Slugblaster

In December 2024 we presented the new Slugblaster Quick Deal featuring Slugblaster: Kickflip Over a Quantum Centipede, the Wilkie’s Candy Lab RPG of teenagehood, giant bugs, circuit-bent rayguns, and trying to be cool. In the middle of nowhere, surrounded by wheat and canola, bored teenagers ride hoverboards into a vibrant multiverse of exotic worlds. If you like the action and energy of Jet Set Radio Future, Scott Pilgrim, and the Spider-verse movies – weird stuff like Everything Everywhere All at Once and Futurama – Tony Hawk games, Skate Kitchen, and YouTube DIY videos of actual kids making actual lasers in their actual bedrooms – then solder up your raygun, print some hazwear in your dad’s garage, grab your hoverboard, and watch out for metaterrestrials as you make a name for yourself in the competitive punk-rock world of interdimensional action sports. Time to go Slugblasting!

Funded in a November 2020 Kickstarter campaign and published in 2023, Slugblaster landed diamondz, picking up a board-full of awards and nominations:

Groundbreaker Game of the Year 2023 (IGDN)
Top 20 of 2022 (Gizmodo)
ENnie nominee, Best Game 2023

More than a year after publication, Slugblaster got sudden new attention after a Quinn’s Quest Reviews YouTube rave review. “There’s a Skating RPG, and It’s a Masterpiece” is 47 minutes of unalloyed praise for Slugblaster, ornamented by Quinn’s actual-play anecdotes that highlight the virtue of roleplaying teenagers: “Teenagers are so close to the extremities of being alive, because everything is a first for them, and everything is so important. Every love is the biggest love they’ve ever had, and every disappointment is them learning the hard edges of this world they’ve been born into. Then the solid foundation underneath all of this roleplaying is that we have all been teenagers before, so we’re all roleplaying from a position of understanding. And also, teenagers grow up so, so fast, so it’s not just understandable, but desirable, that you end up playing quite a different character at the end of a campaign than you did at the beginning.

“What I think about most when I think back to my campaign of Slugblaster – which me and my players do a lot, like we left part of our souls in that world – well, for me at least, I always think about the ending. It was maybe the single most bittersweet scene I’ve ever had in a TTRPG, because what we as players knew, but our characters didn’t, is that they were in the last scene of their story. This may well be what we were roleplaying: the end of the high point of their entire lives. So what the scene was – I’m sure like a lot of skate movies – our campaign ended in a hospital, after one of our player characters had been injured in a way he could not just bounce back from, and would maybe never be the same again. And so the scene took place between a few other PCS in this sterile linoleum-lined hospital corridor. And nothing really happened; it was a conversation where the player characters talked about how they would always still be friends, though, right? and this didn’t change anything, right? And then we kind of rolled credits and went into the epilogue. But what had really happened in that scene, we realized afterward, is that, in that exact moment, those teens had grown up.

“Whatever happens at the end of your campaign of Slugblaster, I feel confident in telling you it will hit you like a truck. And perhaps the reason for that is that Slugblaster is more than just a game book; it is also, more than anything else I’ve reviewed in Quinn’s Quest Season 1, a deeply personal artwork – almost a memoir of the author’s life being a skater.”

(On social media the Quinn review prompted a big sidebar discussion about the reviewer’s three-minute digression, “We are all bad at stories.”)