#slugblaster

[beansprean]

MEET THE SCOOBY SNAX!

Me (Dex) and my Slugblaster team @g0sts (Cynthia) and @phasmama (Alanna) GM’d by the unstoppable @jay-auris! The campaign is over but these rowdy teens will never be the same 😭

Support me on Patreon!

(ID in alt and under cut)

ID: 1. This is Dex. Full body front and back view of a teenage boy grinning with one hand in his pocket on a grungey grey-brown background. He has medium-light skin and dark brown hair in an undercut with the messy mop up top partially dyed red, sparse newly-grown facial hair, two moles on his left cheek, and a scar through his left eyebrow. His other eyebrow is pierced, as well as his cheeks and septum. There are also multiple piercings in each ear with mismatched hoops and studs. He is wearing a ratty purple tee shirt that says 'Scam Cat' with a logo of a winking cat that says "it's legally questionable!" in a speech bubble under a leather jacket layered with a denim vest on top. The jacket has the sleeves rolled to the elbow and duct tape around one bicep. The denim jacket has studs on each shoulder, a few patches and pins at the chest, and says "Dura Weave" on each side of the chest. The back of the vest has more studs at the top and a large yellow and pink "Scooby Snax" patch. He has matching leather fingerless gloves and leather boots. His jeans are torn and patched in several places, duct-taped at the knee, and held up with a studded belt that has a ridiculous number of tamagotchis and hit clips hanging from it. Between the drawings of Dex is the front and back view of a hoverboard shaped like a classic skateboard, the faded black grip cut spraypainted "DEX" in red. Glowing blue strips that presumably make it hover line each edge of the board. The underside is covered with overlapping stickers, including: a large "question authority" decal in green and purple, a slime gun, a shooting spaceman, a wooden bead snake, a chromatically aberrated pizza that says 'infinite pizza', and more. Beneath the stickers but mostly covered are some things carved into the bare wood, including 'Dex is #1', 'Do Not Touch' and 'D+R' with a heart around it.

2. This is Cynthia. Full body front and back view of a teenage girl grinning with one hand on her hip and the other flashing a peace sign on a bubbly pink and purple background covered in sprinkles. She is small and slight with blue eyes, pale skin, and black hair with straight bangs pulled into two high pigtails. She has on elbow pads, knee pads, and fingerless gloves with sparkly pink detailing and matching fingernail polish and heart-shaped earrings. She is wearing a white crop tee with red sleeves and collar with text on the front that says "Dead Cute", the 'dead' in drippy red font and the 'cute' in bubbly pink font with white flowers. Her cutoff jean shorts are tye dyed with swirls of white, pink, and purple-gray, and the back pockets are heart shaped. She has white knee-high socks with pink polka dots and hanging pom-poms, blue and pink sneakers with a heart stamp on the tongue, and a pink and purple bubble backpack with several stickers. The stickers include one that says 'I (heart) Grinding' with a skateboard inside of a heart shape, one that says 'How's my skating? 1-800-SICK', and the same 'Scooby Snax' decal that Dex had on his jacket. Letter beads are strung between two o-rings on the back of the bag, spelling out 'friends' flanked by yellow hearts and her teammates' first initial (D and A). Between the drawings of Cynthia is the front and back view of a slushcult-style hoverboard with a pink and black checkered grip deck. Two large glowing blue orbs stamped with heavy-duty metal plating take up most of the underside; presumably this is what makes it hover. The rest of the plan black underside is covered in stickers, including: a color-inverted Weezer logo, lots of hearts and stars and pink petals, smiling french fries, a cute fox, a bisexual flag, 'save the dodos', a pink middle finger, and a large gold decal with a crown and lightning bolts that says 'heart' in bright blue.

3. This is Alanna. Full body front and back view of a teenage girl smiling with a dignified confidence, one hand on her hip and the other held up and flexing on a pink geometric rose background. She is tall and athletic with lightly tanned skin, full lips, and bright blonde hair pulled into a high ponytail. She is wearing a black athletic top with pink stripes down the side, pink jean shorts, back capri-length leggings with the same pink stripes, black fingerless gloves, and pink tennis shoes. Her outfit is highly coordinated and in perfect matching shades save for her moto jacket, which is bright and chaotic, constantly shifting through various stages of color and motion with some scraps of bright color even escaping the sleeves. On the back of the jacket is the same 'Scooby Snax' decal that her teammates have. Between the drawings of Alanna is a close up of one of her professional-looking hover skates, designed like a slalom rollerblade and colored in white, silver, and the same pink as the rest of her outfit. Even the hover-lights streaking out of the bottom of the skate are pink. Above it is a futuristic pink drone with a single moving camera eye, white wings and antenna, and blue hoverlights beneath. The drone has a speech bubble with a red heart inside. /end ID

[theresattrpgforthat]

Mint Plays Games: Slugblaster

Over the course of 2025, I finally got to pick up and play around with Slugblaster. I've been waiting to play this game ever since I heard the Fandible 2020 episode where I heard David absolutely lose his shit over the Golden Jungle, and when the game came to the proofreading phase, I actually got to participate! (You can find my name in the book if you look hard enough!)

I played a few sessions with some friends of mine in 2025, and this year, I returned to the game with a few new players, since our original group kind of died out.

The Rules

Slugblaster, by Mikey Hamm, is a game about teenage hover-boarders, built on the Forged in the Dark System, but compared to a lot of other Forged games I've played, it's very streamlined and easy to learn. There are only 5 base playbooks, and this is one of very few Forged games that I've played that has allowed the crew to do a bit of game play in the same session as character creation. This is because most of character creation is stylistic, rather than mechanical, and the biggest choice you need to make that influences your mechanics is your signature gear, which isn't made whole-cloth, but rather chosen from a library.

The biggest differences Slugblaster boasts in comparison to base Blades are related to Trouble and Kick. In Blades in the Dark, Stress is a track that fills throughout play and culminates in Trauma, which is a permanent consequence that alters your character for the rest of the game. In Slugblaster however, Trouble is the analogue for Stress, but instead of permanently changing you, it's used as a currency. During downtime, you can spend Trouble to further your character arcs, which are both cool moments that flesh our your character's personal story and character advancement tools.

Here's an example: spend 2 Trouble on "Trouble At Home" and describe how your family disapproves of your Slugblasting. You'll take a Slam (kind of like an injury, but could be emotional), and one teammate will notice that you're off your game. However, it also sets you up for the road to a significant payoff: "Redemption", which can clear a number of negative consequences or improve your character's Legacy.

Then there's Kick, which is Mikey Hamm's solution to streamlining Position & Effect. In core Blades, this is a pair of criteria that determine how bad your consequences might be vs how good success looks. It's a common stumbling block for new players, and explaining it typically requires a graph or visualization of some sort. Slugblaster solves this by giving you a resource called Kick - spend it to make your character's actions all the cooler, or get it for free by accepting more consequences should you fail. When I introduced Kick to my players, it was a much easier thing to pick up than any group that I've introduced to Blades.

The Game

The short campaign that ran for a bit in 2025 involved a crew of three players: The Hearts, The Guts, and The Grit. Their adventures included adopting a math-panther kitten and carrying him around in a bubble-backpack, bringing him to exotic places such as Prismatia, The Waking Pits, and The Local Mall. My characters made very distinct but vibrant characters. The Grit was dedicated, hardworking, and focused on their pet, but had the ultimate teenage sin of having an Embarrassing Parent. The Guts was bold and brash, and their main conflict was their super-religious family, who condemner Slugblasting as overly dangerous. The Heart was bubbly and brightly-coloured, and struggled to maintain a positive relationship with her older brother after she led her little sister into slugblasting a little too soon.

Achilles, the math-panther, illustrated by *@pbanditart on twitter.

One of the biggest things I loved about this campaign (apart from Achilles, the math-panther kitten) was the fact that prep was super easy. I never did more than 30 minutes of prep for this game, even for our first session after character creation. I could have the book open next to the GM aid, and the lists provided in the game were all I needed to come up with something new when the players overcame an obstacle. This was very stress-free GM-ing for me: every Run will involve going on an adventure to a cool dimension, fighting strange critters and pulling off neat tricks, while also filming your adventures for your adoring fans. It's a reliable recipe that serves up satisfying beats and fun drama along the way, and that's exactly what our group wanted.

In the one-shot I ran this year, I had a full crew: Hearts, Grits, Guts, Smarts & Chill. There were a few drawbacks to this, the primary one being that each player got less time in the spot-light. Our crew of partying shredders ventured into Thennis Spar, the garden haven of bug-priests and catacombs, theoretically in a race against a friendly Jet Collective. However, the players were much more interested in focusing on the weirdness of the world and their own character motivations.

There was a lot of investment in the kinds of people their characters were: do they have difficulty talking to their crush? Are they trying to blend in with their peers? How cool is their Voidwear Backpack? It was a different approach to the game, but in the end, teenagers are all a little self-obsessed, aren't they?

I also feel that the one-shot didn't give the group a chance to really lean into their full potential. I think almost all of the group said they would love to keep playing, so they could see where their character arcs could go.

The Vibes

Slugblaster pulls at your nostalgia, asking you to revisit whatever your teenage years happened to be. The game book doubles down on that nostalgia by infusing you with aesthetics that replicate Saturday Morning Cartoons like Ben 10 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; colourful, punchy, and saturated with flavor. The lingo of the game is a great example of this: you take "slams" (unless you "nope" them!), you come up with names for your tricks, like a switch-ollie-to-MJ-dragon-flipout, and when you want to put all your chips in, you say "check it".

The character arcs of Slugblaster are also really really good; Quinns talks about it in his highly watchable review of the game, especially that the arcs can teach a table how to tell a good story, and I think he's onto something there. I've also come across arcs in Jex Thomas' game Bump in the Dark, and the effect is similar. Engaging with arcs in two different games has encouraged me to play around with them in my own game, Protect the Child - you can help me test them in my playtest server!

One piece of the character arcs in Slugblaster that I think really hits the nail on the head is the human connections to your crew and your family. The highs and lows of your character arc revolve around disapproving relatives, crushes, and the forces that push and pull at the bonds that tie you and your friends together. You can make these beats as heavy or as light as you want: your family might disapprove because they're heavily religious, but they might also just be worried for your safety. You can choose to dive deep into an arc about depression with your teenager, or you can use the Angst arc to work through frustration over losing a Run. Both work, as long as you're respecting the safety and agreed-upon limits of the game.

The Takeaway.

I've said it many times before, and I'll say it many times again. The reason I love Forged in the Dark games so much is how little work it takes to get your group on the same page. There is very little orchestrated bullshit - no you-meet-in-a-tavern, no awkward introductions, no convoluted backstories. In Slugblaster, you're friends, cousins, classmates, and you all think Slugblasting is so fucking cool. You might be competitive, following your crush around, or just doing it because your friends think it's cool, but the game assumes that all of you care, and even when it comes to new players, it doesn't take that much for them to get on board.

If you want to live in the brightest version of a teenage past that still has room for pathos, check out Slugblaster. Just make sure to get some hazwear, and keep an eye on your watch, because peelback's a bitch.

[dragonkid11]

Slugblaster, by Wilkie's Candy Lab, is a FitD narrative TTRPG about you playing as a bunch of teenage hoverboarders sneaking into other dimensions to explore, film, go viral, and get away from troubles at home.

It's stupid, it got parent groups in a panic, it's the coolest thing ever, and it's called Slugblasting!

[the-mikey-way]

new character’s pronouns are dude and his own name

[osteoptimist]

So I've been thinking about narrative mechanics in games, particularly the Beats system in Slugblaster.

For those unfamiliar, I highly recommend watching this Quinns Quest review, Quinns is awesome and he really does play games with his group before reviewing them, usually an 8+ session adventure if not a whole campaign.

Basically Slugblaster is about teenagers riding hoverboards and flipping off cops in other dimensions, drawing a lot of inspiration from skateboarding culture, and it has a big emphasis on a kind of coming-of-age vibe.

One of the core mechanics of the game is the Beats system. Quinns does a better job explaining it than I will, but basically Beats (and especially Arc Beats) are like small structured storylines for your character. They follow a particular theme like family trouble at home, or teenage angst, or a romantic relationship, or signing on with a sponsor.

The Arcs all contain four Beats, and they follow a very familiar story structure. Exposition, rising action, climax, resolution. And that means some of the events are good, and some of them are bad, and there are mechanical incentives for all of it and it's very well done and I want to try it.

BUT. The reason I'm talking about this is because this is something I have wanted from TTRPGs for a long time.

See, I mainly play combat heavy heroic fantasy games, which I previously tried to make work in D&D5e but am now having much more fun with in Draw Steel. There are a great many games in this genre, and they tend to work pretty similarly in a lot of ways, but one thing that almost all of them have in common is that as the adventure goes on, your character is consistently getting stronger.

You face challenges, overcome them, and get rewarded by levelling up and getting new powers, or looting magic items, or getting special benefits awarded by NPCs or whatever. But you are always getting stronger. Outside of rare cases where you lose a magic item or something, you never really get weaker or lose access to powers you've gained.

But in virtually all fantasy media where the characters have magic powers, they don't JUST get stronger as the story goes on. They inevitably have a darkest hour, a lowest point where the combination of their internal conflict and the external opposition seem too great to overcome. Often in these moments, their powers might weaken or stop working entirely, or they might lose control, or they might be afraid to use their power.

And once they emerge from that, they're stronger than ever.

The oaths in the Stormlight Archive series are a great example of this. Spoilers I guess, but look at Kaladin! In Words of Radiance when he strays from his oaths and allows the assassination plot to continue, his bond with Syl weakens and he loses his powers. Once he resolves his inner conflict and commits to protecting even those he hates, he swears the third ideal and gets his powers back.

That is a direct correlation between character growth and character ability. You see this in other media too. Zuko loses his firebending after joining the avatar, and regains it once he fully turns away from his anger and decides to commit himself to restoring balance. In the first Spiderverse movie, Miles struggles the entire time to control his powers and it's only when he overcomes his fear and takes a literal leap of faith that he really takes ownership of his abilities.

And THAT is something I have always wanted in TTRPGs. Tying mechanical advancement, at least in some respects, to the personal growth of your character. Levelling up from fighting monsters and getting stronger from experience is all well and good, but becoming more powerful as a consequence of learning more about who you are, what you stand for, what you believe in? That's the juicy shit right there.

Now, in Slugblaster, these Beats don't usually make your character any more powerful. Some of them can give you access to new abilities, but it's not a game where you become a godlike skater by the end. It's just not a game principally focused on becoming more powerful in order to overcome bigger obstacles. The Beats system in Slugblaster is primarily a way to let gameplay set up character and story moments, in a way that is structured enough to let almost anyone create really compelling journeys of personal growth and yet vague enough to let the story be unique and interesting every time. The Beats you go through also determine your Doom and Legacy, two resources that accrue over the course of the short campaign and are used in a final roll to decide your character's epilogue.

The Beats system, I think, is what makes Slugblaster really work as a game about coming-of-age stories. Without it, it might still be a cool fun game about riding your hoverboard in weird dimensions and trying to go viral with videos of your tricks, but it would take a lot of work from the whole group to really make it into a compelling story. With Beats, the game does all that work for you and gives you a very clear recipe for dramatic and memorable narratives. Again, that might sound restrictive or flat or like it's going to make for very predictable stories, but all it really does is lay out the classic story structure that sticks around because it works.

There's also a lot of potential for tragedy, because you don't have to complete the Arcs. In the class arc for the Grit class, for instance, you spend the first two beats trying to do something really hard, failing, and getting back up determined to try again. In the third beat, you try, you fail, and you give up, because you've been trying so hard and maybe you really just can't do it, no matter how hard you try. We've all been there. And then in the fourth beat, you try one more time, spurred on by the people who believe in you, and you nail it. Amazing! Simple recipe, but an awesome emotional payoff every time.

But you don't need to do the fourth beat. You can just stop after the third, where you give up. If that fourth beat wouldn't make sense, if you don't have the support you need to face up to the potential for failure again, nothing in the game requires you to do it.

And I think that's part of what makes this system really sing. If the Beat would feel forced, just don't do it. So even though the path is laid out, the whole group really does need to work to reach the end. There is a happy ending, but only if you actually do your best to make it happen. Brilliant.

I'm thinking about adapting something like this for Draw Steel, a Chronicle system where you can choose to embark on a character arc for your hero where they will encounter both triumphs and defeat. So in addition to levelling up as you gain Victories, you're also having a personal journey and dealing with inner conflict, and you become more powerful by resolving that as well. These Chronicles would also include their low points, their darkest hour, where they might be less powerful. They might include moments where the hero has conflicts with other party members or NPCs, or makes an unfortunate decision, because those moments are essential for the drama.

I'm still toying with the idea, and deciding how it should work and how it might interface with the rest of the game, but I think it might be interesting.

[facelessoldgargoyle]

oh at the start of last session of Slugblaster one of my players asked off he could have a second sword instead of a ray gun. I was like…um, ok. Sure? But it will have the stats of a regular sword, not a ray gun, so it won’t be ranged and it won’t have a stun setting. He was like oh ok never mind.

I’m still kind of bemused—what would a ranged sword even be??

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played SLUGBLASTER ?

By Mikey Hamm

"In the small town of Hillview, teenage hoverboarders sneak into other dimensions to explore, film tricks, go viral, and get away from the problems at home. It’s dangerous. It’s stupid. It’s got parent groups in a panic. And it’s the coolest thing ever. This is Slugblaster. A tabletop RPG about teenagehood, giant bugs, circuit-bent rayguns, and trying to be cool." - Taken from the Slugblaster website.

Have you played ?

Yes I have played it

No but I've read it

No but I've heard of it

Never heard of it

Voting ended onDec 9, 2024

[notwritinggames]

BIG SHINY SCORES: 3 Volumes of Slugblaster TTRPG Supplements

Three collections of supplements for the award-winning Slugblaster TTRPG, named after the much beloved Canadian compilation albums! Each volume is full of new locations, signatures, gear and even new rules for misfit teens sneaking into other worlds:

Land a 360 kickflip from the roof of a house party. Win nega-friction beer pong in front of your crush. Maybe even save the Hillview town fair!

Collect and trade multiversal phone charms. Loot Rescue agents for random contraband. And learn new tricks for the new Portal Yo-Yo signature!

Put the crew into your favorite fantasy dungeons. Argue with a magic talking sword. And get chased by legally distinct extra-planar monsters!

A bit of backstory: I started writing Big Shiny Scores in 2022 as I fell in love with Slugblaster. Creator Mikey Hamm had already honored me with a writing spot for the original game, as well as the opportunity to write solo rules for the Game of the Year Edition published by Mythworks. I'm even writing for the Slime, Warp and Solder zines right now! You'd think I'd have my fill, right? No! I love Slugblaster and I can't stop making stuff for this weird wonderful world of hoverboarding teens.

Depending on how well the project funds, each volume of Big Shiny Scores will contain up to five individual pieces: from tables of multiversal junk to actual rules for using fantasy dungeons as Slugblaster runs. Each piece will be formatted to a single sheet of paper so you can print out the ones you want to use and just throw 'em on your table! Some fold in half like a booklet. Some fold in threes like a pamphlet. Some are just a poster. All of them are easy to use!