Character Creation: Toonpunk

Insert your favorite gif here of someone banging their head against a wall.

The Game: Toonpunk
The Publisher: Bendy Giraffe Games, but they seem to have vanished
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one

Just going on the title, it sounds like we're doing something like Who Framed Roger Rabbitt? or Happytime Murders (but with toons rather than puppets) or, god help us, Cool World. And that's pretty cool - there's plenty of room to mine the happy aesthetic of cartoons for a violent or otherwise weird RPG (see also Cuphead). 

Long ago, in the before times, when I was gearing up to run Spark in order to review it (the review's still up, but I ain't linking to that fucking site, search it if you want), my group put together a setting we called "Toon Noir" which took inspiration from Who Framed etc etc but also Dontnod Entertainment's Remember Me. I never wrote up that setup anywhere online that I can find, and we never played it because that whole process got interrupted by a surprise baby (it was an exciting day), but every time I look at the sheet or file for Toonpunk I get a little excited because my brain remembers that setting. And then I actually start reading Toonpunk and make Patton Oswalt "DON'T WANT THIS" flail. But I have some time today so I'm gonna do the character.

OK, so. Here we go. 

Argh. 

This game has no setting. 

No, really

I did a search on the word "Doublearth" in the PDF. It's only ever mentioned in the context of "in the Doublearth, [this]". There's no setting info, there's not even much of an explanation of what the Doublearth is. Needless to say, the -punk suffix is not remotely earned. Anydang way. This game is basically a tactical Shadowrun/Cyberpunk clone; you do crimes. There are examples of play, but they're presented purely in the same of board game tactics, and the first one has the characters all getting gunned down because they didn't prep. This game sounds like a barrel of laughs, no wonder the company folded.

All right, let's get into this for reals this time. 

First step is "the idea," which is basically just "what do you want your character to be." Since it's cartoons, it can be basically anything, which is both freeing and completely unhelpful. Toon at least gave you random tables, IIRC. 

Looking ahead, the third stage of chargen should have been the first. It asks what type of cartoon you are, and while it's not really any better written than the rest of the book (siiiiinngiiiing..."If you don't know what a semicolon is, don't use it, oh, just don't use it..."), but the ideas here are pretty cool. Like, one of the options is "Shill."

This is pretty clearly a callback to the cartoons of the late 70s/early 80s, that is, the ones I grew up watching. And the idea of having Shaggy or Hefty Smurf or Man-At-Arms or Panthro or whoever suddenly come to life and have an existential crisis is the coolest idea I've seen in this book, so why isn't it the fucking focus of the game rather than a teaspoon of cool stirred into the boring-ass tactical board game soup? I don't know. 

But reading on, "Comic Man" is one of the ideas, and just to keep myself awake and interested I shall draw inspiration from the EC horror games (Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, and so forth). There's some fascinating history there, but this ain't the place to get into it. Suffice to say that human beings transforming into monsters was always a staple. 

So there was one story I remember about an actor who found he was going deaf and was introduced to a Dr. Moreau type of person who transplanted the ears of a vampire bat. This had the effect of letting him hear his wife and her lover plotting to kill him (infidelity-driven murder was a big deal back then), but also transformed him into a blood-drinking bat-monster (here's the issue in question). So I'll play that guy, why not. Let's call him Harry "The Bat" Davis (named after the character in the story and the artist). 

Harry is your basic Man-Bat kind of thing; bit bat-like snout, sharp fangs, under-arm wings, thin brown fur, red beady eyes. He dresses in smart suits (where do the wings go? Don't worry about it) when he's not doing crimes. Why is he doing crimes? I mean, he drinks blood for sustenance. If you're already crime-ing, you might as well go whole-hog.

Attributes! These go from -1 to 10, there are 10 of them, and I get 36 points to spend. They all start at 0, but I can reduce them to -1 to get an extra point. 

Looking at them, I can tell I want decent scores in Stealth, Perception, Athletics, Murder, and maybe Acting (since Harry was an actor by trade). Hacking and Hardware can be low; Harry is very hands- (fangs) on. In fact, let's drop Hacking to -1 and leave Hardware at 0. I've got 37 points and 8 more to score.

Dividing these points up even would give me scores of 4 with 5 left over. I guess let's do that, because of the 8 remaining I don't want any of them to be lower than 4. I'll put two of my remaining points into Murder, and one each into Stealth, Perception, and Acting. That gives me:

Stealth 5
Perception 5
Athletics 4
Hacking -1
Hardware 0
Murder 6
Grit 4
Artistry 4
Acting 5
Nonsense 4

Next up, Specialties. These are just more specific skills. I get 10 points, and there are only three slots on the sheet so I guess I can only take three. 

Oh, goddammit. 

HAHAHAHA IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE I don't actually know

 

OK, I'm gonna take 5 in Mastermind and 5 in Psychopath. I hate them all, though.

Next section is "What are you", which is where the "what type of cartoon" question comes into play, but really this should have been first. I'm a Comic Man. This allows me to cast a single doodle each turn at no action cost, but all my doodles have doubled IP cost. I have no idea what any of that means.

The next couple of bits are equipment, but I hate shopping in RPGs on the best of days and I don't want to be in this game any longer, so I'm gonna say done. 

So: I think the role Harry The Bat could fill in a crime team in this stupid game is mostly stealth attack and planning, probably with a Malvolio-level snark to the whole thing (though he probably aspires to Iago or Edmund levels of evil genius). I described already, that's that, done and done.

Also this sheet design is hot garbage.