Product– Raptor Ruckus

System- Raptor Ruckus

Producer– Snapback game Studios

Price– FREE here  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/epicrpgs/raptor-ruckus-rpg-0 

TL; DR– Super Simple Not-Jurassic Park fun!  98%

Basics–  Welcome employee!  Raptor Ruckus has you play different characters in REDACTED Park when things go wrong.  Let’s break down the pieces.

Core Mechanic- This is a d20 game where you add -3 to +6 to a roll.  Your average DC is a 12.  That’s it!

 Survival- Survival is a character trait and the leveling up mechanic.  You can spend survival to reduce the DC of a check,but you get that back later.  You can permanently lower your survival and you level up.

Crits and Chaos Tokens- If you roll five above a DC or 5 below, you critical.  Critical successes result in double damage, while critical failure results in the GM using the chaos charts.  These charts have RANDOM events happen.  Some are honestly good.  Some are crazy bad.  You can also trigger these with Chaos Tokens.  Chaos tokens are tokens everyone starts with; you get more when you critically succeed.  It’s fun randomness.

Panic- This game has a sanity mechanic.  You roll panic tests when things get crazy.  You gain panic and when you get two panic, you fumble on a 1 to 2 instead of always a 1.  When you hit five panic or fumble, you then roll on the panic table.

Hit Points and Tenacity- Hit points are the ones we know and love.  Do enough damage and things die.  Tenacity is like hit points, but for how much you want to keep going.  You do tenacity damage, and the target might decide to run away.  That human isn’t worth this much trouble or you’ve hidden so well the creature loses interest.

Turns- This game is decidedly old school.  You roll a 1d6.  Low?  Enemies go first.  High?  Humans.  Easy and quick.

Ok, that’s the basics.  Let’s review this.

Mechanics or Crunch– This is a very simple game for fast game play.  It’s as simple as a simple D20 can be.  I also love any game that has degrees of success for criticals.  You blow past a roll, you get a critical.  I also enjoy the simplicity of combat. The addition of tenacity really helps the game go past “punch till dead” and helps GMs know when an animal would be driven off.  You don’t need to kill everything to win.  And in a game of giant dinos, that’s even more important!  5/5

Theme or Fluff– This is the book I wish I had as a kid addicted to Jurassic Park.  It’s clearly wearing its influences as the book looks like the posters and props from the movie.  It’s pretty and really draws you into the theme of the world.  5/5

Execution– Snapback made a fun product, but here is where I’m an old fuddy duddy.  They lean HARD into the theme here making a solid product, but that always leads to a bit of style over substance as it might be a bit harder to follow all the pieces to completely understand how to play.  That’s a tiny gripe as the book is pretty, reads fast, is well laid out, and even has an adventure with several pre-gen characters.  The book was a bit harder to see all the pieces compared to some cleaner, more bland books, but this book is pretty!  4.75/5

Summary– I do love me some simple horror RPGs.  I don’t think I’d want to run this long term though.  Horror is always a one shot for me, but what’s here is fun.  There might be some issues as I love the theme, but it does make seeing all the flow a bit more difficult.  I got it, but style vs visibility.  That said, I’ve already kickstarted the PDFs, so I think this will be fun.  Give this one a look.  There is even a whole one shot adventure for you to check out.  It’s another free to check out promo, so you honestly can’t lose!  98%