The Good Fight - An RPG about loss, struggle, and sometimes vampires

I've been working on this on and off for the better part of a month and, having finally had a chance to get it to a playtestable state and play it, I'm sharing the first draft with the good people of Barf.

The Good Fight is a game about the supernatural struggle between Good and Evil in a contemporary setting. It started as an attempt to essentially build the Angel to Monster of the Week's Buffy, but it has in the meantime changed into somewhat more than that, with a throughline and subtext that I wasn't even aware of when I started sketching it out. You can think of it as a "prequel" to Apocalypse World, the massively multiplayer crossover edition of the old World of Darkness, Monsterhearts with grown-ups, tragic long-form Fiasco, a mash-up of Primetime Adventures and Monster of the Week, or even Dungeon World transposed into the modern day.

At this stage, it's also highly experimental and very broken. You can get it from here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/w8578wks0kbddll/KmUKL9Qmpn

Here's the opening blurb:

The world's going to hell. We all know this, or at least our entrails do. But not everyone knows just how.

There's Evil out there. Honest, no-shit, capital-E Evil. Things go bump in the night. The whole crawling, walking, talking, shrieking mass of cliches.

Then there's also evil out there. Honest, no-shit, small-e evil. Children with distended bellies. Squats full of reeking addicts that no-one will get to in time. Soulless bourgeois assholes murdering people in droves, with pens and figures and apathy. That always-falling sensation of imminent collapse we've been wallowing in for the last forty-odd years of our civilization, where apocalypse seems just around the corner but never actually comes to end our misery.

And on this corner, there's you lot. The mass of unfortunates who, by some ugliness of fate, sheer bloody-mindedness, or plain old misfortune, are clued-in to the fact that those two things are anything but unrelated. A lot of people go mad when they scratch the
surface of the world. But there's an alternative.

You say: It doesn't have to be like this. And you go out into the world to make it so. Regardless of the cost.

If you do read it, or even run it, please let me know what you think and how it goes for you; I actually think this could be something really interesting - but I also think making it so would take more playtesting than only me and my group of (lovely, dedicated) playtesters can accomplish.

Encouragement note: still reading it (never enough time). While it's, like, 3rd hack about Urban Mystery (other two being Monster of the Week and Urban Fantasy), it's neat and offers some interesting ideas (I especially do like chosen one).

It's pretty explicitly something that started out as an expansion of Monster of the Week, but ended up looking to a lot of different games for mechanical ideas.

I haven't really looked at Midsummer yet, but I skimmed Urban Shadows and I think the games fill very different niches... Urban Shadows has its faction and corruption mechanics and plays to a totally different sort of arc in the same general milieu.

Sequitur,

I am creating a WoD type add on for Urban Shadows. We looked at making it from yours instead, but Urban Shadows was a great starting point. Though we liked that TGF had that WoD grit, US had a great 1 to 1 playbook to theme conversion for WoD.

You have a great game started here .... hope to see more.

Would you mind if I borrow a couple of your moves from here if I give you credit? You have a few that are unbelievable, and well I am trying to make A LOT of moves for practically 3+ games. We have currently "finished" Werewolf and Mage with a good chunk of Vampire started.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vAfokBManOfs96xyvhPB2q6P1lR3PrN1OGNmjkLoqk8/edit?usp=sharing

I put your moves in and gave you credit, but will remove them if you do not want us too.

I actually can't tell which moves you used, besides adapting the Gifted's flashes of insight move for the Malkavians. So it's cool; I mean, it's not like I haven't adapted a ton of moves.

Using UD as the basis for your game is probably correct - TGF's arc mechanics wouldn't serve a game about inter-player intrigue and shifting agendas (What I think is the heart of WoD) very well.

I think I used 2, the other was Ritual (in Mage) and I know we will be using Linguistics for Mage and Hunter. I just like to ask if I can.

What do you have planned next or are you just wanting more play testing?

I think TGF is "feature complete" right now. Some stuff bears fleshing out (Subplots), and most stuff bears changing in some way or another (The playbooks and basic move set may have moves added or removed, for example). But I don't think there's any major component of the design that's missing. The most important thing that's actually missing from the design right now are endgame specials; the entire obols/arc/endgame system is the shakiest in general, because it's the part of the design that has less precedents to draw on (So, truly, I have little to no idea what I'm doing). It's also inherently hard to playtest because, well, it takes a long time to even get to an endgame. I wonder how McDaldno playtested his series finale rules for Monsterhearts.

Right now my focus is on continuing playtesting (You can never have enough data, right?) and on moving the magic system towards something that fits this game more (As you can tell, ours is very similar to how Monster of the Week does it). I think that this is a game where magic is more prevalent than in MoTW, so I'm making changes to let players take more control of how magic works in their game and fleshing it out a bit (Because I expect magic to come up more, I'm also making it so SRs have more guidance in how to play out Work Magic moves). Magic may eventually be split into two or even more moves, and the delineation between magic-users and non-users will probably change. We may make Hidden a more relevant rating for characters that aren't "spellcasters," or we might leave it as the designated dump stat.