kaiju (of course) but it is mainly a fight against the Oni-powered Ogre Ninja organization and their efforts to control various Kaiju and use them to attack the MAF. Besides not liking the main badguys conceptually I also think it distracts from the main theme of this kind of campaign: STOP THE GIANT MONSTERS FROM FLATTENING YOUR HOME! I don't mind a ninja guest appearance. I don't mind a supernatural guest appearance. I just don't want it to be the dominant theme. I could rewrite it to remove this aspect, but it would be a very different campaign. Also, the way it is written feels more like an anime series than a kaiju movie or series of movies - one of the near-incomprehensible ones that you just have to go with, especially once you add in the supernatural stuff

I just really don't like the extremely heavy supernatural angle to it. It feels out of place to me and my own view of a kaiju universe. I was probably looking for more Pacific Rim - more straight-up man vs. kaiju. Like that movie, part of the campaign is discovering that there is an intelligent opponent behind the kaiju and then uncovering who they are and what they are up to. I'm cool with space aliens or dimensional aliens or even straight-up power-mad humans but the Oni/ogre thing just falls flat for me. I am pretty sure that if I ran it as-is my players would look at me like I was looking at the TV near the end of the Battlestar Galactica finale - "they're what?!" I just can't get onboard with it.

Now my own dislikes of the secret history aside, there is a lot of good material here. If the idea of a Kaiju-centric campign interests you and you are interested in FATE then this is still a great book. The "stuff I don't like" is less than a third of the book. The whole MAF section is a pretty good example that could be used in any game.

There is a website for the game that, while it hasn't been updated in a while, it does have stats for some additional characters like Optimus Prime and Ghidorah.

Now there's an idea:

• Season One: Fight the Kaiju to a standstill. 
• Season Two: A talking truck shows up and warns you about a galaxy-wide war that's about to land on earth. I'm pretty sure any fan of this kind of thing is up for Dinobots vs. King Ghidorah

So, to wrap up: there are a lot of good ideas and useful material here, even if you're not playing FATE, and it's not like there are a ton of games on the topic anyway. Consider it, think about what you would want from this kind of campaign, and if anything in this review sounds interesting, well, it's not terribly expensive on DTRPG  - and it has a soundtrack too. How cool is that?

A Review of "Save Game" for FATE

So, this is the first campaign/adventure for FATE that I've sat down and read with some idea that I might run it in the near future. It's a cool concept that I thought fell a little bit short when it came to execution.

The concept is what drew me in. I mentioned it in an earlier post but here it is again:

A vicious computer virus threatens to corrupt the entire internet, and the only ones standing in its way are the characters from your video games.

8-bit heroes battle monsters and corrupted files—it's Wreck-It Ralph meets Lord of the Rings in a fight for the fate of the world! 

That sounds like a lot of fun, and reading through the first part of the game had me even more interested as the basics of the world and the threat are explained. The additional information in the book is that many of the famous video game heroes already fought The Glitch (that's the virus threat) and lost. They were corrupted and now stand as the first obstacles the player characters will have to overcome, That seems incredibly appropriate for a video-game type of campaign.

Another twist is that while most characters have a set of defined powers some have Hax, which is the ability to go beyond their own abilities and alter the world around them - it's magic, or seeing the Matrix, or whatever you want to call it. There also some feeling that it's related to the Glitch so those who practice Hax are not always welcomed in normal society - well, normal video game society. It is useful in battling the glitch but can lead to problems, a very angsty modern element (potentially) in an otherwise 8-bit videogame type of ... game.

There are some mechanical tweaks from normal FATE.Coins take the place of fate points, stress is tracked in "hearts", and characters lose lives when bad things happen. Skills have certain unlockables that can be acquired during the game. There is a shop which appears identically in each section of the island that sells power ups and recovery items. It really contributes to the atmosphere when the mechanics reflect the world this closely. Just as an example, here's the character sheet:

Once characters are made and the starting situation is explained, the campaign can get going. There are five different areas of the local island that need to be cleared of the Glitch to make your home safe again. Each is ruled by a corrupted former hero and their minions, which may have been enemies or may have been allies in the past, but all are tainted now. The basic structure is pretty entertaining to read and I think a GM with some knowledge of the games referenced could enhance them on the fly and drop easter eggs the players might appreciate. Similarly, the players are going to enjoy this a lot more if they are familiar with all of the games.

The rest of the book is the actual campaign, and this is where I felt a little bit of a letdown. Each area is covered in 5-6 pages, about half of which is character stats and pictures. The area descriptions are very short and there is nothing close to resembling a map which seems to me to make it trickier to describe the environments the characters are operating within. Also, while I might expect statblocks to take up a chunk of a Pathfinder adventure, I was surprised to see them featured this way in a FATE adventure. Sure, characters are important, but I was hoping for a little more material to connect them to each other and their lands. As I mentioned before a GM that knows all of the referenced game can turn this into something special but going only by what is in here I thought it was thin - thinner than I would like.

Also, for an epic quest story (as described above) there is a distinct lack of a climax. I've read through it several times and I can't find anything that describes what happens after the last of the five areas is freed. There is a discussion of how to continue the campaign into new virtual islands and there are some good ideas there but I was looking for a wrap-up scene (a cutscene?) that brings this part of the story to a close. NPC reactions, a change in the color of the land or sky, the return of some of the corrupted characters to their old selves - none of that is really covered.

Anyway, considering it's a pay-what-you-want PDF, it's definitely worth a look if you're at all interested in FATE and videogames and the possibility of combining the two. I think it's also an excellent example of how the game can be customized to fit a particular genre/theme/concept. There are a lot of good parts and ideas here even if you don't take the fight to the glitch. Even with lack of a finale, I really like it and I'm sure I will be doing something with it, even if it's a little different from the campaign as written.

Something New for FATE - Save Game

"Save Game" is a new campaign for FATE that caught my eye. This is the description:

A vicious computer virus threatens to corrupt the entire internet, and the only ones standing in its way are the characters from your video games.

8-bit heroes battle monsters and corrupted files—it's Wreck-It Ralph meets Lord of the Rings in a fight for the fate of the world!

I have to say that it worked - I'm interested. Interested enough that I'm reading it now. I'm thinking the younger set is going to like it on the idea alone, while the older set will appreciate some of the humor.

I needed an excuse to look at FATE again anyway - this was it. I'll have a more about it next week. If you're interested yourself it's on DTRPG here.