Hounds of G.O.D.

June 30, 2010 1 comment

It’s a dark future. Earth is overcrowded. Crime is rampant. United Earth Corporation comes up with a solution: generically engineer some human-wolf hybrids who can track down and eliminate criminals and troubleshoot other corporate problems. These Genome Operatives, or “Hounds”, report to a handler known as a Genome Operative Director, or G.O.D.

So yeah, you play a cyberpunk werewolf with big fat juicy guns. Hounds of G.O.D.

Disclaimer: My name is in the credits of this game, as “Additional Support”. I’m not entirely sure what I did but Adam Weber, the game’s author, probably bounced ideas off of me on Twitter or something. I also consider Adam a personal friend. So I may be a bit biased, but if you read my review of his previous game, Helix: The Post Apocalypse, High-Tech, Fantasy, Western Role Playing Game, you know I won’t refrain from busting his chops.I should also mention that Robin Stacey, aka Greywulf, did the cover and some of the interior art for Hounds of G.O.D., the same person who did the cover art for DoubleZero.

The system is fairly straight forward die pool: roll a number of die equal to the appropriate attribute, roll under your appropriate skill. So to shoot, you’d roll a number of dice equal to Agility, and your target number would be your Guns skill. Character generation is a hybrid of point-build and random; you get 30 plus 3d10 points to spread between six attributes. You get 35 points to spread between 12 skills, which are fairly broad categories like the afore-mentioned “Guns” and things like Covert, Communications, and Medical. It works, and 12 skills cover everything the characters would have.

There’s some tight worldbuilding, and neat twists. A character can only stay in hybrid wolfman form for so long (rounds equal to Willpower). After that, you automatically change back to human. You can make Control rolls (a Willpower check) to stay in that form. If you fail, you can stay in the hybrid form but lose a Control point. This also means you go berserk and attack any perceived threat. Lose all your Control points and you experience Feral Lock, a genetic flaw meaning the character is stuck as a berserker wolfman. This is bad. They end up assigning Hounds, even your own teammates, to hunt you down.

While there are no specific rules for it, a “group build” is suggested. As the player characters are a team of operatives, players are encouraged to create characters that compliment each other. Think of a Mission: Impossible team: one sniper, one computer expert, on martial artist, etc. My only real criticism of the game is that there aren’t templates for various suggested character types.

I want to play this. It’s pretty beer-and-pretzels, but it’s got a lot of potential for one-shots and short campaigns. Werewolf operatives with big guns. Mission Impossible, but everyone on the team can turn into werewolves. Fun, fun, fun.

Buy Hounds of G.O.D. at RPGNow