BREAK! and the OSR - Neckbeard Chocolate and Otaku Peanut Butter

Okay - Let me preface this by saying when I first met Reynaldo M., author of the BREAK! ttrpg, I had known him slightly parasocially from Google Plus (from which all good things spring). I played very briefly as a Murder Princess in a game he was testing at TridentCon 1, and I got in return a card of a bald-headed brawler. The scowling brute reminded me of my favorite character from Samurai Shodown 2, and so I was intrigued. I had never in my life considered that desktop publishing RPG creatives would have something as slick as a pack of cards. Maybe BREAK! was originally conceived as a card game? I don't know. But the card is cool and it has a place of honor in my collection. That was 10 or more years ago, so you should know that BREAK! has been a long time coming and my feeling is that Reynaldo and Gray Wizard have been very meticulous about crafting a thing to perfection. I pressed him probably too hard and too often to know WHEN WILL IT COME, REY? WHEN?

Well, it's here. And it delivers! It has been well worth the wait.

It's very cool, and deserving of praise and accolades. It's quite a love letter to anime, DnD, and 80's and 90's nostalgia. For example Sailor Moon, the Final Fantasy series, She-Ra (the netflix series), Chronotrigger, the DnD cartoon, Miyazaki stuff. It's rich, dense, and artfully and technically well done. The book is weighty, internally hyperlinked - most sections that refer to other material will actually include the page that the entry refers to. I don't know if Rey is a technical writer, but it shows in the ease-of-use of the book. Which is bewilderingly stocked with lore and overflowing and oozing with richly thought out and elaborated world building. In fact when the .PDF came a few months ago I was excited but overwhelmed with the information density of it. IMHO it's much easier to handle as a physical book, but your mileage may vary. An interesting thing is that by the end of the reading process, when you get to the world lore, you have already had quite a tantalizing taste of the feel of the game's setting and then you get the rest to fill in the blanks.

The system itself is pretty straightforward. Sort of DnD with similar attributes down the line. Roll under for skills. Opposed skill checks - you try to get under the target number but over the roll of your opponent for contests. Combat pretty simple. "Hearts" (like in Zelda! and NES games) regenerate after battles. If you run out of hearts then you take injuries. Pretty easey peasey. All kinds of skills and background options that can be rolled for randomly or chosen. Even a class - the Factotum - that is a non-combat option for those to whom violence does not appeal. The rules are relaxed and easy like Sunday morning but in some particulars are very gritty - like hunger, fatigue, and time/resource management. Not overly so, but if you are a fan of Old School play, then these subsystems will probably be intuitive and easy to use. The encounter and dungeoneering system is point-based and has skill checks in between nodes that give a party bonuses in the next encounter if they are successful and it seems to me that it's a better thing than constantly referring to maps. I guess, in short, that it nicely combines a lot of the ease-of-use and intuitive features of the past 15 years of thinking about tabletop games. I could go on and on, but time is fleeting and I have to get to work soon.

Such Well Considered Information Design!

My favorite thing about it is the fantasy/sci-fi vibe, which coincidentally is exactly the sort of thing my Dungeon Crawl Classics/Palladium/Star Frontiers/Star Wars soaked brain is into. My face to face game world is genre-bending. Like DCC, androids and mutants and dwarfs and orcs abound. Remnants of ancient technology (including the mechanoid/robot PCs!) are everywhere. Why would I want a Tolkien world without robots, laser pistols, and kaiju? Hacking computers and hacking reality with magic are mostly the same thing. Esoteric skills that specialists can use to delve deeper.

So, it's inspirational. I'm trying to get my kid to read it but she took one look and was like "too much! I can't keep it all in my head". She won't get the references because she was born in the 2010s instead of the 1970s and 1980s, but I imagine a great many old school DnD folks will grok them. I do not believe that you could be a nerd into DnD for the past 30 or 40 years and not be impressed by Rey and GW's beautiful, good hearted, expansive, well conceived, wonderfully laid out and masterfully illustrated thing. Why, my brain lights up with possibility when I thumb through it, its generosity and goodwill are on every page - kind of like Reynaldo himself. As far as I know, I've never met Grey Wizard directly but I fondly remember interacting with him (her?) on G+

Anyways, run out and pick up BREAK! if this sort of thing interests you. You'll be pleasantly rewarded. I suggest the hard-cover, because I was simply overwhelmed with the PDF but if you like that method and style of learning and information delivery, you probably won't go wrong with it. In fact it seems to me that the appendices of the book are explicitly meant to be printed for reference which is an amazing touch and really shows some forethought. Well done Rey and Grey Wizard. Your Ennie is well-deserved.

If you don't get this reference, or if you think it's corny, well - move along, I guess. 

I give it a 9.5/10 simply because I almost fell over backwards trying to gather all the rules to play, since the character making process takes up about a third of the book - the first part (as it should be, I suppose). The rules are laid out generally at the beginning but in my excitement to devour it I skimmed over them and was befuddled for a bit, but it made much more sense as I progressed through the thing. If you open up any particular page, you will find something delightful and most of it even has a sly wink. Yay for the love of the hobby in all its myriad forms!