How To Play Summer Camp Slayers

Hello everybody this is a special episode of the Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I am the Gamemaster for an upcoming episode where I’ll be using the mechanics from the tabletop role-play game, summer camp slayers. You can catch me as ‘Tord Unfrid’ playing a similar game that uses a different flavour of the same mechanics called Pirates of the Bone Blade in episode 266 of the Firebreathing Kittens Podcast. Summer camp slayers is a table top role-play game designed by Richard Woolcock from Zadmar Games using his universal Tricube game system and you can find this and more on DriveThruRPG. I will speak more on the TriCube system towards the end of episode here but for now let’s get into those game mechanics.

 

General Mechanics:

 

In summer camp slayers, you roll between one and three D6 6 sided dice, depending on your characters archetype and you compare your highest result against the difficulty set by the game master. For instance, you may roll two 6 sided dice and have a 3 and 5 on the dice the game master set the difficulty at five meaning you have one success. You start with 2D6 add a die to your roll if what you’re doing falls in line with your trait and you remove a die if what you’re doing falls outside the scope of your concept but we'll get into that more during the character creation section. The main thing to remember going forward is that together your trait and concept make up your characters archetype forming half of your character design, the other half of the character design comes from your perks and quirks.

 

Perks and Quirks (Archetype) Overview:

 

Speaking of perks and quirks, they allow you to influence the difficulty of the challenge you face. You can influence the difficulty of the task by expending one of your karma points to reduce the difficulty of the task by 1 if you can explain how your perk aids you in that moment. You can also decide to make the difficulty of the task harder before rolling, increasing it by 1, describing how your quirk negatively effected you. If you fail the task when using your quirk you get a karma back but if you succeed you can choose to regain a resolve instead if you'd like. If a player runs out of resolve they are typically removed from the scene and gain an affliction. Afflictions are described by the victor and are treated as temporary quirks for your player. A character with three affliction is retired from play, although they can be brought back if one of their afflictions is cured. Now that we've talked about how to decide the outcome of a challenge let's find out what happens if you succeed or fail.

 

Success/Failure:

 

Succeeding a task with one single die above or meeting the difficulty rating will result in a normal success, any additional successful die roll will be a exceptional success. Exceptional successes typical provide additional removed effort tokens or beneficial effects as decided by the game master. The same is true however for failures as well with the distinction being that you have to roll all 1’s on your dice for it to be a critical failure, this typically involves losing double the amount of resolve or additional negative effects as decided by the game master and player such as gaining an affliction. Some tasks are simple and only require a single success to complete them, there are however harder tasks and in these instances effort tokens will be used. A harder task can require anywhere from 2-4 successes or more depending on the situation to whittle down that encounters effort tokens.

 

Character Creation:

 

Now that we know how the game works, let’s talk about creating a character. In Summer Camp Slayers you select from a list of four different options during character creation, those four options as discussed earlier are Trait, Concept, Perk and Quirk. At first all the these four terms may sound the same however they do function differently from each other, let’s get into that.

 

Traits:

 

We’ll start with trait, in this game system a trait is always the same, regardless of the flavour of the system you’re playing. A trait is one of the following: Agile, Brawny or Crafty; the ABC’s of Tricube! Agile covers things like quickness, dexterity, reflexes, or stealth; they also roll 3d6 for ranged combat. Brawny covers things like strength, toughness, stamina or athletics; they also roll 3d6 for melee combat. Crafty covers things like charisma, intellect, willpower or perception; they also roll 3d6 for mental combat (magic, persuasion, intimidation). Unless something falls within your trait you will roll 2d6, if it does happen to fall within your trait however you get to roll 3d6 instead! For example. A brawny kid would roll 3D6 when trying to lift something heavy off their friends, but only 2D6 if they were trying to avoid getting pinned by the same object as it's falling as that would be a