It occurred to me after mentioning it in last week's post that I ought to talk about PewPew as a game because it's a great little effort from one of my favorite small publishers Fainting Goat Games. They've made a lot of interesting things over the years, particularly superhero adventures for games like ICONS. This game was a new direction for them and I really like it.
First up it is very rules light - if you're looking for crunch and "builds" this is probably not going to work well for you. The whole thing is less than 40 pages and includes the rules, pregen characters, and an adventure. Around half of the page count is spent on opposition and NPC's and a map for the adventure. This is a full-color production as well and it looks good. I give bonus points for the "action figure" marketing on the back - this is another Fainting Goat signature item like the snack cake ads in their superhero adventures and it tells you where they are coming from.
As for the rules themselves they are simple but interesting. They are borrowed from Havoc Brigade, a game I do not know beyond what I can see on DTRPG, but I may have to look into it. In a larger sense they are borrowed from Marvel Heroic, or Cortex+. When a character needs to do something they roll a d6 looking for a 4+. Beyond that basic d6 though you are looking to build a dice pool - one from your skills, some from your equipment, (one for each relevant piece of gear), two from each relevant drive ... you get the picture. While it is only d6's, unlike Cortex+, you can build up a pool fair quickly and each 4+ is a success and this is how the whole thing works whether you are shooting someone, flying a ship, schmoozing your way past a guard, or repairing a ground vehicle. There is not a ton of structure here beyond the building of that pool. Some things have limited uses - like the armor on the sheet up above, or medpacks and some other items noted in their descriptions.
Your character can have a spaceship and there are some equipment you could add to it and some basic rules for space combat and ship repair. There are no points or tech levels or speed ratings here - it's more about the flavor than the technical details.
Also much like MHR there is no character creation system. There are 6+ pre-gens and the suggestion is to tweak one of them if you don't like it. This is a game meant for drop-in type use, not an extended campaign so I am OK with this.
There is metacurrency in the form of "Embrace the Chaos" (steal the GM's dice), "You Owe Me One" (re-roll your pool dice) , and "Carefully Crafted Plan" (add 2 dice to a pool)which players can use a limited number of times per adventure to really push things over the top. These are entirely genre-appropriate and look like a lot of fun.
The GM uses NPC stats when opposing the players directly and the "Chaos Pool" for general difficulty levels not tied to an active opponent or as bonuses to add to a particularly capable opponent. This is very much the Doom Pool from MHR and begins with X dice based on the situation or location and grows when the PC's screw up. The players can, once per game per character, use the chaos pool themselves for some ridiculous stunt they want to pull off. Let me use their own description and example here:
Chaos can also be used to the bounty hunters’ favor. Once per game, every character can use the chaos to their advantage. Grab all the dice in the Chaos Factor Pool (whether the GM's rolled them this turn or not) and describe some awesome but unlikely thing that happens that benefits your character or describe an amazing action your character is doing. (For example: it turns out the infant that is your bounty secretly has telekinetic powers and uses them to oppose the attack of the monster who was about to kill you.) The GM rolls against you at the base suspicion value for the area.
After the PC has used the Chaos Factor Pool, it refreshes to the default level for the area.
I think that communicates the spirit of this game pretty well.
Some of this will be an exercise in justification - again like MHR - but is likely to be less strict about it since it is an even looser style of game. There is no grid or range incrementation or variable difficulty levels - a lot of this is eyeballed by the GM and defaults to "roll more 4-ups's than the other guy" which should work just fine for this.
The whole idea here is a one-off adventure for a team of bounty hunters in a vaguely Star-Warsian-Outer-Rim type setting. There are at least 3 other add-ons in this line and each one pretty much contains the rules and basic info plus an adventure and some other odds and ends - a random character generator, a random adventure generator, etc. As a fill-in game I think it's set up with just enough "system" to be fun without requiring a bunch of rules-reading and explanation and going through character generation. It's much more "pick something you like and get going". I have not tried it out yet but it is on the short list for the next opportunity.
For those who want more structure there is a Savage Worlds version of these same books which runs off of that system and converts everything to those stats. The adventure is converted to a Savage Worlds One-Sheet format and is a little more structured. I can see a lot of groups preferring that so it's great that that version is out there and it would nicely supplement an ongoing Star Wars style campaign with some drop-in NPCs and an adventure complete with map. Given some of the crossover potential in Savage Worlds campaigns - like Rifts - having a one-shot like this with a limited scope and a set scenario can be a godsend and a heck of a lot of fun.
When I get a chance to actually try it out I will post about it here.
