The year is 1943. You are part of a team of crack vampire commandos with one mission: drink all of Hitler’s blood. This simple but ingenious pitch is the premise for the upcoming tabletop RPG Eat the Reich from publisher Rowan Rook and Decard.
This action-heavy horror-comedy game is being designed by Grant Howitt, whose writing credits include Honey Heist, Heart: The City Beneath and Orc Borg, with art by Will Kirkby, who has drawn comics in set in the world of the popular actual play series Critical Role.
In order to get the scoop on the game, which just hit Kickstarter, we chatted with both Will Kirkby and Grant Howitt about their creative process.
BD: Eat the Reich now features a large cast of colorful characters and horrific enemies set in a fully realized version of Nazi-occupied Paris, but the seed of the idea came from humble origins.
Howitt: Just entirely the pun. I was on a plane… and I was like “huh that looks a bit like eat the rich, could be Eat the Reich” and I came up with a pitch. Then there was a scant eight months of knocking it around in my notebook before I decided maybe an artist would be useful.
BD: Bringing Kirkby into the creative process helped shape the identity of Eat the Reich. This back and forth between the two defined the tone they were going for, both visually and gameplay-wise.
Kirkby: We had an early on talk about whether it was going to be a very dull browns and grays kind of a game or whether we were going to be really bright. I was going into the Hammer Horror stuff in the 70s where you had these really saturated tones… I loved that over-bleached kaleidoscopic look, and it just seemed like a perfect blend.
Howitt: The initial pitch I had for Eat the Reich was much scrappier. It was much more person-versus-person, one vampire fighting one Nazi. Then as the art came in, I did some more playtesting, and I started getting an idea of who we were playing. It’s like, this has to be huge, doesn’t it? This has to be really big and silly. I think wrapping some silly around it gives us the opportunity to go really hard at the Nazi stuff.
BD: This balance between horror and comedy is key to the core of the game. Instead of focusing on the grim realities of World War II, they wanted to create a bombastic game that’s equal parts thrilling and slapstick, a tone that resonates with both of them.
Kirkby: The humor means that I can be really graphic. We’re talking about having a page where it’s literally just a ripped out heart nailed to the book, and if I just drew that realistically, it can be a bit gratuitous, but because it’s all these bright colors… it means I can amp up what I feel I would be comfortable showing, because it has that comedy element to it.
Howitt: I’ve found comedy and horror are really natural together because horror makes you uncomfortable and comedy makes you comfortable, so they flow in and out of one another. Giving vampires these ragdoll bodies to throw around and these fascist piñatas to fuck up across Paris means that the pressure can build and release.
BD: Howitt based the game mechanics on a game he wrote nearly a decade ago called Havoc Brigade. In Havoc Brigade, you play a squad of orcs dispatched into a human city to run amok. These concepts mapped well to the vampires-take-back-Paris premise of Eat the Reich, so Howitt started working on molding the mechanics to fit the new setting. The game’s clever dice mechanics do a great job of simulating the battlefield in a dynamic and descriptive fashion.
Howitt: You’ve got a dice pool, you roll a bunch of dice, four up is a success, and then after that you spend those successes to attack, to defend, to achieve objectives or to drink the blood of Nazis. As you spend those you’re chipping in narrative descriptions, and your various abilities and weapons reward you for using them in certain ways and describing certain actions. Hopefully it lends to some interesting combinations and some fun narrative descriptions.
BD: Rather than let you create your own characters in Eat the Reich, Howitt and Kirkby have come up with a prewritten cast for the players to embody. Initially they tried giving the players tables to roll their character on, but it wasn’t doing the proper job of communicating the tone of the game. Instead, they worked together to create very distinct characters that helped demonstrate that tone.
Kirkby: Grant has just been very open. If I draw something that looks cool and it’s funny and interesting, the game will shift to help with that. It’s not just the writing that handholds the art to the point where the artist is just performing a function, it means that there’s a back and forth, an actual conversation, which is a lot of fun. A throughline was sexiness, just not cheesecake sexiness. If you draw something fun and attractive there’s gonna be someone out there who loves them, and that’s been the reaction so far online. It’s been really positive.
BD: Clearly your run-of-the-mill Nazi soldiers don’t have much of a chance against your squad of the undead, so they had to come up with more dangerous ‘boss monster’ style characters to throw your way.
Howitt: Paris is full of magically and scientifically enhanced Nazis called, appropriately, Ubermensch. The majority of the things you’re fighting are feckless Nazis who you’re going to be mashing through entire squads of, but the only things which can damage you one-on-one are these Ubermensch. Will just finished the drawing of one today, which is the Rust Witch. The deal with the Rust Witch is that the Nazis found Atlantis, and they’ve got these weird golden magic tablets which let you absorb energy from catastrophes. She can point at you and a plane crashes out of the sky and smashes into you.
BD: Instead of setting up the players for a long campaign, like most traditional tabletop RPGs, Eat the Reich is meant to be completed in about three sessions. Players start out being dropped in coffins directly into the city, then have to make their way to their target.
Howitt: We provide a map of Paris, here are some interesting things, on you go. This is a complete package. It’s gonna be three sessions, it’s gonna be great fun, then it’s done. I’m really keen to have this as something that is powerful and brisk and over. It’s cheaper than taking everyone to the cinema three times, I can tell you that.
BD: At the moment, the book sits at 72 pages. Not only are they trying to make the game fun, but they want the physical product of the book to be just as amazing.
Howitt: We had a lovely meeting with me, Will and Maz, who is our business brain at Rowan Rook and Deckard, and Maz, in addition to being our business brain, is kind of a, what’s the word, book pervert. They really like books and the physical material of books, so having them and Will just go like “what can we do,” “well we could get three different kinds of UV treatment,” “we could do cut outs.” We’re hoping to make this one of the most beautiful things we’ve published.
BD: Rowan Rook and Decard tends to layer lots of political and social into their games, and fighting against fascism comes up frequently. Spire: The City Must Fall, which Howitt co-wrote with Christopher Taylor, dealt with rebellion against an oppressive societal structure, and writing that helped him work through his feelings about the political climate of the world at large.
Howitt: Honestly it’s exhausting. We are careening towards some sort of global catastrophe and everyone is getting increasingly scared. A small number of people are getting increasingly rich, and it benefits them to have fascism. And so I got pretty worn out about it. It was 2016 when we had the Brexit vote in [the U.K.] and Trump got in power [in the U.S.] and it was very disheartening. That was when I started working on Spire. I’m just fucking tired of it honestly, it’s really irritating. When we put out the Eat the Reich stuff, we’ve done our best to be as careful to be, sensitive isn’t the word, because this is a game about drinking all of Hitler’s blood, but as decent as we can toward people who aren’t Nazis.
BD: Despite having a fantastical premise, this game is still set in a very real moment in history, so the team wanted to make sure the game still came off as respectful in its handling of possibly sensitive themes.
Howitt: We’ve worked with sensitivity readers on every one of our products since Spire, and this is the one which we’ve hired the most sensitivity readers for. We’ve done the most effort in finding a good spread of people because it’s set in the real world. We’re up to five sensitivity readers now. We’ve got someone of Jewish heritage, someone of Romani heritage, we have a French person, a German person, an Italian with an expertise in fascism. I’m always careful as hell in this sort of thing because I don’t want to upset anyone. Well, sorry, I wanna upset fascists. I don’t want to upset any decent people. There’s a responsibility to do this properly, even if you’re doing it tastelessly.
BD: The Kickstarter campaign for Eat the Reich is pretty standard, with tiers for getting both a digital and physical version of the game, but Howitt said that they have expanded to include plans for bigger rewards as well.
Howitt: The plan was just PDF, book, that’s it. Then Maz and Will got talking. I went out to make some tea and I came back through and they were looking up custom printed votive candles for the made up order of nuns in the game. Working with an artist like Will gives us an opportunity to create something uniquely beautiful.
BD: The top tier of rewards, which is limited to a small quantity, features a replica of a 50 caliber ammo crate full of the hunting kit that the vampires would be deployed with.
Kirkby: On my end, it’s a lot of fun. My whole motivation on the crates is the silly fun of stenciling up the ammo crates. I like making things when I get a chance, so even if it’s a small number, it’s like crack to me. It’s very addictive.
You can back Eat the Reich here on Kickstarter until September 14.
The post ‘Eat the Reich’ – Creators Preview Tabletop RPG Centered on Vampire Commandos Who Drink Nazi Blood appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.