As I mentioned when I first brought up designing a Ghost Punchers roleplaying game, I really don’t want to spend time reinventing the wheel. That’s why I chose to base my game off Savage Worlds, rather than create a new system from scratch.
In the interests of avoiding reinvention, I’m taking a side trek today to check out the Savage Worlds Horror Companion. As the name would suggest, it’s a book of supplementary rules for dealing with horror tropes using the Savage Worlds system, and I suspect it might have some rules I’ll want to use.
Let’s take a look and find out…
First of all, I see that ghosts are still the same as they are in the main book: “ethereal” monsters that can only be hurt by magical weapons. Also, while there some cool new “character class” style Edges such as Exorcist and Monster Hunter, none of them come with the built-in ability to see or harm spirits, so that’s definitely still a niche I’m creating/filling.
The book does have some rules for stuff I can see using: rules for characters going insane, or using rituals to bind or ward off spirits. And while the “atomic ghost-hunting packs” refer to a very different and specific sort of violence against the supernatural, the rules covering how the weapons interact with the spirit world could be adapted for my purposes (he said while rubbing his hands together like a Bond villain).
So the results of my side trek look like this:
- I’ll still need to design the ghost-punching rules myself.
- The Companion has some great rules for rituals, sanity, and ghost-fighting equipment I can work from.
- After seeing all these cool new rules, I want to run a “Buffy the Cthulhu-Slayer” game. Ah, Savage Worlds. You just get me sometimes.
Now that I’ve seen what’s out there, it’s time to start focusing on what’s new. In the next entry, we’ll look at creating the actual rules for ghost-punching.
