As nerds of culture, we here at Wargamer place very high stock on the works of genre film master John Carpenter and the rich tradition of Kaiju cinema – so when the Backerkit campaign for upcoming tabletop RPG Force of Extinction billed the game as “escape from LA meets Godzilla”, we had to find out more. We tracked down executive producer Chad Pytel (using a futuristic scanner with a big radio antenna, of course), to get some answers.
The game is set after the “evopocalypse”, a mysterious event that has driven humanity to the brink of extinction while animals and plants have mutated into colossal monsters. It’s not a horror game, though, but B-movie action: Pytel says the game’s lightweight rules system “gives people the freedom to let their imagination run wild in the face of insurmountable odds”.
The game uses a very simple roll-under-stat dice system, which Pytel says is because “we wanted to find a simple system that avoided doing math!” Humans roll D20s, but since everything else out there is “more powerful than humans, we hit upon the mechanic of everything else in the world rolling smaller dice, and everything CLICKED”.
“When I’m trying to hit a ‘d6 monster’, the GM rolls a d6 and gets a three”, Pytel explains, “I need to roll my d20s and get a three or under – not only do I not need to do any math, it feels REALLY hard, which is exactly the epic feeling we wanted for the game”. On top of that “everything, from the lowliest human to the biggest creature has only three hit points – no more, no less”.
That certainly feels like the right maths for a good monster battle – movie monsters don’t go from having their hitpoints slowly chipped away, they fall to critical injuries delivered with dramatic flair. “ALSO, it turns out that this inversion of a nat one being GOOD turns players on their heads and makes them uneasy, which – when you’re fighting a d4 monster and it rolls a one and you need to roll a one [on a d20] – is exactly how you should feel”, Pytel adds.
If that sounds a bit brutally punishing, there is some help for the players in the form of the Settlement mechanic. Players can enhance and gather resources for this home base, and spend them during adventures as Flashbacks to fuel automatic successes. Pytel acknowledges that the mechanic is heavily inspired by Blades in the Dark: “we really wanted to encourage players to avoid over-planning and to jump right in, and the Flashback mechanic does that super well”.
“Something else that heavily influences us are TTRPG Actual Play shows”, Pytel adds – co-creators Jasper William Cartwright and Edward Spence are in fact both actors from actual-play series. Pytel says “those influences run subtly (and not so subtly) throughout the game, from the setting, to the mechanics that encourage role playing and epic moments and keep it high energy, fast moving, and fun to play”.
That shows up in systems like the Build a Beast deck, which seems extremely well suited to provide good answers to sudden improvisation questions. “We love homebrew and with many of the features of Force of Extinction we wanted to give GMs the building blocks on which to build”, Pytel says. “Force of Extinction monsters have a dice type and a trait, a special ability” – like being incredibly stealthy, or incredibly massive, or dripping with acid – the deck is “this big library of traits [that] makes it really easy for a GM to quickly make their own threats, but also serves as a template to make their own traits”.
The class system, called Archetypes, is also lightweight. The different Archetypes “emerged organically from running sessions for hundreds of playtesters without any class system at all and asking them the question, ‘What’s your character’s role in the Settlement?'” Pytel says “those answers, and their creativity, shows us the kinds of people who populate the dangerous, post apocalyptic world of Force of Extinction”.
The different Archetypes “accommodate a variety of play styles and range from everything from Medic and Archivist for people who like to play more support roles, to Artillerist for people who really like to blow stuff up!” Pytel says that the buffs from Archetypes are pretty light touch, offering just a few special abilities “so they aren’t overwhelming and add just enough flavor to spice up your session and your character” – and players will have to survive and rank up before they actually enjoy these boons.
The Backerkit campaign for Force of Extinction is open until 5pm PDT / 8pm EDT on July 16 (or 1am BST on July 17), and a pledge for a hardback and PDF copy of the rulebook costs $55 (£41). Shipping will be charged closer to the actual point of delivery, which the team says will be in 2027 – and apparently, “rewards to the EU, USA, Canada, Australia, UK, and China will not receive any customs charges”.
For a very different take on kaiju-RPGs, check out our coverage of the official Godzilla RPG – and to meet a gang of gamers who love a good B-movie, come and say hello in the Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
