EAT THE REICH: Promising, but Fangless
This is another experimental type thing, where I do a less structured (still structured!) more review-ey type thing. I know TTRPG reviews are Dime a Dozen, but I feel I can usually have some interesting insights into things like this.
A SYMPHONY OF FEAR
Eat the Reich is a TTRPG by Grant Howitt, a very respected figure in the field for his many, many single-page games. It is published by Rowan, Rook, and Decard, Grant's publishing group, and an extremely respected one at that. They have actually published two of my favorite games of all time! (Voidheart Symphony and Legacy 2e). They also publish the duology of games named "Resistance," which includes Heart: The City Beneath and Spire: The City Must Fall. Both games, which I'm told are very good, though I haven't read them yet.
So this is quite the number of accolades! A beloved game designer and a trusted publisher, this is also combined with the third name you'll see on the game's cover: Will Kirkby, who is... an artist. hm. I've said my peace on games that use "Has Good Art" as a selling point, but TLDR: I often feel that good art and trippy writing are used as a way to distract players from an otherwise mediocre game, to the point where the 'game' portion is irrelevant and the book primarily just functions as an artbook. The best example I can think of is Mork Borg (which is a mediocre OSR game), Troika (which is a bad OSR game), and the Post-Waks Gubat Banwa (which is a bad... something)
But this is mean, the game being proud of its art is fair! Will Kirkby is a fantastic artist, and while I will take jabs at the game's art-first focus multiple times during this review, I implore you not to judge Will's art because of this. Will is a phenomenal artist, and I adore his gritty Urban Fantasy style. I highly recommend Grenade, his comic. It currently goes for around $10 USD on Etsy for a PDF, and it's a beautiful book.
Well, now that that's out of the way: The art is the best part of this book, and it's not a competition.
Let's start with the positive, actually, because I do think there's some potential here (as you can see from the title).
INGLORIOUS BATSTARDS
Firstly, the story is reminiscent of Grant's other works, but greatly expanded. While most of his stuff is short, single-page romps that are often over in one or two hours, this game aims to greatly expand on Grant's usual One-page format. Characters and the core plot are still pre-determined and chosen from rather than created, but the plot the game tells is genuinely pretty interesting! You are a group of vampires that are part of a military task force named F.A.N.G with a simple task: Kill Hitler, drink his blood, and kill as many Nazis on your way there as possible. The characters in the game are pre-made, though you are encouraged to modify them to your content. You get to pick from one of 4 characters with unique abilities (We'll get to that), let's get through them really quick because while I don't think it's particularly important, I think they're still pretty neat.
Iryna: An old-blood rich bitch vampire, she has a bunch of vintage magical weapons and a bunch of the more traditional vampire powers, she's a Vampire's vampire, y'know?
Nicole: Lesbian Demolitions Expert, has a bunch of griefing abilities and a TON of explosives.
Cosgrave: Shitty Hackney Scammy necromancer, got taught by his aunt and is crooked as hell, but he's charming. He's also my personal favorite, for reference, and he's the one I played during my game.
Chuck: Outlaw Cowboy Zombie, cannibal but mostly chill, has two revolvers and a bunch of creepy, grisly powers.
Astrid: Ex-Pilot that got bitten by Something or Other in the taiga, she has a 'predator's soul' and 'the natural world bows to her'. She honestly reads as a liiiiittle bit of a stereotype, but whatever, she's your Gangrel for you WODheads out there.
Flint: Possibly not a vampire, giant bat demon, dangerous, and seemingly unable to talk? To bring back the WOD comparisons, this is a Humanity 0 vampire.
This is a good cast of characters! They feel well-rounded, with interesting backstories and a lot to work with for additional details. If this were the cast in, say, A vampire-themed hero shooter, I'd probably enjoy it. The main thing is that the game encourages you to tinker with them and make them truly 'yours' by changing things around, which I suppose makes sense, though it removes a little bit of the game's uniqueness. The way the cast is presented is also beautiful; they have really nice artworks all depicting them lying inside various coffins themed after their personalities. Overall, the cast of characters is generally a slam dunk; they all feel unique and interesting, as well as having unique and cool abilities, basically zero complaints here.
I could also gush about the art, but. What's there to really talk about? it looks nice; it has a good style. the whole book is stylized as a series of military documents from a telegram, with various minor details strewn around like blood stains, X-rays of teeth, minor worldbuilding, etc. It looks nice and adds to the game's style and vibe.
Ok, now that that's done with, let's talk about the shit that sucks, and that's most of the game.
THIS IS A GAME ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST
It's rare that a game fucks up right at the safety tools. I'm serious, I've never seen a game that fucks up there.
I'm gonna start this section off with a quote from a friend of mine who also read the game, he's a very intelligent dude, like if Foucault was really into TTRPGs, and he puts my core issue with the game into really good words that I couldn't say better myself, so here it is, mildly editorialized in order to make it shorter "[...] The rulebook suggests you do not mention or bring up the Holocaust in any capacity... when your characters are, presumably, trying to stop the holocaust, the holocaust is what makes the Nazis unambiguously evil in the eyes of the people. It seems like its a growing trend in TTRPGs that want to make statements on important or complex topics but also wanting to avoid the discomfort these topics bring with them at the same time. Why even make games about subjects you're too scared to talk about? if philosophy is a conversation and games are art, then tabletop gaming is art that invites you to take part in philosophy. You cannot develop a philosophy or mature worldview based on the principle of 'oooh that subject is scary i don't want to talk about' when the subject in question was brought up by you in the first place. if you have no statement to make, then you should just keep your silence instead of filling the air with meaningless noise." Thanks to my friend for these thoughts; he wrote them when the game was new. He's much more eloquent than I am, and I would have probably floundered for around 4 paragraphs to say the same thing in worse prose. This game's primary issue is that it actively fears talking about what it's about. Let's compare this to this game's alleged inspiration, and other popular Anti-Fascist Power fantasy media, Wolfenstein.
The modern Wolfenstein games are set in an alternate universe America where the Nazis won WW2 and took over the United States. Wolfenstein is not afraid to talk about racism and the holocaust, there's mentions of Nazis stealing Jewish technology (and failing to use it), the newer games have mentions of how American racism perfectly fit within the Nazi mold, and despite the game's focus on being an anti-Nazi power fantasy, its still willing to explore the actually bad things the Nazis did as a theme and the game will often remind you that the Nazis are not only huge racists, but also extreme losers. In comparison, Eat the Reich instead has the Nazis be shown as uh. It's hard to describe, but they did genuinely create all the magic technology they use via "Morally Dubious Wizards". This plays into the Wunderwaffe trope that a lot of Extremely Fucking Stupid Nazi media plays into, the idea that the Nazis were one Super Weapon away from winning the war, and that the Nazis secretly were geniuses/employed geniuses in order to create mega powerful weapons that could have easily trounced the allies were it not for their savage human wave tactics. And funnily enough, there are moments that the game actively makes fun of this trope despite actively playing into it. Especially with the final boss, an Artificially-created Werewolf named the "Ubermensch". Overall, this game is thematically a complete and total incoherent mess, it's strangely liberal and reactionary, and plays into shitty tropes about the Nazis while refusing to actually tackle anything, it's a game that tries to talk about serious things without being willing to talk about serious things. Why even bother making the game about the Nazis at that point? Why not have the fascist government be, say, a clan of Eugenicist Vampire hunters who have taken over America? Or an installed Werewolf Puppet-Dictator in South America? and the reason why is because the Nazis are 'safe', they need to make this game marketable, so it has the enemy that everyone will agree is bad, but will forbid you to actually talk about any of their heinous acts beyond acknowledging Fascism as a "Baddist" Ideology, without actually wishing to dissect the evils and horrors of Fascism, its literally Kung Fury morality, its not the leftist power fantasy of taking down the Nazis as the fascist machine of warfare and genocide that they were, its the Liberal power fantasy of fighting the Nazis, the enemy of America.
Normally, I wouldn't really complain about this, its fine to have your game be about a power fantasy of killing Nazis because they're Nazis and no other reason... except the game clearly WANTS to be something deeper, there's multiple points in the game where they try to... do something I can only describe as trying to "Out Woke" other games? like they'll go on short rants about racist TTRPG tropes (something I'm known to do, to be fair), talk about the bold take of how Being a Fascist is BAD, and how you should Do Violence to any fascists near you as that's morally correct, not to mention the game's provocative title of Eat the Reich, which is based on the common Communist phrase of "eat the rich", you'd expect this to imply the game would actually explore the evils of fascism, but it doesn't! Fascism is a backdrop for the ontologically evil enemy that you must vanquish; the game makes fun of "Killing an Orc because he's an Orc" in one of its texts, but the game is itself just that! It quite literally disallows you, Rules as Written, to talk about WHY the Nazis were bad! It disallows talk of racism (outside of 'light European on European ribbing', whatever the fuck that means), it disallows talk of the holocaust, it doesn't let you talk about why the Nazis were the Nazis! The game says at one point, "This is not a game about the Holocaust," and I'm sorry to say, but it is. You cannot separate the Nazis from the Holocaust! Are you fucking stupid!? All of these factors end up combining in a TTRPG that's the equivalent of the AOC Met Gala "tax the rich" dress, an empty, lukewarm message, scrawled in blood for all the world to see. Well, that's a lot of words for only one of the issues in the game, the issues with the gameplay are waaaaaay less deep, so I shouldn't take as long to dissect it, don't get it twisted though: it's still bad
PLAYING IMMORTAL
Now, I like to review games based not on some mysterious, objective criteria on what makes 'good game design' but rather on what the game's goals are. For example, while I'd loathe basically every mechanic in His Majesty the Worm if they were put in any other game, HMTW's goal is to clamp down on the nitty-gritty aspects of dungeon crawling and create mechanics that make you care about extremely minor things. To this extent, its mechanics function within the context in which they are placed and meet the game's goals.
For this game, the goal is to create a power fantasy of playing sexy, powerful vampires who slaughter Nazis on their way to defeat Hitler, so the game should make the player feel powerful and give players powerful tools, both narratively AND statistically, to achieve this.
The game's rolling system is... solid, actually, I like it. You create a dice pool equal to your relevant stat, you can also add Items to your roll if the current situation meets the Item's criteria, if you do use the item, spend one of its uses and add the specified amount of die to the pool, then after you roll, the GM will also roll a number of die equal to the situation's Threat Rating, you then compare the die, 1-3 discards, 4-5 succeeds, and a 6 criticals adding +2. if you got the same amount of successes as the GM, you leave unharmed but can't do anything extra, but then for every die you have over the GM's rolls, you get to do a powerful action like eliminating a threat, feeding on blood, or activating a special ability.
This is a solid foundation, but it also does not align with the game's goals! Ok so this is purely anecdotal so apologies here, gonna break my professionalism for a second, but from my experience what this ACTUALLY leads to is characters that flounder around barely actually doing anything and constantly getting their asses kicked by all but the most basic of threats, unless you're in an extreme advantage and expend your items and have high relevant stats, you are not going to do well on anything more complex than an Attack 3 threat, and for reference a squadron of basic infantry are attack 3. This actually led during my own experience to one of the most embarrassing moments in my TTRPG career, my character had something called the "Soul Jar" which could be expended to add a ton of die to a roll, clearly something meant to be used during big climactic encounters in order to get the edge, I was forced to use it in a fight against a basic squad of Infantry because If I didn't we were just gonna flounder about in that encounter forever! It's just not FUN!
I'll again say that the character playbooks are, in general, very fun and well-made. The special abilities each character gets access to are flavorful and fun, and can be used creatively in order to defeat Nazis. While hard to pull off due to the game's barely functional rolling system, it's still pretty damn fun to summon giant swarms of rats or ghosts or whatever. It's a shame because I imagine this ruleset would work super well in a system that's trying to emulate an evenly matched fight like in a fighting game or something, it's a good die system that's just in the incorrect game for itself.
That's... kinda about it on the gameplay aspects, actually, the game's not super complex, its meant to be played in a short format after all. But yeah, I don't have as many thoughts on the gameplay as I do on the game's writing and themes.
Conclusion
I actually held myself back here, I could have talked about how the game treats religion, nationality, and Identity, I could have talked about the default campaign you'll be playing in more in-depth, I could have talked about the way treats our 'Anti-Hero' cast, and on the positive side I could have talked about some thematic things I DO like, like how the GM isn't allowed to voice Hitler (though that's ruined by them right after saying that killing Hitler immediately ends WW2 holy Great Man theory). But I won't, not because I don't want to drag this on, lord knows I'd LOVE to drag this on, but because it just makes me... sad. This game was promising, it COULD have been something cool! There's so much fun stuff here but the game's refusal to actually SAY anything meaningful, to actually EXPLORE any themes, to fulfill anything more than its extremely basic premise just completely ruins this game for me. Just. find the most annoying communist you know and ask their thoughts on Vampire the Masquerade, and you can get a much better experience on Vampires vs Fascism than this. It's disappointing because one of my favorite things about the Indie Space is that it doesn't need to be marketable. You don't have to make things that are catering to a so called 'mass market' that doesn't exist, you can find a niche of people you want to sell to and make a game for them, and for no one else! We could have gotten a meaningful and interesting TTRPG about Fascism and Vampires, but instead what we get is a messy, liberal power fantasy that doesn't seem to actually believe in anything beyond "Nazis Are Bad", which, while true, is not exactly something we needed to be taught!