Brandoff the Off-Brand's Horrid Writing

Play Report: Cosmic Ray Kids

I finally got to run a one-shot for Cosmic Ray Kids, a one-page atomic age kid superhero RPG by my pal, the wonderful and talented Jesse Ross. It's Power Puff Girls with a dash of Ren & Stimpy advertisements!

The Setup

Character creation was a blast thanks to a few deceptively simple but effective design decisions. For one, the characters are all siblings. For another, if two characters are the same age (you can either roll 4+ 1d6, or choose an age from 5-10), they're twins. People love this stuff. I've never ran a game of R'lyehwatch where someone picked a Veteran or Rookie and another player didn't immediately latch onto the remaining complementary role. There's a huge amount of mental load removed from playing a new RPG when you have an obvious defined role. This is true whether you're a sticky-fingered Rogue or a bossy older sibling.

The System

Everyone loved it. While I struggled a bit with All Outta Bubblegum, which had a fantastic premise (everyone got to bring bubblegum!) but never really seemed to pop off, at least during my lone one-shot, here the simple dice mechanics really shined. It's basically a push your luck system, where you roll a single 1d6 and compare it to a PbtA-style chart. The twist is, you can roll too high, which results in a catastrophic failure. And that's the only form of failure. No matter how low you roll, you'll achieve what you set out to do, albeit with a drawback.

This creates a lot of interesting decisions for players.

Let's say someone sets out to save a hostage.

This is the sort of decision-rich simplicity that's perfect for one-page one-shots.

The Adventure

Cosmic Ray Kids has a slight twist on the Tricube Tales-style "Objective, Location, Compilation." Instead, you roll 1d6 to determine the supervillain, then an additional 1d6 to determine the location, each of which has a bespoke villain scheme. I rolled snake eyes, which resulted in the Fowl Prowler -- think Catwoman, but with Chickens -- at an Art Museum planning a jewel heist. Loved it. The one tweak I made was ditching the "art" part, as I've been running too many adventures set in art museums lately. (Outsider art is like, one of my favorite scenario themes.)

So I had a Chicken-themed jewel thief planning a heist? What else could I call the adventure other than: The Break-Hen. (I also gave the Fowl Prowler "HENchmen" and came up wit roughly 75,000 chicken puns.)

I knew I'd have about two hours for this one-shot, so I decided to swipe a great idea from Joseph R. Lewis' latest Dungeon Age Adventure, which featured a gauntlet of timed half-hour dungeons. (Players have 30 minutes to find the treasure before they're teleported into the next dungeon. This allows the GM to customize the scenario for however long they have.) Instead of dungeons, I had hostages tied up in museum exhibits, with about eight rooms in total.

The idea was, the Fowl Prower appeared on a video screen in the main hall. She gave an egg-based clue where to go next. They were free to go to any room, but if they chose wrong, the hinted-at room would get more difficult. (I tracked how long it took to get to the right room using clocks.) None of the tracking was probably necessary, but I had fun with it.

Here's an example of how an exhibit might look in my notes:

Horses -- O O O

(Obviously this is written for my personal games. In my head, I saw mechanized ponies herking and jerking towards hostages tied on the chariot racing track.)

There was one exhibit I wasn't sure about -- "Finances," based on the Black Tuesday market crash. Grim stuff! I checked with the players and they were fine with it, reasoning that the kids might not catch the reference.

I also had a sort of red-herring room, The Fabergé Egg Display, containing a lone janitor just minding his business. He was immediately deemed Scruffy, and it has been decided that Scruffy will return in each and every game of Cosmic Ray Kids.

Final Thoughts

For Play Reports I try not to mention players and their characters too much, as I don't want to embarrass anyone. I will say that this group took to both the game and scenario like ducks (chickens?) to water. Their characters had a great superteam theme and made imaginative uses of their powers. I was a little worried about making a group of adults act like 5-10 year old super-siblings for two hours, but we all had a blast and I wound up dipping into my Emergency Content folders for an additional half-hour of fun.

I will definitely run Cosmic Ray Kids again.