Play Digest
To The Slaughter's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
SUBSTANCE | #8 | 4.429 | 4.429 |
Overall | #15 | 4.143 | 4.143 |
STYLE | #18 | 3.857 | 3.857 |
Ranked from 7 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
To The Slaughter is a great zine with engaging content and a strong point of view.
An old comrade's farm is the target of corporate espionage threatening his retirement. The players are tasked with shutting down Cyclops and their Industial assets. The campaign included consists of three different facilities featuring various livestock.
The missions include dangerous Cyclops operatives and their minions, but I found that the real standout NPCs were the livestock. They (mostly) don't have stats blocks but the writing makes clear that this story is about them and their life trajectory.
The content warning is not used frivolously, these are not happy farms. The peek behind the curtain of the realities of industrial animal farming set a dark and grounded tone. There may be cosmic dark forces at play in the F.I.S.T universe but you don't have to look beyond out own creations to find true evil.
Included at the beginning of the Zine is the RNPM, and mishmash of psychological theories tied together to make a system for creating and defining NPCs. The thematic combination of advanced psych and it's visualization creates something that looks aestheticlly occult. It's a very interesting tool to play with and may help refrees provide realistic portrayals of the human condition.
You should read this.
A 2-parter, To The Slaughter is part NPC generating mechanics/representation and part campaign.
The generating mechanics took a bit of getting my head around, but they clearly have a lot of depth represented in a really concise way. With a bit of practice they would be allow referees to act as NPCs with a lot of detail and interesting motivations. The NPCs in the campaign illustrate the mechanic nicely, a clever touch.
The adventure equally took a bit to grasp, but has loads of depth, interesting challenges and a cool setting (it is pretty dark and graphic, but in a 'part of real-life that we prefer to ignore' sort of way).
To The Slaughter is a supplement and mini-campaign for FIST revolving around the modern corporate animal-butchering system.
The PDF is 20 pages, with a rad neon-washed cover and a readable but sort of chaotic and zine-y interior. There's hand-drawn illustrations, photobashed public domain art, jumbled fonts, and a feeling of everything being stuffed onto the page, but it's charming and doesn't interfere much with readability.
The first bit of content in the supplement is the RMPN, an extremely good piece of tech for scenario writing. It allows you to show an NPC's personality, values, emotional precarity, and a lot of other data in a small, somewhat arcane looking graphic---and it also allows you to quickly and randomly generate NPCs at a level of fairly intense emotional depth.
After the RMPN is a mini campaign about small farming vs big agribiz. It's a little goofy in tone, but has a solid narrative structure and a sense of escalating stakes and fun NPCs and setpieces.
Overall, this is a really solid supplement and would work just as well for a more lethal, grounded system like Delta Green. It *is* big CW for cruelty to animals, but if that's not a barrier for you then both the mini-campaign and the RMPN mechanic are very worth using, and the campaign is a great read even if you don't run it. If you like modern espionage horror, farmland gothic, and meaty b-movie gore, I strongly suggest picking this up.