Through Wednesday, June 4 we present the Awfully Cheerful Engine, a pop-culture action-comedy RPG with the emphasis on comedy from EN Publishing. The icons of action cinema and cartoon mayhem – ghostbreakers, road warriors, student wizards, kids on bikes, talking animals, aliens, two-fisted pulp heroes, vampire slayers, and trekkers on the final frontier – they’re all in the Awfully Cheerful Engine Omnibus.
The flexible Awfully Cheerful D6-based dice pool system, inspired by West End’s Ghostbusters (1986) with elements of W.O.I.N. (What’s Old is New), lets you create cinematic heroes in a minute or two, then run fast-paced, genre-mashing, time-hopping, high-spirited adventures that never take anything seriously. From fantasy realms to galaxies in the far future, the streets of Manhattan to Transylvania, the universes of pop culture are your sandbox. And now EN Publishing has priced that sandbox cheap.
Ideal for novices and young players, an ACE game uses just a handful of six-sided dice. You won’t get bogged down in endless rules and character sheets that look like tax forms. Your ACE ID Card fits everything you need to know on a character sheet the size of a credit card. Your character has a Role, such as an occupation, species, or character class; a Trait, which is an adjective (Impulsive, Hardy, Larcenous, Teenage, Smelly) for your Role; and Smarts, Moves, Style, and Brawn ratings from 1-5. Some adventure settings also give you a Power rating that flexibly handles supernatural or superhuman abilities.
For each stat, you choose a specialized expertise called a Focus – for instance, Smarts 5 (Physics). To do something, you roll a number of D6s equal to your relevant stat, plus two extra dice if your Focus applies. If the total roll exceeds the task’s Target Number, you succeed. To hit the high targets for Herculean and Impossible tasks, you can spend Karma points for extra dice. Rolls of 6 explode (roll the die again and add it to the total). Whenever you roll, you designate one die as a Calamity Die. If you roll 1 on the Calamity Die, something bad or funny happens, decided by your fellow players. In combat, if your roll exceeds the defender’s Defense, you do 1-5 points of damage, depending on your weapon. A target who runs out of Defense points is knocked out, not killed.
This light and loose system supports all kinds of hijinks in fantasy, space opera, or action-film settings. EN Publishing produced eight short Awfully Cheerful supplements, each transparently based on one pop-culture franchise. Get them all in this Awfully Cheerful Engine offer!
Pay just US$7.95 to get the complete non-watermarked, DRM-free Awfully Cheerful Engine Omnibus, a $25 retail value, in this Awfully Cheerful Engine deal before the final credits roll Wednesday, June 4.
