[Hell 4 Leather] Satanic Bikers + Manga KAPOWWW!

Hell 4 Leather is Joe Prince's Tarot game of satanic revenge. There were six players (including Joe Prince, Gregor Hutton, myself and Daniel Klein). It was nought-to-gaming in 60 seconds. This probably the most elegant game on the market.

Grab your Tarot deck and deal out the Fool, Death and the Devil. This determines who is the badass biker, how he dies and the resulting bargain with Satan. Suffice is to say that I got the Fool and the theme was "Akira."

Cue Shinichi, the enormous uber-biker with shoulders big enough to bust your door frame. He drove up the side of a skyscraper on his death-wheels, burst through the window of a secret drug cabal penthouse and shot up the occupants in a blaze of noise (all the while fucking the hoes and screaming his own name).

Rules
I'm not going to go into all the rules. You can pick up the contest submission here (which is only a couple of pages long).

If you're the Fool (the badass biker), you seem to be in charge of pacing. You get to decide when your character appears and when someone dies. Therefore, I'd caution against giving the Fool character to boisterous, loud egiots like me. Sometimes with indie games, I forget I'm not the GM and I take too many liberties. For example, during an appeal by Joe Prince's character, I cut him short after he mispronounced one of the Japanese character's names. In retrospect, that was probably too bold. There's a danger here that the Fool player has too much power and, if that is given to a cock, the game might end up cocked.

The conflict rules: Basically, once two or more players contest a piece of narrative, an independent party turns over a random Tarot card and uses the image to determine what happens. In our case, the image was a corpse strewn battlefield. The guy who draws the card interprets.

See how elegant that is?

Death rules: When the Death card is played on a character, you get these awesome tension-loaded moments—the Fool player must divine which card is which (flipping over a Tarot to see if it shows Death). Bam!! Every game needs moments like these.

Motivate! One last thing, as Gregor mentions here, this game works best when the intentions and betrayals of each character are explicit. At one point in the game I didn't know why I was supposed to kill the gang members. I tried to push for some motive, but I don't think everyone was clear that this was important. When you play this game, remember that all the characters have been involved in the murder of the badass biker/Fool and try your best to express your character's involvement, betrayal and motive.

I'd love to go into detail over every scene and pick out the gems, but I'll leave that for you guys to figure out when you play yourselves. There are significant, invisible elements of design here that help generate great story. Just like Hammer Falls, I'd play this again in a heartbeat.

Sebastian.