Movie Mashup 2011 - Review - Fist Full of Darkness

Since I'm involved in a contest that doesn't end until June 1st, 2011, I figured that I would do what I did with Game Chef and do reviews for people who have put forth entries into the 1km1kt.net Movie Mashup 24 hour RPG competition. I put my game up already, but since I'm not really going to review my own stuff, I'd rather get feedback from other people, I turn my attention to those the other contestants.

I'm doing this because I know that feedback is important, and that it is rather notoriously hard to get. I offer free copies of a book to people who will do a review of the PDF and I still haven't gotten any reviews that fit the contest (though Ed at Robot Viking did one, which is always appreciated).

Anyway, I'll be doing this review using most of the criteria put out by the contest. Copying from the 1km1kt.net thread here are the criteria for judgement.

Poor you! Our panel of monkeys will be judging you on:
Must include an NPC called Keeton
Proximity: How close to the two films is it?
Complete: Is it complete? Could you run it?
Attractive: Is it attractive to look at?
Professional: How much effort went into layout and style?
Extras: Did they include actual cover, index, character sheet or any other cool things you get in a proper RPG?

Don't worry too much about the Keeton part. That's a running joke on the site.

Next on the docket - Fist Full of Darkness by Gryffudd

Fist Full of Darkness is a game that is striving to take The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly and Dark City and combines them into a single entity. I will admit that I was pretty excited by the sheer possibilities of this concept. A Western that deals with what Dark City deals with. That's pretty sweet, or it could go horrifically wrong. It all depended on what was going to happen on the other side of 24 hours.

Proximity: The game does a really good job of taking Dark City and making it Dark City at the OK Corral but it doesn't really feel a lot like The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Not that this is generally a bad thing, I think taking a game and turning the genre on its ear can create some awesome game design moments. The problem is that you're trying to mash up two movies into a game, and this feels more like a drop from one was taken and put into a drinking glass filled with the other. It provided a little bit of flavour, a little bit of setting but not much more. I was hoping for a little bit more grit in my alien controlled city.

Complete: It's got all the rules that you need to know in order to play the game. You're always rolling 3 stat blocks worth of dice, which can make for some hand-fulls of dice situations if you've got your two highest stats being pushed against a really high resistance. It uses the DRYH idea of Dominance without the success part which weakens the suspense on the rolling. If you know that you only have to roll high, not get a good number of successes and high dice, and there are no consequences of using your other dice then it's functional, but again in a 24 hr RPG functional is what you're aiming for.

Attractive/Professional: I was jazzed when I saw the cover. I think it's one of the best covers in the competition so far. Really got me into what was going to be inside the cover. Hell, it even made me ignore the coloured paper, which usually annoys me to no end when it comes to RPG books. The border really adds to the Western feel of the game and is really pleasant to look at.

The problems happen when the text constantly runs overtop of the border. That's something that's easy to deal with and should probably be avoided. I know that the author has 24 hours, which is why I don't comment on things like typos or editing mistakes because you've got a limited time, but this is something that you can catch and fix with the basic functionality of whatever application that you're using. When this is one of the criteria I'm gonna mention it.

Smaller quip, would be to try to not have the images be a block of white behind them. It's a problem when you want to use images and coloured backgrounds. Again, it just detracts from the overall look of the book. Also, the two "Indian" images probably shouldn't be there. I use the term "Indian" intentionally, goodness knows I haven't talked about appropriation here, because the western that the author used didn't include any type of appropriative of caricatured depiction of First Nations people in the text, so including the use of said images just makes me sad, really.

Extras: There is a really lovely character sheet in the back filled with the same stylized border, but done in black and white. I think it's a nice book end to the game.

Would I Play It?: Yes. It's still looks like a fun time, and the mechanic is totally playable. Would it be my choice to win the competition? No, but that doesn't mean it isn't a fun concept.


NOTE: Kenisis missed a great opportunity to have it be all sorts of stuff. Pyro, cryo, tele etc.