PLAYTEST: Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland
The game is still in Kickstarter campaign for another week. It is fully funded and in "stretch goals" mode. The artwork is rad and the flavor is nutra-sweet, and I suggest that you back it! The playtest version is available free currently. I discovered the game through a forum for another post-apocalyptic RPG, and something about it sucked me right in. The "cassette futurism" flavor speaks to my personal imagination in a way that no other sci-fi or futuristic setting has before. Imagine a combination of He-Man, Escape From New York, Mad Max, 1980s WWF wrestling, D&D, Ah-nold gettin' to the choppa... add your own examples as needed. I personally envision that incredible scene from Weird Science where the high school keg party gets crashed by post-apocalyptic wastelanders from another dimension.
The author describes the play style as "hack & slash, kick down the door, grab the gold, save the babes." I'm down with that! The playtest material includes an introductory adventure scenario -- THE LAST OUTPOST ON THE LEFT -- and I decided to run that. Before we made characters, I gave them the setup: NPC Slade, a badass bodyguard of the President, has gathered the PCs together in his assault chopper, sending them on a suicide mission to re-capture a military outpost which has fallen into the hands of mutant raiders. My players of course were totally into that with no additional backstory needed: let's just fucking get in there and blow shit up... YEAH! On a sidenote, Slade totally reminded me of Lee Van Cleef sending Snake Plissken in to do the dirty work in Escape From New York. And for my game, the mysterious "President" was basically Jesse Ventura.
So then we sat down with the "Character Creation Quick Sheet" from the playtest book, and rolled up some bad-ass dudes for our party. As usual, character creation was fun and a bunch of laughs. Even more-so with NEON LORDS where the character classes are hilarious and include hairstyle choices which convey specific game benefits. We decided to also include a motivation for each PC, as to why they were going on the mission, and also the location where they were found by Slade, just to give some extra flavor.
Anton's PC was CHUNK HARDCHEESE, a swole Deathbringer (fighter). Rockin' a "Prince Adam" bowl cut. He was squatting 5 plates in the gym when Slade found him. With his Brains score of 4, his only motivation is to follow orders and find some heavier shit to lift. He strapped on his armor and grabbed a baseball bat with nails in it as his weapon.
Nema rolled up BLACKWOLF NIGHTFALCON, a War Wizard with a Danzig "devil-lock" (reverse mullet), who sold his soul to the Demon Lord Abraxas in exchange for arcane powers. Slade found him half-passed out in a bar studying his scrolls. He joined the mission in order to kick ass for his demon bro, and ready to deploy his signature spell, "Dubstep Thunder."
Jimmy took on the role of KORG the Dwarfling, a stubby little guy with "flock of seagulls" hair , come from another planet to find a mate down here on Neo-TerraXX. Slade tracked him down in an adult bookstore in the seedy section of Detroit-Prime. Korg grabbed his plasma pistol and shield, eager to find some new lifeforms to "interface" with.
And Rob played ANDRE the Cosmic Barbarian with a mullet he calls "hair pillow." Slade found him in the forest, hiding from his mate! Andre was eager to jump in the chopper to escape that clingy shrew, and equipped himself with some studded leathers, a fanny-pack full of space-coke to snort, a pair of nunchuks, and a bandolier of ninja stars.
The crew stocked up on a few other items from the chopper, grabbing some torches, a zippo lighter, and a fistful of vitality sticks (mini health potions in the form of highly addictive pixie-stix). They did a flyover recon of the outpost from high altitude, and then rappelled down to the ground a couple klicks away. Their approach took them through an Ultraviolet glowing forest of radioactive trees. Luckily Blackwolf had enough brains to know not to mess with those trees, otherwise Chunk would have tried to bench press them or Korg might have tried to bang a knot-hole or something. That shit probably would have mutated the crap out of them.
They crept to the edge of the forest, about 20 feet from the entrance. There were dead good guys everywhere, and two enemy guards, mutant wastoids Chico and Stu, were arguing over who got to eat the brains. Blackwolf crept up and cast his "charm" spell, convincing Chico to eat Stu's brains instead. The two guards got into a firefight, and then cokehead barbarian Andre lept in and nunchucked Stu to death. Chico was now Blackwolf's best bro, and they told him to hang back and watch the door while they infiltrated the base.
Once inside, the tripped a trap that reanimated some zombies, who were quickly dispatched. They proceeded into a guard room containing machines with blinking lights and dudes shooting at them. There was some gunplay back and forth, until Blackwolf started messing with the machinery. He activated a laser trap right out of Resident Evil, which promptly cubed a baddie on its way across the entire room! The rest of the bad guys and most of the PCs ran for it, hiding behind obstacle or fleeing out of the door before the laser grid diced them. Andre was like "watch this bro!" and did an incredible acrobatic leap through the trap, rolling a natural 20 on his agility save and taking no damage. HELL YEAH!
There was a huge glass window along one side of the room, and so Korg picked up a blaster rifle and shot the glass, fracturing it. Then Chunk just dove right through the glass like Hicks in Aliens, into the adjacent room. In there, among weird pizza smells and ancient technology, Blackwolf found some intel about the base and its genetic experiments, and also grabbed a blank data tape for future use.
In the next room, they faced their toughest battle yet, with a big brutish mutant ogre and some mooks. The ogre ran to block the door, and got into an extended brawniness contest with Chunk, locked in a clinch. Due to all his 'roids and lifting, the brute was holding his ground, not letting them in. Korg the dwarfling then scuttled under Chunk's legs and lopped off the brute's ballsack with a hand axe, allowing the rest of the party to storm into the room and slaughter all. They rescued some good-guys who gave them a yellow keycard for use deeper in the compound.
In a hallway they encountered some cultists chanting "oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah"... Based on intel they knew that there was a Drool-Aid Man cult in the area, and they speculated as to whether this was chanting to the Drool-Aid Man, or whether they were worshipping Lord Randy and getting ready to snap into a Slim Jim. Blackwolf blitzed into the corridor and unleashed his magical DUBSTEP THUNDER, which had devastating effects in such an enclosed corridor, blowing the cultists' brains out their ears with a bass-drop and laser-light show of gore. The rest of the PCs meanwhile crouched in a corner, covering their ears to avoid the aural nightmare of the worst music ever made.
The next room contained mist and electrical activity, and I played the T2 soundtrack music as I described a nude robotic figure standing up like the Terminator. It was revealed to be a Ronald Reagan death-borg with glowing eyes and a prime directive to eliminate all sentient life. Unfortunately for Ronnie it was 4 vs. 1 and the PCs annihilated him, keeping his head to use the glowing red eyes as a flashlight.
They proceeded into a trashed room with a weird metal cylinder. Blackwolf investigated it, unleashing a Sludgeblood, a living red ooze which jumped onto his face and began smothering him. The party had no choice but to light up their torches and burn the bastard off. They didn't know how many HP the monster had, and I told Korg he could choose any dice he wanted to roll damage, but that it would also hurt the wizard. He chose a d10, and really plunged the fire down. It burned the creature bad enough to get it off, and then Andre unleashed ninja stars to pin it on the wall, killing it. Meanwhile Blackwolf was a crispy critter, having used his chaos powers to narrowly avoid death. He had to chow down some Vita-Stix to keep going. Blackwolf was low on his chaos power, and Abraxas spoke to him, demanding blood sacrifice of 3 HP from living beings before the adventure ended... or else. Andre remembered that his charmed homeboy Chico was still outside, and smiled knowingly.
[At this point we had been playing for about 3 hours, and I told the guys that there were a couple of rooms left. I asked them if they wanted to skip to the final room or keep going and they unanimously wanted to clear the entire dungeon. They were having tons of fun.]
The next door they kicked down (did I mention that Chunk just tried to kick down every door??) led into a room of bio-flesh regeneration pods. Each one contained a Reagan-2000 bot, and they had an epic fight. It was going so well, until Andre fumbled with his nunchuks, and they flew across the room hitting Korg in the face and dropping him. They eventually triumphed, but they needed to pause and suck on some Vita-Stix. The cumulative addiction potential was becoming alarming for some who had indulged multiple times, which was becoming a fun, flavorful deterrent to healing spam.
They used the keycard to get into the next hallway and found a genetic experimentation lab where a scientist and his mutated homies were trying to animate a giant lobster hybrid man. The PCs were like "hell nah" and just stormed in. This lobster freak was the strongest enemy they had encountered by far, and it was a brutal fight. Lobster boy and Chunk were trading devastating blows, but the freak lucked out, scoring double crits with his claws and slicing Chunk into chunks. The rest of the group took the badboy down, and then tried to put Chunk back together. Expending mucho fortune points, and hopped up on mega-doses of Vita-Stix powder, they tossed the chunks into one of the bio-flesh regeneration pods and managed to bring him back. Meanwhile Chunk's DNA had fused with the lobster's when it exploded, and the new Chunk got to rolling on the mutation table, gaining thermo-vision with his new lobsterlike antennae.
The party went back to get Chico, and then entered the final chamber. They found 6 cultists and a leader chanting "oh yeahhhh" and summoning something. The room glowed purple.... They smelled the aroma of artificial grape flavor saturating the air.... suddenly the wall exploded and the DROOL-AID MAN crushed in, overflowing with purple putrescence and even destroying some of his own worshippers in the ruckus. The final showdown began.
This was an all-out war. They were lettin' the bodies hit the floor left and right. The Drool-Aid Man pummeled Chunk down for the second time, but not before he cracked the glass which started spraying toxxxic purple punch on all the adjacent combatants. Seeing Chunk go down, Korg fired his gun into the Drool-Aid man and blew him into a million pieces, spraying even more purple poison on everyone. Everyone was down except for Blackwolf and Chico who had been hanging back fighting the cult leader.
As the smoke cleared, the outpost's self-destruct alarms started blaring. Blackwolf and Chico grabbed their fallen comrades and went out through the hole the Drool-Aid Man had created in the wall. They got to the chopper and dusted off as the outpost exploded in epic fashion below them.
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The bros and I had a blast trying out NEON LORDS OF THE TOXIC WASTELAND. One of the players even said that he brought some 420 to the game, but forgot about it because he was having so much fun.
I give it a rating of 9 out of 10 shirtless saxophone guys. Amazing flavor, stupidly fun. There were just some mild mechanical issues with the playtest rules, which I handled by on-the-spot DM rulings.
Hope you enjoyed reading.
- NICK
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