A Review of 'Local Heroes' by Amanda Lee Franck
"put on a mysterious hat or a wizard robe or a regular robe"
(Disclosure; I am friends with the creator so you can add this review to the ever-expanding ‘OSR Circlejerk’ sub-category).
…
Local Heroes - is a 16-page PDF game that Amanda Lee Franck put out on her Patreon, so far you can only get it there! (Or on her Comradery, which is communist Patreon.)
A single-session game about about a single night; the players play themselves, the game-world is their own. They are given gifts and sent to fight a multidimensional monster which must be dead (banished) by dawn.
Imagining the KnownCharacter generation has already been done. In rules terms this means (unless you have that Fireman/Marine buddy) everyone has relatively ‘flat’ characters, and that everyone knows who everyone is, and that everyone knows what everyone can do. A basic exchange system exists to discourage inane min-maxing or self-delusion, though, since its near-assumed that the players will be a semi-familiar friend group, the honour system, and embarrassment, will be the more effective restriction.
The game begins (in-world) at midnight and the creature need only see the sun to win. Thankfully is is bent on wiping out the heroes opposing it and won’t just get a taxi out of town, and hopefully you are playing in Winter and dawn is many hours away.
What remains is planning and manipulating the environment and a small selection of magical tools. You get an hour of lead time - all those fragments of local knowledge can actually be utilised - zombie escape plans, the locations of building equipment and industrial machinery, of train tracks and ruined buildings, unfilled pits, canal locks, teetering long-term structural collapses, places that might be set on fire, walled gardens, funnel spaces, dead zones in the middle of vast roadworks, strange places difficult to get into or out of, water mains, electrical junctions and pylons, barbed wire, hardware stores, fire axe locations. Its a memory-and-play game for local residents.
As it pulls on local memories so much, and as the honour system and mutual knowledge are quite useful in shaping ‘character generation’, this is not a good ‘Con Game’ and therefore mildly unamerican - it is not highly systematised, depends on local knowledge, is not great for a mixed group of strangers meeting in a place unfamiliar to all, and might not work well in rural America, the south, or anywhere where gun ownership is common or widespread - your average game with a bunch of enthusiastic gun owners might be pretty short. (Or might not, the Monster is not always vulnerable to bullets).
The Multi-Stage Problem-MonsterThere is only one enemy and you know its coming. It has a range of ten, or sometimes more, possible forms. Each form is that of a hero who opposed it in the past. It can change forms five times until it ‘slinks back into the void’ and and most forms have specific win conditions. (Though in most cases you can still beat it to death or smash it to bits.) One of the possible ‘transformations’ is a tower with three archers and a series of complex traps and environments inside. If the creature kills a PC’s it might take on their form.
The monster transforming into a place, then back again, is I think, new, (though if someone else has come up with it, I am sure you will tell me in the comments, or would have if this was 2015 and people still commented on things.)
Few of the forms can be straightforwardly fought, but then the special relics gifted to the team are barely weapons at all, but curious tools with strong specific game effects.
Parlour GameWhile its not a ‘Con Game’, Local Heroes feels much more like something like ‘Werewolf’, a parlour game of problem-solving you could play with normies. They barely need to imagine anything at all, only recall who they are and where they live, and the Aristotelian compression of time and space, and single, set, obvious and declared win-condition (defeat the multidimensional monster in five of its forms, before sunrise, using these particular tools), hopefully nukes most decision paralysis. Its quite Dowlian in that sense.
(Disclosure; I am friends with the creator so you can add this review to the ever-expanding ‘OSR Circlejerk’ sub-category).
…
Local Heroes - is a 16-page PDF game that Amanda Lee Franck put out on her Patreon, so far you can only get it there! (Or on her Comradery, which is communist Patreon.)
A single-session game about about a single night; the players play themselves, the game-world is their own. They are given gifts and sent to fight a multidimensional monster which must be dead (banished) by dawn.
Imagining the KnownCharacter generation has already been done. In rules terms this means (unless you have that Fireman/Marine buddy) everyone has relatively ‘flat’ characters, and that everyone knows who everyone is, and that everyone knows what everyone can do. A basic exchange system exists to discourage inane min-maxing or self-delusion, though, since its near-assumed that the players will be a semi-familiar friend group, the honour system, and embarrassment, will be the more effective restriction.
The game begins (in-world) at midnight and the creature need only see the sun to win. Thankfully is is bent on wiping out the heroes opposing it and won’t just get a taxi out of town, and hopefully you are playing in Winter and dawn is many hours away.
What remains is planning and manipulating the environment and a small selection of magical tools. You get an hour of lead time - all those fragments of local knowledge can actually be utilised - zombie escape plans, the locations of building equipment and industrial machinery, of train tracks and ruined buildings, unfilled pits, canal locks, teetering long-term structural collapses, places that might be set on fire, walled gardens, funnel spaces, dead zones in the middle of vast roadworks, strange places difficult to get into or out of, water mains, electrical junctions and pylons, barbed wire, hardware stores, fire axe locations. Its a memory-and-play game for local residents.
As it pulls on local memories so much, and as the honour system and mutual knowledge are quite useful in shaping ‘character generation’, this is not a good ‘Con Game’ and therefore mildly unamerican - it is not highly systematised, depends on local knowledge, is not great for a mixed group of strangers meeting in a place unfamiliar to all, and might not work well in rural America, the south, or anywhere where gun ownership is common or widespread - your average game with a bunch of enthusiastic gun owners might be pretty short. (Or might not, the Monster is not always vulnerable to bullets).
The Multi-Stage Problem-MonsterThere is only one enemy and you know its coming. It has a range of ten, or sometimes more, possible forms. Each form is that of a hero who opposed it in the past. It can change forms five times until it ‘slinks back into the void’ and and most forms have specific win conditions. (Though in most cases you can still beat it to death or smash it to bits.) One of the possible ‘transformations’ is a tower with three archers and a series of complex traps and environments inside. If the creature kills a PC’s it might take on their form.
The monster transforming into a place, then back again, is I think, new, (though if someone else has come up with it, I am sure you will tell me in the comments, or would have if this was 2015 and people still commented on things.)
Few of the forms can be straightforwardly fought, but then the special relics gifted to the team are barely weapons at all, but curious tools with strong specific game effects.
Parlour GameWhile its not a ‘Con Game’, Local Heroes feels much more like something like ‘Werewolf’, a parlour game of problem-solving you could play with normies. They barely need to imagine anything at all, only recall who they are and where they live, and the Aristotelian compression of time and space, and single, set, obvious and declared win-condition (defeat the multidimensional monster in five of its forms, before sunrise, using these particular tools), hopefully nukes most decision paralysis. Its quite Dowlian in that sense.
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