This RPG product excels at being exactly what was promised: You and some friends make a demon-powered posse looking for their fill of reckoning, revenge, and/or redemption against a warlock outlaw who taught them how to trade their souls for demonic miracles.
I was in the market for a RPG product, preferably rules light, that would let me explore a wild-west genre that would be easy to pick up and play for a One shot. I'm hear to say that Teapot Dome Games delivers on this front with flying colors.
What most intrigued me about this game was it's skill based mechanics. As a fan of the Savaged Worlds types systems, I enjoyed the die-size as ability score fashioned game. The 4 of us enjoyed watching our characters slowly inch towards death with each successful roll. The very end to the one shot was extremely memorable and I will talk about it for years to come! It felt true to the spirit of the game.
What surprised me the most was character generation. The card-based character generation mechanic is absolutely brilliant. The fact the number of cards is predicated on the desired length of play was just super elegant. Within 30 minutes the 4 of us had 3 characters and surprisingly interesting world! The bullet points of possible questions for town generation were perfect. Watching our narrative ideas synthesize into this crazy Wild West horrorshow was just too much fun!
What I didn't like and what confused me a bit were some of the resolution mechanics. Keeping track of when the Devil John himself got scars/when the players face him felt a little odd. Since this was a one shot, we were getting very close, fictionally, for our player characters to finding the Devil John, however we were nowhere close according to the rules to having him appear. In the end, I ended up throwing in a filler train-escapade as the players rode off getting closer to the Devil John and his attempt at sucking a lake of holy water.
I recorded my game for youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ9lcvIypvY&list=PLJ0snHDJGuC0UOdkoPGkky4qjeCHjzvQC
I reckon I did a bunch of things wrong (as all new GMs do), however we all had fun with the game. Naturally, since I played this online, I had to edit the card dealing rules a bit in order for everything to work out.
I will recommend this game to anyone who wants a filler game to play during a downtime/break in a longer running RPG campaign. For how little mechanics and crunch this game provides, it OOZES with flavor and everything sort-of just works. My players commented how it felt a bit like Apocalypse World.
Definitely try this product with your group, and if you like it, consider going back and throwing some money to Teapot Dome's Way. This product is awesome.
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