Hundreds of years before the dawn of history lived a strange race of people called...the Druids. No one knows who they were or what they were doing...
The Game: Overgrowth
The Publisher: Madness Heart Press Games
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one
Actually this game has nothing to do with Stonehenge, or druids as they're usually imagined (or with Spinal Tap, for that matter). It's just what it says on the cover. You're playing "Druids," nature-themed wizards fighting against a group of thinly disguised corporations from our world (instead of Amazon we have "Kongo," instead of Tesla we have "Edison-X" run by Elliot Mosk). It's basically the same flavor of eco-terrorism RPG as Werewolf: The Apocalypse, only we're wizards instead of lycanthropes.
It looks a decent game. Yeah, it's got one of those performative "NAZI FASCISTS AREN'T ALLOWED TO PLAY THIS GAME" paragraphs up front, but whatever, that doesn't take up much room. System is a pretty simple "roll some d6s and get 4 or better" kind of affair. When you fail, your BadAss rating goes down and if it hits zero you're dead. Overgrowthall, it looks perfectly playable. Would I run it? Dunno, maybe. Let's see how much I like making a Druid.
PDF isn't bookmarked, boooo.
Cool. I'm meant to start out as a person who was driven from the civilized world into the wilds and there communed with the spirits of nature, becoming a Druid. Do I wish to do something aquatic? Seems like I go back to that particular well a lot. Nah, let's go to another biome I find compelling and say that my guy ran off into a pine forest.
To back up a little: Toby McBride was a young idiot camping with a bunch of other young idiots. They got lost while hiking (they were all woefully unprepared for this hike), and after the Blair Witch jokes stopped being funny, someone (not Toby) decided it'd be a good idea to light a signal fire. Problem is they were in a goddamn pine forest. The fire blazed out of control, destroying a lot of acreage of national park, Toby got separated from his friends, and wasn't seen again for months. When he finally emerged, he was part of the forest.
So next we pick a Sorcery School, which is just kinda what you have magic power over. You can be as specific as you want, but I think I'm going to say that Toby's Sorcery is all about "pine forest." That'll give me lots of cool conifer-based magic to throw around.
OK, so next we do Methods. There are four Methods: Other, Self, Environmental, and External. Other lets you affect other people, Self affects you (duh), Environmental affects the natural world and what's around you, and External lets you create stuff within your sorcery's domain. If you're thinking that these categories are kind of ill-defined, well, yeah.
Also, the book says each one will be assigned a numerical value, but doesn't say what. There's an example of chargen, and it explains how each of those Methods would work with his bug-based magic, but doesn't give numbers.
Ah, here we go. On the next page, the book explains that our BadAss score (which starts at 2) plus the sum of all of our Method scores can't exceed our "starting points," which is a number provided by the Tyrant (the GM). Supposedly that's normally going to be 10. Just for fun, let's check the GM section and see if there's any guidance on that. NOPE. OK, 10 it is. Actually 8, since I have to use 2 points on BadAss. Do I feel like being an all-rounder? Eh. Let's put 1 into Other, 2 into Environmental and External, and 3 into Self.
Is that it? There's a blank on the sheet for "Patron" and a d66 table for "Patrons and Sorcery Schools," but I don't see "Patron" explained anywhere. I'd search the text, but the book is laid out as graphics so you can't search for words, which is really fuckin' annoying.
Well, since the book doesn't bother include Patron as part of chargen, it can't be that important.
Anyway, I think Toby is now in his 30s, tall, thin, brown hair that has almost green highlights if the light hits it right, and a fresh piney scent.
