Would you like to make your own tabletop RPG of madcap escapades, over-the-top high-octane action and/or narrative freedom within interesting constraints? We have great news!
Today, we’re releasing the Havoc Engine – the system design guide for the mechanics that underpin Eat the Reich – and we’re celebrating by holding a games jam next month.
Read on for more details on the Engine itself and learn how to take part.
THE HAVOC ENGINE
Havoc believes players should do the fun thing immediately and then find another fun thing to do based on the first fun thing. This engine is more candy than you should eat. This engine is a greased pig. This engine is a drum kit for your seventh birthday. This engine is Friday night forever.
The Havoc Engine began life in 2014 as Havoc Brigade, a freewheeling romp about six orcish commandos “infiltrating” a human city and getting up to various hijinks. During the development of Eat the Reich, after struggling to make it work using an adapted Apocalypse World system, we realised that adapting the over-the-top mechanics from Havoc Brigade worked really well to tell the sort of high-flying, pulp action stories we wanted the game to enable.
(It also runs Goat Crashers, my game about goats attending parties they’re not supposed to be at.)
I updated the system with the benefit of a decade of games design experience and, with a few tweaks and clarifications, it became the blood-soaked splatterfest that many of us know and love today. Eat the Reich is military-themed, but it isn’t a tactical wargame: it’s an excuse to describe vampires brutally murdering fascists for upwards of several hours at a time, and maybe (but probably not) having your character die gloriously in the process.
THE TOOLKIT
It went through a few iterations, which is why it’s about three years late. We promised it as a stretch goal for the Eat the Reich Kickstarter, and it began as a fairly by-the-numbers explanation of how the mechanics behind Eat the Reich worked and some ideas for expanding them into different settings or making them do different things.
Maz, my editor (and my business partner, and my husband) had a good look at it and, correctly, said that it wasn’t right. It wasn’t ambitious enough. It didn’t inspire or teach or rile up the reader – it just explained what the dice did. It did have a fun sample adventure in the back which played around with my on-again-off-again Beautiful Space Pirates setting, which I enjoyed writing very much and was an absolute darling in terms of needing to be killed.
With plenty of assistance from Producer Chant, and after a great workshop at Pyrkon where we instructed thirty keen young Polish people to make a game based on it, we reached the current version. It’s closer to an exercise book than it is a standard SRD, and it guides the reader through the process of making their own Havoc Engine game with a series of questions. In fact, it comes with its very own printable (or form-fillable) workbook that you can use while you read through, if you’re so inclined.
It’s much better than it was and, as long and difficult as the rewrites were, I’m glad it’s become something more engaging and useful than a fairly dry director’s commentary on Eat the Reich with some jokes about Space Champagne stuck on the end.
THE GAME JAM
Following the success of the One Hundred One Page Game Jam, we decided we wanted to do more of ’em. They’re free to take part, they’re enjoyable and exciting to run and hopefully to get involved with, and they mean that more games exist in the world than before. All good things. You can learn more about the jam and sign up to take part here.
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