The Godzilla roleplaying game is something of a dream project for veteran game designer Gav Thorpe. "Creating a game system from scratch - especially a new role playing game - you don't often get to do that", he tells Wargamer via video call. The prolific freelancer is co-designing it with two fellow ex-Games Workshop veterans, Jervis Johnson and Mark Latham, and it's clear from his enthusiasm that the team has fully embraced the challenge.
Kaiju are at the heart of everything. "There's an adventure generator which is a mix of procedural generation and random generation", Thorpe says, focused on the monster causing all the trouble. The GM will "generate what the kaiju's objective is, whether that's to destroy a certain place or to perform a ritual, or there might be two kaiju and they're going to fight, or one's chasing the other" - classic reasons for a cross-city monster mash.
"We wanted the action to take place over several several miles of city", Thorpe says, as kaiju "don't hang around in small spaces". Expect monsters to "rampage across the city, lay waste through the docks and the city blocks, then head downtown, and [do] all that kind of cool kaiju stuff". A typical city map will be thirteen hexes by thirteen, each one representing about a third of a mile - when your enemy is the size of a city block, that's pretty much point blank range.
"You have an action phase [in which] the players do their stuff - an action phase is quite long, from five to 15 minutes of action depending on what they're doing", Thorpe says. "So it's not a case of just 'I pick the lock on the door and that's my action', it's like 'we're going to try and get into the entire building and raid the safe'". It's a rapid pace, but given that your characters are on the trail of a vast monster capable of eating tanks and toppling skyscrapers, that feels about right.
"Then you have the crisis phase", Thorpe continues. "The first thing you do is you advance the crisis clock - the world is always moving, the kaiju is always going to attack, things are going to turn up".
Each adventure sets a timeline of events, with the GM's draws from a deck of 'crisis cards' moving them forward. This will push the players into 'flash points ranging from minor upsets like "your commanding officer gets on your back and he's having a go at you", through to a kaiju arriving and eating a football stadium.
"The players are always aware that regardless of what they're doing, other stuff will happen and the world isn't just dependent on what they do", Thorpe says. "If they hang around too long, the clock will start overtaking them and they're going to be behind the curve". Players will have to "respond to threats quickly, with a plan in mind". The pressure's on.
The stakes are high, too. By their mere presence, kaiju "damage stuff, they break stuff in the locations they're in, so you don't want to just let them roam around freely. The option to engage the kaiju head-on is always there - as members of the elite G-Force, combat-oriented characters will have a powerful arsenal at their disposal.
However, Thorpe says that while kaiju are the "instigator of the adventure, quite often there's a period of a) trying to work out what the kaiju is doing and then b) building up the resources and the plan to stop it doing that" before it can be slain or driven away - "you quite often need to get some allies or a secret weapon".
High octane adventures building to a boss fight are obviously suited to single session play, but Thorpe says that equal consideration has gone into making campaigns rewarding. The tabletop RPG uses Hero and Nemesis points, which are player and GM resources that can be spent during adventures for one-off benefits, or spent between sessions as experience points - and the GM can spend Nemesis points upgrading the kaiju.
"You might fight the same kaiju several times and build a campaign around that common antagonist" Thorpe says, "but the antagonist changes and evolves and adapts. So again, you're not just fighting the same bad guy all the time - it might be Godzilla develops a different ability or becomes tougher the next time you fight it". I'm immediately put in mind of the warped mutations in Shin Godzilla.
The book contains 12 pre-written "immortal" kaiju fron the Toho canon, including "Godzilla and Anguirus and Mothra… you can defeat them, but you can never destroy them, they'll always come back in some form". There's also a kaiju generator, so game masters can "create their own kaiju or ones that we've missed if they want to". And what self-respecting GM doesn't want to build a bespoke monster?
The Godzilla roleplaying game has already been successfully funded on Kickstarter, and Thorpe says that the manuscript for the core book is just about complete. "We're just delivering the last few bits", he says, adding "it's nice to be involved in a project that's actually running on time".
Which is your favorite kaiju (and why is it Mothra?) Have you ever played around a campaign based around a single mega monster? Come and share your table tales in the friendly Wargamer Discord community.