The year is 1943.
You are a unit of crack vampire commandos coffin-dropped into occupied Paris.
You have one mission:
Drink all of Hitler's blood.
Tabletop roleplaying game/adventure, designed by Grant Howitt and illustrated by Will Kirkby. It was published by Rowan, Rook & Decard in 2024 after a successful Kickstarter campaign. If you like roleplaying games, the name Grant Howitt should mean something to you. He's designed a ton of great games, including "Spire: The City Must Fall," "Heart: The City Beneath," "DIE RPG," "Unbound," and many more, including a horde of complete one-page roleplaying games, including "Stag Party," "Sexy Battle Wizards," "Himbo Treasure Hunt," "Jason Statham's Big Vacation," "Bird Crimes," "Crash Pandas," and the beloved "Honey Heist," a game where a bunch of bears wearing jaunty hats knock over a casino to heist a shitload of honey. Basically, if Grant Howitt puts his name on a game, other game designers sit up and take notice.
So what's this game about? Well, it isn't at all subtle. The player characters are all secret vampire operatives of F.A.N.G. who will be deployed -- without parachutes in special drop-coffins lined with pressurized cylinders of high-quality nuns' blood -- into occupied Paris, where they'll slaughter their way through hundreds of Nazi soldiers and a few supernatural super-soldiers to make it to the Eiffel Tower and kill Adolf Hitler!
How shocking! They don't engage them in an earnest exchange of ideas? They don't shake hands and agree to disagree? They don't welcome them to a lively discussion in the campus auditorium? They don't offer them op-eds in the New York Times? They don't call them Very Fine People?
No, they don't! They kill the hell out of every Nazi they get their claws into! They drain their blood! They eviscerate them! They tear their ribcages out and eat their lungs! They blast them to hell with military rifles! They blow them up with hand grenades! They tear their souls out with black magic! They burn them to a crisp with conjured hellfire!
This isn't just me waxing rhapsodic. This attitude is built deep into the game's DNA. Howitt writes extensively about anti-fascist violence, and he's wildly in favor of it, both in fiction and in real life. He acknowledges that this game is pure fiction, that the characters are, at best, antiheroes with deeply questionable morality, that the setting is almost entirely historically and geographically inaccurate -- and that's all done in service of making a game where the players get to butcher their way through history's worst villains.
Is the violence incredibly over the top? Yes, and that's also by design. The name of the game here is cinematic and cathartic ultraviolence. The player characters are exceptionally skilled and powerful people, and most of their opponents are so out of their league that most the heroes' victories are going to be effortless glory kills.
This isn't something that's unique to this game either -- plenty of RPGs make it trivially easy to knock out common mook opponents and some even give you the option of simply narrating your devastating triumph. The minions are there solely to make the heroes look cool, with lieutenants or bosses being the ones who it takes skill and good dice rolls to beat.
This is really something midway between a full roleplaying game and a short adventure. There isn't enough material here to make a complete RPG and a bit too much for a simple adventure. In fact, Howitt says he doesn't really want this to be played for more than this one adventure. Once you're finished, you've already killed Hitler, so why unleash these undead psychopaths on post-war Europe?
I'm not going to try to give a full description of the game rules. They're based around what Howitt calls the Havoc engine, where you roll a dice pool of a certain number of six-sided dice depending on how challenging it's going to be to accomplish something. Results of 1, 2, and 3 are discarded, with 4, 5, and 6 counting as successes (and 6 counting as a critical success). This makes gameplay and combat move very fast.
There are also some fun rules concerning player equipment. Your equipment, whether it's guns and grenades or grappling hooks and tool belts or soul jars and spellbooks, have only a finite number of uses before they're destroyed or used up -- but the last use of a piece of equipment always adds a bonus die to your dice pool. So it's worth your while to use your equipment instead of hoarding it -- and you can always find new equipment anywhere you look around Paris, either inside buildings or taken from Nazi corpses.
There are limited rules for character creation. In fact, players are strongly encouraged to just use the pre-generated characters in the book instead of making their own. These characters include Iryna, wealthy and aristocratic; Nicole, gun-loving ex-soldier; Cosgrave, suave, spell-casting con artist; Chuck, vampire cowboy; Astrid, spirit-commanding murder machine; and Flint, half-bat, half-human, all monster.
The game does have weaknesses, and the big one is that it's set up almost entirely as a one-shot adventure. That sucks because it's an exciting premise! Vampires killing Nazis! You don't get that with D&D! You don't get that with GURPS or Call of Cthulhu or Apocalypse World! You don't even get that with Vampire: The Masquerade! The idea of telling players, "Oh, did you have fun? Well, that's all there is, go shove off, nerd" didn't go over well, and that may be why there are sections in the back offering general character building advice and suggesting more Big Bads to send the vamps after (Stalin! Mussolini! Hirohito! And Churchill, that fucking racist!).
Another weakness is how disorganized the book is. Sections on roleplaying safety lead to tips on how to set up your game and back to roleplying safety, then on to character selection, how drop-coffins work, character stats and dice pools, an example of gameplay, injury and death, etc. There's no index, and an index is badly needed, because if you forget a rule, you may have to dig through the entire book to find the info you need. Granted, the book is only about 70 pages long, but as haphazard as the contents are, you might have to do some serious searching.
Nevertheless, killing Nazis by the hundreds with terrible, gory vampire powers is big, big fun! Blowing apart their brainpans with sniper rifles! Exploding their trucks with firebombs! Using ancient magic to tear their souls out through their pores! Ripping their hearts out of their chests and noshing down on them while they watch! Crushing their Nazi skulls and gulping down the blood spray! The game runs fast, and it runs cartoonishly violent, and that makes it great to play for anyone who loves killing Nazis with cackling vampire antiheroes! If that sounds like fun to you, then you wanna hunt this game down and get down to the serious business of chug-a-lugging Nazi hemoglobin!
horrorquest