Not-A-Review: Macchiato Monsters
I picked up Macchiato Monsters the other day and, while I’m still poring through it, a lot has leapt out at me. So here goes!
- I love the tone of the book. It’s humorous when it needs to be, and always sets expectations about what sort of game it is. It’s unapologetically old-school, where straight-up combat is a bad idea, stats are random, and life is cheap.
- I also love that a lot of the art has monsters drinking coffee.
- You know what, classless OSR may be my jam. I couldn’t stand the dissonance of a game that touted a “Fighting Man” class and yet said that fighting was, as mentioned, a bad idea.
- The game uses the Risk Die for everything and I am down with that. It’s such a clever mechanic. It reminds me of Blades in the Dark’s Clock mechanic in a way, sometimes blended with random-event tables. Yeehaw.
- Combat looks fun. It kinda reminds me of Dungeon World through a more traditional lens. Having to compare HD seems a little fiddly though.
- Hell yeah, Chaos Magic!
- Holy shit, the GM tools are top-notch. Random tables for plot and faction generation? Yes please! A way to mechanize hex map generation? OMG YES.
I’ve got more to digest, but this game looks cool as hell.