Threadbare
Threadbare is a Powered by the Apocalypse RPG for people who wanted to play in a weird as hell setting. The setting is entirely based upon Stitchpunk (a subgenre of steampunk best exemplified by the movie 9 or Little Big Planet) where the tagline is "Play a broken toy in a broken world." Think Toy Story, but all the humans are long dead.
Play
You play a toy. You are either a hard toy (made of metal or plastic or the like), a sock (sock puppet or a genuine sock), or a plush toy. The human world has collapsed, you remain, and you are now sentient. Navigate your new surroundings, and choose each move carefully
For a "move" the player rolls 2d6+bonus to determine success;
- 10+ is total success
- 7-9 is success with consequences (player chooses), and will most likely result in a broken part
- 6- is possible failure but a certainty the DM will use one of their "move"s to mess with you. You also get a point of XP.
An example of the 7-9 "success with consequences": Your party is moving across a treacherous bridge made from badly rotting wood. The Lego figure and the (formerly) mint condition Boba Fett action figure have successfully crossed this bridge. As you cross, a sudden gust of wind knocks you down, and a split in the wood catches a loose thread, slowly pulling you undone as you proceed. Now one of your arms is missing its fluff.
Pros of Threadbare
- Live out that wild dream of a post apocalyptic world without humans
- Be whatever toy you want to. If you want to play the Tin Soldier you can. Even miniatures from tabletop games are applicable options in this universe
- No need to eat or drink anything, you're a toy. Reality for you is very different than what you expect.
- Three difficulty modes: Fluffy, Scruffy, and Dented.
Cons of Threadbare
- The gamebook is rather small and fairly politically bias, though DM Discretion is fair game.
- The Game is heavily built around the Scruffy category, which detracts some power from the DM in that the player gets to decide what part of their body is now injured.
- The gamebook dedicates far too much time to some ugly as fuck crafts in the later half of the book. Seriously who the fuck is gonna make that nightmare doll spider from Toy Story?
- There is far too much of the book dedicated to making sure everyone can enjoy the story. If a bad decision happens you can go back and reverse it if the player is uncomfortable, a player character can't be killed without both you and the player agreeing on it, etc., etc.
- What systems the game actually does illustrate or flesh out it does so poorly.
In Conclusion
If you're going to pick up the book, probably best to combine aspects of it with another game that uses the Apocalypse system so you can actually have combat and consequences. Otherwise you could literally eviscerate a character in game and the player says "I'm not comfortable with my character dying" and suddenly this lone piece of string is a party member somehow. But again, DM Discretion is important so you could just homebrew some combat options for this and tell the author to go fuck herself for trying to make an RPG in a dystopic grimdark setting without any combat.
Links
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