Metatopia 2018 Report – Part 7: Soldiers & Serpents

Per usual with all Metatopia recaps, everything presented here is based on playtest material and not final published versions.

Day 2, continued

Soldiers & Serpents by Eric Simon

Presented by Eric Simon

Soldiers & Serpents playtesters
Around the table, slightly blurry: Phil, Eric, and Rob

This was an unusual playtest in many ways, but the big one was that the presenter didn't run the game! This session was meant to test some GM-facing materials, so one of the attendees (Phil) was asked to try running the pre-written scenario cold for Eric and I as players.

Another unusual thing was the sheer gonzo of the setting. In talking with Eric later, I was apparently rare in enjoying it! It's sort of a war-in-Heaven situation, except Heaven was designed by the psychedelic 70s aesthetic and, I don't know, Flash Gordon. I was into it. I didn't know it at the time, but I was later to learn that this game is an RPG adaptation of the setting in the Lucifer: Soldiers, Serpents, and Sin series of books by David Taylor II.

The system was card-based. There was a persistent set of cards that made up the "character sheet," and then there was a shuffle-and-draw deck of cards particular to each character that affected task resolution. Also there were d4s, though modified to come out with 0-3 results instead of 1-4. Plus other dice, a couple gameplay currencies...there was a lot going on.

This game is also slated for Kickstarter in 2019, and the public beta is currently available (for free!). Eric does a lot of cool work, and you can check out more of it at Four-in-Hand Games. (I'm personally a big fan of Rockalypse.) And just since he was the only other attendee at this session, I'll also throw in a plug for my friend Phil Vecchione, whose work you can check out quite a bit of at Misdirected Mark (as podcast host) and Encoded Designs (as game developer).

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