Slugblaster! Kickflip Over a Quantum Centipede
What is Slugblaster?
It’s puberty and laser beams, bug guts and punk music. It’s skateboards and texting and fights with your parents. It’s alien worlds with your dumbest friends, it’s being in your bedroom completely alone. It’s yesterday’s colours, today’s feelings, tomorrow’s daydreams, and slang from five decades.
In the middle of nowhere, surrounded by wheat and canola, is the small town you live in.
It doesn’t have a mall. It doesn’t have a movie theatre. It doesn’t have a Turbo Taco or a music venue or a liquor store your aunt doesn’t work at.
What it has is a gas station, a curling rink, fourteen churches, a privately funded particle energy physics lab that employs half the town, and some of the thinnest spacetime fabric on the planet. Thin enough for a growing, underground culture of bored teenagers to slip into the vibrant planescape of exotic worlds just beyond.
They call it slugblasting. It's dangerous. It's stupid. It's got parent groups in a panic.
And it's the coolest thing ever.
So solder up your raygun, print some hazwear in your dad’s garage, grab your hoverboard, and watch out for metaterrestrials as you try to make a name for yourself in the highly competitive, punk-rock world of interdimensional action sports.
Who Is Your Character? What Do You Do? and the Game System
In Slugblaster, the players create their own teenage character, then work together to form a crew with it's own hangout spot, personal brand, and a web of unique interpersonal dynamics.
During gameplay you'll be blowing off school to sesh the abandoned waterpark in Emptrean. Get that Miper sponsorship by speed-running Prismatia. Salvage power crystals from moss-covered decommissioned giga-mechs in The Golden Jungle. Go viral by venturing into Quahalia without a logic binder. Sneak into the hottest party in Operaeblum.
Just make sure you get home before the demiplane melts, or the bloodwhip swarm sucks your marrow out, or Rescue scoops you up and hauls you back to the decontamination facility, or that android mercenary gets revenge for that thing Curtis drew on its head with paint marker. Or, you know, before your mom finds out and sends you away to some kind of camp for troubled youths.
The rules system for this game is based on John Harper's Blades in the Dark. However just like any good slugblaster, mods have been made to the system, rules stripped out, bolted on, and tuned to support these stories. The game system supports:
- Looking cool and doing tricks! Popping your gum in slow-mo while you do a 1080 over jets of slime.
- Gear-hacking, component-collecting, and special items with physics-insulting powers full of colour and creative possibility.
- Fame and popularity! Get fans, earn sponsorships, wear a t-shirt with your face on it.
- More teamwork (but also more drama).
- Really fun chases!
- Touching narrative downtime arcs, where you buy scene prompts with points you earn during your adventures.
- Dramatic, push-your-luck, third-act disasters!
- Satisfying campaign epilogues.
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