In early October, a friend messaged me about 9th Level Games’ The Excellents. The mention of that RPG started my Halloween adventure. I was thinking about the RPG when Victory Condition Games’ Douglas Shute posted this simple message to Facebook: “I’m craving Gummy Bears.” I’d just seen Doug at Dragon Con and again at Origins Game Fair over the past 30 days, and the post made me smirk. I opened up its comments and there was Lucus Palosaari, Editor/Project Manager at Fat Goblin Games, reply, “It’s worse when the Gummy Bears crave you…” Like that, the adventure started to take shape. The powered princesses of The Excellents in a fight against Gummy Bears bouncing here and there and everywhere. It would be huge, ludicrous, and fun! Some scenarios suggest themselves.
Where Did This Idea Come From?
At conventions I try to connect with as many creators, publishers, and players as I can. Results vary as I rarely get to see everyone I’d want to. However, when I can talk to creators, it’s a good time. At Dragon Con and Origins Game Fair, I was able to talk to Doug. He was with Free League selling the ALIEN RPG and its sourcebooks at Dragon Con and the full range of Free League’s catalog at Origins (ALIEN, Tales from the Loop, Mutant: Year Zero, Coriolis, and more). We talked both times and he filled me in on some of Free League’s hopes for the upcoming Blade Runner RPG.
In addition to talking to Doug at Origins Game Fair 2021, I got to play 9th Level Games’ The Excellents, which was <Looks Up Worst Dad Joke> excellent! John McGuire, who I played that session with, talks a bit about it in his write up of our Origins trip over at the Tessera Guild (here). The Excellents was one of the many games that I enjoyed at the convention. Everything about it spoke to me as a gamer. It used an original system that really made the experience pop. The action and humor never stopped as our characters attended a beach party that was threatened by evil rain drops. These sentient droplets of evil were determined to ruin our character’s good time. It sounds simple, but I could not ask for a better introduction to the game. Combine that with an exceptional table (one of the better GMs I’ve ever played with) and a perfect set of players, it made for Saturday morning cartoon characters that leaped off the gaming table!
But What Is The Excellents?
It’s Adriel Wilson and Chris O’Neill’s ENnie nominated RPG in which you play as a Saturday morning cartoon princess. It’s like She-Ra and the Princesses of Power meets My Little Pony with fun, simple, and versatile mechanics thrown in. Each player’s character is represented by a single die, d4, d6, d8, or d10. Intelligence rolls are easier for the lower dies and combat rolls are easier for the higher dies. Regardless of the roll, the math is weighted so you generally succeed, which, with a Saturday morning cartoon style of game, makes sense.
When this project was crowdfunding on Kickstarter, I interviewed the creators (here). I’d wanted to play an “official” session and was glad to get in on a game at Origins. Everything about the game worked. Great GM, great table, perfect adventure, and perfectly paced. We made characters and played the session in two hours, but it felt like a deeply satisfying three or four hour session (in the best possible way).
With that in mind, I’ve been thinking on the RPG and what could be done with it. Enter the comments by Douglas Shute and Lucus Palosaari that I wrote about and it all started to flow. Now, I just need to narrow down what the adventure will be.
Halloween is approaching and I want to setup a fun game in which everybody feels like they had fun and accomplished something. I’m not going for horror, instead I want laughs. More Nightmare Before Christmas than John Carpenter’s Halloween. With that in mind, I started thinking of how to tie power princesses and gummy bears together. Well, that’s not true, the idea was there, it was more about how to present it.
The Excellents: It’s Worse When Gummies Crave You…
The Princess of Halloween, Julie, invites the other princesses to her Halloween-themed castle to partake in a night of fun, scares, dancing, and candy. The guests arrive expecting to find a mansion that is both creepy and deliciously well appointed in the style of every dark cartoon castle. While the house does resemble that, the interior is deserted and dessert-ed. There’s no one in the entry and hallways of the grand house, yet everything within is covered in globs of Jell-O and brightly colored goo. Maybe the sticky walls and floors are just poorly applied decorations? As the guests move through the mess to get to the ballroom where the party is raging, they hear an earnest 1980s TV theme song playing from here and there and everywhere. As the characters move through the candy scented halls, it feels less Halloween fun than they might expect from Julie. (If you’re getting a Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 4 Halloween episode, Fear, Itself, vibe in which the characters had to get through the frat house to get to the party, I can see the resemblance.) As they press on, they have to find the guests, discover the secret of all of this gummy stuff everywhere, and rescue themselves from the bouncing party treats that Julie unleashed!
Will to be fun? I can guarantee that the system will be fun! That said, these ideas, well, they’ll be dumb enough to get some laughs and that’s the best Halloween treat!
Thanks to Doug of Victory Condition Games and Free League Publishing as well as Lucus of Fat Goblin Games for providing the inspiration for this idea.
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