YOU SHALL NOT PASS without a sex scene: FAPP

A fantasy tabletop role-playing game in a world gone…porny.

Warning: Images in this post are not safe for work or for people who are under 18.

 

That being said, I would have been ALL OVER THIS when I was under 18.

FAPP

Offbeatr campaign ending 9/14/14

[UPDATE: Since the first quite successful campaign, the FAPP Team has gone to Patreon, using that system as a book subscription service and charging on a per-book basis. Nice use of the platform!]

I have been playing tabletop role-playing games for a long, long time, since fifth grade in fact, which is getting close to 30 years of funny dice with lots of sides. And I do remember playing when I was an awkward 14-year-old, just hit in the face with the frying pan that is puberty–loaded with hormones, playing D&D with a couple other teens ALSO loaded with hormones, none of us really having any great sense for plot or character development, it’s no wonder that most of our sessions had at least one or two very contrived and abrupt sex scenes.

Of course, I’ve outgrown that. Now the sex scenes are a lot more complicated.

Anyway, I never thought I’d say this, but somehow, this project–this weird, weird, project–is making me want to be 14 again. It’s silly and crazed and perverse. Yes, I’m buying a copy.

FAPP–the abbreviation stands for nothing in particular, a riff on the tabletop RPG industry’s love of silly nonsense abbreviations like GURPS, TORG, FUDGE, etc etc–is a tongue-in-cheek, massively over-the-top furry pornographic tabletop RPG (TRPG moving forward). It’s being committed principally by Lemuel, whose FA account is probably the best place to go for daily updates and information about the project, and Min, who goes into detail on some of the monsters and stats.

Bukkake is a stat, and that is beautiful. I have never seen Bukkake in a stat block before.

Is it a “serious” game? Hard to say, and I’m honestly not sure it matters. The indie TPRG hobbistry (it’s like an industry but you can’t make money off it) is full of games that tell interesting stories, but the majority of the copies sold will never see a gaming table. Take “Engine Heart,” a TRPG based on “Wall-E” and “Brave Little Toaster.” Never going to play it, love thinking about playing it, never going to sell it to Half Price Books. Game books can be their own form of literature, with all the world building and character building–if not more!–of fiction.

Characters in FAPP are adventurers in the world of Jizzrel (let’s get our sniggering over with, people, this is a serious review). The Powers That Be have cursed (?) the inhabitants of that benighted, sticky land with crazy powerful sex drives and body parts to match (how that wolf doesn’t pass out from blood loss when he has an erection, I don’t know, possibly he always has one.) At the same time, they’ve warped the world so that swordplay and spellcasting just don’t work. This leaves one obvious, throbbing solution for how to subdue your enemies.

From a certain angle, that’s actually a lot nicer than the huge number of critters my 4th level paladin has killed. But you could totally run out of gold pieces buying everyone dinner afterward.

There’s actually plot in there, too. Dark gods inspired by HP Lovecraft have unleashed horrible, sanity-destroying monsters, the sort of epic awfulness that brave adventures strap on their armor and gird their loins–or ungird them, this is that sort of game–to fight. There’s an introductory adventure wherein the party defends their village against an invading army of gnolls, with a supplementary chapter on playing gnolls (I sense a level of wish fulfillment here because the project manager Lemuel is a gnoll, but I’m not complaining, since my mate and I both play gnolls every Friday.)

FAPP is also a kink-friendly RPG, with latex, macros, and whatever else might conceivably float someone’s pleasure barge. It sounds like, while the basic idea is “let’s use sex to defeat the monstrous boobdragon!”, the idea of what sex is is flexible and accommodating.

So far as the project itself goes, I’m a little concerned that the amount of member-customized material involved might overwhelm the creators. A recent update to the page said that the main rulebook would need to be split into two volumes, which is great for the backer, but with the cost of goods involved increasing, a small print run, and a discounted price on top of Offbeatr’s hefty 30% fees, makes for a terribly small profit margin. Strictly from a print/publishing perspective, their business model is unclear, and I’d like to see some breakdowns of their goal, cost, etc. It looks like the project launched at the lowest possible goal to get around the voting period and deposit fees–and I can sympathize, those are irritating!–but I don’t have a clear idea of the funding they need to produce the project. It’s not a huge concern–the TRPG hobbistry has some excellent print on demand and digital options that lift the PP&B burden off the indie publisher–but a clear business plan is a definite +1 in a crowdfunding project. [EDIT: Lemuel contacted me to let me know that the books are digital, so that concern over PP&B is not an issue!]

Note: Images used above are included to promote the work of crowdfunding artists, and are owned by the original creator.

P.S.: yes, this entire thing is silly. Absolutely. But what does it say about our culture that sexing monsters into submission come across less mature than the “murder hobo” lifestyle of a typical D&D party? This is leaving me with some strange questions…