MUSCLE WIZARDS VS LASER DINOSAURS: TURBO VAMPIRE EDITION # Inspiration *Kung Fu Hustle* *Rifts* # Character Creation There's no GM in MWLD:TV. Every player has a character. List five traits your character has. These can be anything: * T-Rex With Cyborg Arms * Bottomless Pockets * Stuck in the 70s * Greatest Mind This Side of the Salt Flats * Sweet Race Car * Etc. Each of these gets a token. You also get three 'free-floating' tokens that aren't attached to any traits. Your character also gets a four-box health track: Deterred, Halted, Transformed, and Destroyed. Finally, you need to know your character's name and what they want. Write these down. # Antagonist Creation Go down the list of things the characters want. Someone wants the opposite, or at least something mutually exclusive, and they're the Antagonist. If it's not plausible for someone to want the opposite then the Antagonist can be an alliance of people who want things the characters don't want. The Antagonist is a big deal. They're personally powerful, at the heart of their fortress, surrounded by their minions. Each of these elements functions like a trait: make some notes about the nature of their personal power, their fortress, and their minions, and then one at a time each player should put a token next to two of those. Those tokens are the strength of the Antagonist's resources. Give the Antagonist a name. # Conflict First of all, you need to boil the conflict down to two sides. Us versus them. Maximus Rex versus alcoholism. La Saxofina versus an unfriendly audience. [This system probably works for more sides than two, but I have no idea.] Then look at the non-player element in the conflict, if there is one. What's their threat rating? Folk Threat Will Back Down After... Just Folk 1 A harsh word. Bad Folk, Wild Animals 2 A harsh smack in the face. Elite Bad Folk, Monsters 3 A harsh assault with an axe or bullets. Maniacs, Natural Disasters 4 Nothing. Only death will stop them. Come up with 2-3 traits that describe them, too. Each of those traits gets a token, and they have a free-floating token too. If there are multiple player characters on a side then they each get their own conflict with the enemy, all at the same threat rating and traits. Resolve each conflict one at a time. ## Resolution 1. How much skin do you have in the game? Choose how much harm to risk on a range from 1-4 and that's *your* threat rating. There's still time to run away if you choose a threat of 0 -- the bad guys will get a total win, though. 2. Whose threat rating is the highest? They win! 3. Except... 4. One at a time, the participants in the conflict can seek to gain an advantage. To gain an advantage choose one of your traits and one of the opponent's traits, and explain how you're taking advantage of their trait with yours. If everyone agrees that this makes sense in the context of the fiction then spend a token from the trait you used (or a free-floating one), raise your threat rating by 1, and remove *both* traits from the conflict. 4a. Repeat until neither side wants to go again. 4b. If you don't have any applicable traits, you can spend free-floating tokens instead by describing how you take advantage of the envrionment or some other external advantage or momentary stroke of luck. 4c. Player Characters Only: When someone exploits one of your traits, you gain a free-floating token. 4d. Non-player threats -- including the antagonist -- are played by all the players not currently in the conflict. 5. Okay, *now* the one with the highest threat rating wins. ## Winning If the conflict ends in a draw then everyone loses. Neither side gets what they want. NPCs retreat and player characters check off the next box on their harm track. If one side wins by 1 then they get what they want, but the losing side can add a 'yes, but' condition. It can't *negate* the victory, but it can colour it. If one side wins by 2 or more then they stormed the opposition and just straight up get everything they want. ### Harm As Established In any given conflict, harm can stem from being the loser when what the winner wants is 'your death' or something similar, or from being the winner when the loser chooses their condition to be that you get hurt. A player character receives only the amount of harm that they risked. Non-player characters suffer an appropriate amount of harm for the nature of the contest. When a character fills in the Transformed box then their loss has left a significant impact on them: maybe they died and came back as a vampire, maybe they were so convinced that they've joined a religion, maybe the savagery of the world has blasted all morality from them, etc. The upshot is that you must choose at least two of your traits and rewrite them into new traits. Any tokens on the changed traits should be more or less evenly divided among the new ones. On the plus side, going through the transformation restores all your harm boxes to empty. When you fill in the Destroyed box, that's it for that character. They're either dead, or they've been owned so hard they just give up on the spot and retire to a farm in the country, where they live out the rest of their days with the bitter memory of such a crushing defeat. On the plus side, your new character has all their harm boxes empty! ### Collateral A player character in a conflict can choose to reduce the harm they take by 1 by explaining how something precious is destroyed, lost, used up or otherwise ruined in their place. ## The Antagonist Interferes, And Interfering With The Antagonist [Spent Antag tokens and they interfere in conflicts. Antag invulnerable until their defences exhausted.] ## The Gonzo Rule If someone describes an action in a conflict which makes the other players applaud, sit around in open-mouthed silence, fall about laughing, go *WHAT?* in stunned disbelief, or otherwise express their admiration for the escalation of the story to the Next Level, then that action is protected from the worst extremes of failure. Even if you lose hardcore, you still get to set a condition as if you only lost by 1.