Here was another Kickstarter that caught my eye last year (gah! it was an expensive year for me with Kickstarter last year!): The Troubleshooters, a Swedish game based on the old Franco-Belgian style of comics from the 1960s/70s. Think Tintin, and you’re on the right track; this is set in the Jet Age, when tourism became a think and much of these comics revolved around traveling the world for adventure (similar to the I,Spy series or James Bond movies…). The artwork was superb (I like it when I can identify gear in RPG art!) and caught the style of the comics, so I backed the project. After some delays caused by an injury sustained by the main writer/artist, the PDF dropped a week or so ago.

That gave me the opportunity to kick the tires on this games system with the wife and kiddo this weekend. It got a solid thumbs up from both of them, and I found it worked well to help the story along with only a few hiccups that were mostly the first play session blues of getting used to the system. We ran the quickstart adventure they dropped last year The Minoan Affair — a quick “save the friend and stop the dastardly smugglers” one-shot.

The basic mechanics: Troubleshooters uses a percentage test. You roll for a challenge and have to roll under your score in a skill like Agility or Drive. If you succeed and get “doubles” (say a 33 on a skill of 45) you also get good karma — this lends benefits to other test, etc. Likewise, a double on a fail is bas karma — your gun jams, and so on. You have certain abilities that allow you to use the game currency — story points — to either flip the roll (a 73 becomes a 37 for 2 story points, but if you have “Born Behind the Wheel” than allows the flip with a single point) and complications that give you story points when they affect you. Your health/damage is tracked with Vitality and is usually somewhere in the 4-6 range. You get hurt and lose enough to hit Vitality 0 and you’re “out cold.” You don’t die in this game unless its story appropriate, you do something really stupid, or you trade the Vitality hit for a “wounded” or mortal peril” tag — that puts you in danger of death, but keeps you in the action for longer.

The system also has an advantage/disadvantage system using “pips”. A +2 pip means that if you get a 1 or 2 on the ones die, you succeed, no matter the tens, and vice-versa for disadvantages. It’s a bit odd but works well. There’s also a tweak to allow you to use a +/- 5% per pip. We found the pip system worked fast and well. Karma, your signature item (be it a car, or a gun, or whatever), and more difficult tests give you an advantage or disadvantage rating, usually +/- 2 or 5. It sounds confusing when you’re reading it, I found, but played very well.

Combat is simple opposed tests, the character’s appropriate skill vs. the bad guys, who tend to have generalized skills like “basic” or “boxing” or even “bam! biff! whop!” to match the style of sound effect for their fighting. Challenges can be met with the appropriate skill, or sometimes a related one — agility or endurance for running away from a threat, for instance. There are also extended challenges that require multiple tests together (and often can be done by different members of the cast): looking for the island where the hostages are could take a Vehicles test to get there, a search to find them, an investigations to navigate properly…

Character creation: You get a group of templates you can tweak, otherwise you can put together your own with a set number of skills you can assign a percentage number to, pick a couple of appropriate abilities and complications, give the character a name and a look, and figure out how the characters net to allow them to get straight to it. It’s easy and fast. You get a signature item — like the pre-generated race car driver character’s Lancia Stratos, that give you benefits.

The game has it’s own comic universe set in the 1960s. Cool is definitely a factor here: the clothes, the cars, the look of the comics of that period will enhance the play. The stories are French comic styled — there’s danger and villains, but the gunplay is kept to a minimum, and characters are expected to punch or outsmart their way out of trouble. There’s the global bad guy organization, a la SPECTRE or CHAOS — in this case, the Octopus. In reality, the “Octopus” has been a name for various organized crime syndicates from the Cammora to a Bulgaria gang, and it was even the imagery used for the early capitalist trusts. SPECTRE in the James Bond books and movies used the Octopus as its symbol, linking it intentionally to these shadowy “Octopi” groups of the middle-20th Century.

The Kickstarter had a lot of extras with it — a few canned adventures, character “passports”, and a GM screen, maps, just for starters. I pledged at the Business class which was about $100US — so is it worth it? Yes — if you are looking for a game that captured the Jet Age cool and the comics or movies of the period, it’s a fun game that’s nice to look at and has mechanics that are easy to learn and help the flow of play. I’m not sure of Helmgast’s plans for producing and marketing this beyond the Kickstarter; my hope is that Mödipiüs or one of the other Euro-game publishers snaps it up and keeps it going.

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