Eat The Reich is a new tabletop roleplaying game from Grant Howitt and Will Kirkby that skips all the respectability nonsense around punching Nazis and gets to the heart of the question: how, exactly, should a fucking vampire absolutely brutalize Hitler and co like they deserve to be brutalized?
EAT THE REICH is a tabletop roleplaying game in which you, a vampire commando, are coffin-dropped into occupied Paris and must cut a bloody swathe through nazi forces en route to your ultimate goal: drinking all of Adolf Hitler's blood.
This over-the-top, ultraviolent game is designed to be played from beginning to end in one to three sessions of carnage, blood magic, meaningful flashbacks and hundreds upon hundreds of extremely dead fascists. It tells one story, it tells it loud, and it tells it brilliantly. Think Wolfenstein crossed with Danger 5 and you're not far off the mark.
That's a perfect setup, in my opinion. Absolutely no notes. But even so, this interview with Gizmodo has me even more intrigued, especially this part:
Another quirk of Eat the Reich is that it's written with six pregenerated characters to use during play, rather than built-in character generation. Each character is "four lines and a list of abilities," and is, in Howitt's words, just enough so that "you can get the joke and then start telling it yourself." With this kind of structure Howitt was able to write a game that "does one thing, loudly, very well." Having these characters also prompted Howitt to play with the fiction of the game, which in turn gives players space to play off these characters in interesting ways in their own games.
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The fact is that Eat the Reich is a game about tasteless, over-the-top, ultraviolence and sexy vampires. "James [Hodes] actually wrote a couple pages into the book about how not to be a bad person while playing this game," he explained. In addition to Jewish readers, he spoke with experts on facism and the man who translated Achtung! Cthulhu into German. He did not want to fuck this up. "I think as a sensible human being and as a conscious human being, and in today's environment the only decent thing to do is to ask people who have some greater touchstone to the things they're writing about, and just checking to make sure that we were doing okay on this."
Howitt reiterated, again, that he knows he's not going to please everyone. But he's not writing this game to be an instigator; he's writing this game because even though it started as a vampire pun about killing Nazis, what he ended up with was a cathartic horror-comedy about finding justice while also becoming your own worst nightmare.
Eat the Rich is a D6-based game built on the Apocalypse World gaming system. The game is raising funds via Kickstarter pre-orders right now; you can get the basic 72-page, D6-based rulebook for about $16 for a PDF, or $32 for a print copy.
