atiaxi / bdtg

Roleplaying system that's just a little metal

Blood Down the Gullet

⚡ 🤘 ⚡

What's all this, then?

This may come as a shock to some of you, but I'm a tiny bit of a nerd. Accordingly, I play D&D (and assorted other role-playing games) with a number of my friends. One of the campaigns that I've had the fortune to DM -- although I can't rightly claim to have written it, this one's all from the players, especially @atiaxi -- was "Blood Down the Gullet," a chaotic evil campaign following the exploits of an absurd metal band, touring across a vaguely faux-Nordic frozen landscape. If you've seen Adult Swim's "Metalocalypse," these sessions would have felt oddly familiar.

We ran these sessions with D&D 4E. Don't hate: we've had a lot of fun with 4E over the years, and I maintain that having a good time with a pen-and-paper RPG is far more a function of who else is around the table than what's inside the books. Just the same, it never quite seemed to fit. Combat, equipment and the EXP ladder has always been D&D's focus, but that's not what we were having fun with. Honestly I can't even remember what classes the players were playing. Each concert was a skill challenge, but while the concerts themselves worked well, I never had a good sense of what "failing" one actually meant, and it didn't seem like a deep enough mechanic to capture such a core part of what made the campaign work.

So, I'm writing my own system.

I've been toying with the idea of doing this for a while, and there's actually another one I want to write, but it seems like a better idea to do here, first, where nobody will actually care if the numbers are ridiculously unbalanced or the mechanics are unfit. They get to be my guinea pigs, and if something sucks, we'll stop doing it.

Index

1. Characters
2. Music
3. Fame
4. Combat