#jttrpg

So my current TTRPG kickstarter has about 48 hours left until it wraps up. It's sitting pretty close to its funding goal! Any last minute pushes would be appreciated!

So it's 2023, were in year 456 of the Covid pandemic, I'm feeling nostalgic for my old days of Tabletop gaming, and I just found my Crown Royal bag of dice I thought I lost like five years ago.

So I want to talk about a tabletop RPG game, the last one I was able to actually play for a bit. a game about...

A not to distant future where a unknown viral pandemic infects 80% of humanity and either.

A.) Does fuck all

B.) Gives you superpowers and a ticking timebomb to insanity

C.) Drives you insane and gives you super powers.

Yes.. Yes I am.

The game Double Cross came out in the states in 2014, published by a small indie game company called Ver Blue. Who... doesn't exist anymore? The released the first two books of the original Japanese game in a single 500 page core rule book, and then later published three of the games supplements before disappearing into the void due to heath problems. Which is fine, but there is like... 22 other supplements in Japan we'll never get.

Mechanically, it's a very, very, simple game of rolling a pool of D10's based on one of four stats in the game, keeping the highest and then adding your skill rating to it. 10's "Explode" meaning you reroll any 10's you get and adding them until you stop rolling 10's.

Which is why it's possible to get like, a 54 on a d10 die, also holy shit you can break this game over your knee with shockingly ease with the right setup.

(The Art is also very very good, where there is some)

The setting is, for me the selling point, because, it's special kind anime nonsense and crazy shit that you could just park your ass on and raise a family in.

In the setting, The Virus didn't just infect people, it infected "everything" It infected rocks, trees, buildings, *Concepts*. and it can turn itself into a living personification of said thing. It's very possible that your investigation gets interrupted because a Viral infected *rock* got up and decided in it's newly found sentience and insanity to throw hands. Also one of your characters could either literally be a moth that was infected and turned into a human form. Or you can have someone literally be just idealized version of the concept of your favorite anime character.

(This is just another Tuesday in Japan aparently)

Now how the hell are you supposed to survive the super power psycho pandemic, by also having superpowers of course!. You get your choice of 13 syndromes, strains of the virus that gives you different super power sets (12 in the core book and a 13th in the last American released supplement).

You can choose to pick up to three of them. The more you take, the weaker each strain is overall, Single strain characters can make the individual powers stronger, and you get exclusive powers, but you lack diversity. Taking two is the "default" and you miss out on some "Pure strain only powers" but you don't lose out otherwise. Taking three means you have a large swath of power picks, but the maximum strength of each power is weaker.

Each Strain can also determine your starting stats, picking one means you look at what stats it gives you, and then you double it, picking two means adding the two strains together, having three means you only get stats from two of them.

Each strain is, very different and often builds off of each other and really fun ways, one strain lets you shoot lasers and bend light to cloak yourself. One strain lets you affect heat, meaning you can either set shit on fire, or remove heat to create ice weapons and attacks. One of them lets you create drugs in your body. one of them lets you affect electricity and allows yourself to become a cyborg. One lets you be a god damn lycanthrope.

It's very very fun to just think of combos of power sets in this setting.

For me though, the most interesting part of this game is the way you can create your backstory. You see the super powers, are slowly driving you insane, the more you use them the more likely the virus is going to take you over and turn you into the next Charles Manson. in fact, every "scenario" has your encroachment, aka the amount the virus is gripping your mind. Normally start off in the 30ish percent range. If you end a scenario over 100%, your character goes insane off screen and you loose the character. But the closer to this line you go, the more dice you get. hell even going past the line can turn you into an absolute beast. But your pretty much screwed if you push to far past it.

So how do you keep from losing a character if your riding over 100% at the end of the session?

You see, as part of character creation, you roll, on several different tables to get what the game calls "Loises" Aka things or people that are important enough to you for you to grab on to so you don't go insane. You can collect more of these in a given scenario if it the GM allows it, but by default, you only have three permanent Loises. This could be something mundane like your parents, or your lover. Or you could be holding on to sanity by the sheer burning hatred of that asshole at work that's constantly fucking you over and taking credit for your hard work (Fuck you STEVE!)

Point is, at the end of the scenario, each of these becomes a D10 roll that you can roll to reduce your end game encroachment and hope you can get it under 100, you actually do get more Experience at the end for riding the line, so your encouraged to use those damn powers. Gm's are also encourged to really push at you to use your abilities to the fullest so you don't die in the process.

I also hope you like tables because there is a *metric shit-ton* of them for determining these things.

So yeah, there's a lot to love about this but this is already an insanely long post so I might add more to it later in another post, but this was just me wanting to write off some of that built up very Neurodivergent "Damn I miss playing this" game energy that I started building up in the last day or so for this crazy ass game.