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
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).