This holiday season, I’m going to review a different module, game or supplement every day. I haven’t sought any of them out, they’ve been sent to me, so it’s all surprises, all the way. I haven’t planned or allocated time for this, so while I’m endeavouring to bring the same attention to these reviews, it might provide a challenge, but at least, I’ll be bringing attention to some cool stuff!

Eco Mofos is a 170 page game by David Blandy, with art by Daniel Locke. It’s based on Into the Odd and Cairn, and claims “rules-lite gameplay, procedural no-prep adventures, and psychedelic future explosion” in an ecopunk ruin-delving survival game. I backed the Kickstarter, but I haven’t actually looked at the game itself until it was offered for Critique Navidad.

In terms of what the rules consist of, this is a blogosphere- informed NSR ruleset, that walks through the basics of play based on a bunch of contemporary sources. It lays this out in a smart, principles-forward way, that differentiates itself well in terms of tone. Because of this, its basis will be familiar to anyone who’s read recent games in the the D&D unlike cluster of games. Features worth mentioning: Character creation is a randomly created affair, featuring 36 backgrounds with associated key-items, which are designed to lure the characters into dangerous locations. It has an optional advancement system, with a risk vs. reward basis, which is fun to engage with and not to, as you wish. Luck is a burnable resource as well as a stat. Combat gives generous leeway in avoiding death, fitting the hopeful themes. Cover rules for gunfights are simple. A standout feature is the random crafting rules, which manage to feel like Breath of the Wild’s crafting music sounds like — I want to steal and adapt this to every future game I play. Very elegant and joyful. As befits a game about scavenging, there are 10 pages of random treasure tables, with some cute surprises befitting the retro ecopunk stylings.

In general, the best thing about Eco Mofos is also somewhat underwhelming to say, but: Whenever I thought about something I thought it needed, it was there, somewhere, when I looked for it: A bestiary, mass combat, faction rules, downtime events that change the world, specific NPCs, an NPC generator, solo rules, job rules if you’re stuck for something to do next. It provides a bunch of support, so that you really can, as a referee, just play the damned thing, so long as you know the book back to front, without having to do any work. That’s huge praise coming from me, but so often my complaint about games that I read is that they leave design work for me to do, rather than just let me play. And, for me at least, I do my own design work: When I’m at the table, I’m there to play, not design a game loosely based on someone else’s game.

The most interesting way Eco Mofos innovates, though is through the use of burdens, which are emotional debts with specific ways to diffuse them. That in and of itself isn’t interesting — there’s been plenty written of using inventory in alternative ways — but the way Eco Mofos uses them is interesting, because basically it serves as a currency for using most of the background’s powers. For moderate powers, you can “risk a burden”, or test luck to see if you take one. And for major powers, you can just take a burden for immediate effect. As a simple way to implement currency for power use, make it feel fair between classes, and give a small mechanical crunch to an otherwise simple rules system, this is elegant and I really, really like it. You’re balancing burdens with inventory, and more than three burdens causes the deprived condition, and removing your burdens takes specific action that often serves to draw you deeper into the drama of the adventure — such as “take pity on an adversary” or “unleash your anger on the world”. Cleverly, most of these have multiple options to remove them, which give you character-specific choices to make at any time. I’m really impressed with this mechanic which on initial note didn’t seem to matter at all.

The magic system here is a fun and unique take, and provides a huge amount of flavour to a game that up until that point is a kind of 90’s post-apocalypse pastiche. Here, the magic is something released by the earth in response to humanities abuse of the biosphere, and it’s the cause of the gamma-world-esque adaptations that exist in Eco Mofos. It is found in orbs and shards of shimmering material, and can be absorbed and manipulated to cast spells. There’s an associated misfire system that has flavours of Dungeon Crawl Classics (well, it’s a little closer to that of Shadowdark, but they’re both in Dungeon Crawl Classic’s shadow in my opinion), but also of Gamma World, and it has associated visions that feel a combination between Pariah and the psychic maelstrom of Apocalypse World. There are 6 pages of spells, and they are an interesting blend of Gamma World and classic old school spells. This melange of influences is pretty unique and the main hook for me in terms of this world; I was a little underwhelmed until I got to this, and now I’m leaning forward to see how it feels in play. This makes me go back to re-read the 36 classes, because most of the low-HP choices are spell focused, and they leverage these rules in ways that wasn’t apparent on the first read: The Oracle, for example, has very concrete possibilities in the context of the Vision rules, and the Pyromancer can use orbs in a way unique to all the classes.

One of Eco Mofo’s major selling points is that it can be run with absolutely no prep. The final third of the book is entirely devoted to the systems around generating content on the fly. How do these hold up? They took a while for me to grasp the basic procedures, because there are (kind of) three, depending on the scale of travel, but basically they take Marcia’s Bite-sized Dungeons, and turn them into a random spatial generation procedure — neat! The set of 12 maps are keyed, and those keys mean different things for each scale of travel, so basically they represent weeks of travel at one scale, or minutes at a smaller scale. This is complemented by absolutely boatloads of tables to help with generating what these spaces contain: Weather, day and night encounters, locations, lair generation, random encounters, characters, etc. This is very strong procedural stuff, and playing with it for 15 minutes came up with some entertaining stuff. Colour me impressed. Is it realistic for me, though, to use this on the go? I think I’d get the procedure itself down pat after a few sessions, sure, but the preponderance of tables here is a lot to manage, and it’s the one area of the book where the layout makes navigation challenging, due to the lack of strong headings and section separation here. My first thought was that this must exist in automated form, given I knew that Eco Mofos achieved a bunch of stretch goals on it’s crowdfunding campaign, but I can’t find anywhere that this has been automated. I think that if I were to use this procedure as the core of my campaign, I’d need to get some automation happening to handle the pages and pages of tables, or the on-the-spot aspect just won’t work.

The visual style created by the team of Blandy and Locke is absolutely fire. Stellar visualisations, comic-book interludes and post-apocalyptic vistas pepper the pages of this book. The basic layout stylishly adapts the Explorer Template to good effect, with clear headings and spacing, and flags section headings for easy navigation. For my eye, reading digitally, I think monotype is overused, but there’s smart use of spacing to overcome the issues with the typography choice, making it far less straining than it could be. Font choices don’t change much on a single page, maxing out on maybe 6 subtle variations. Generous white spaces are balanced with regular spot art, making a very spacious layout feel cosy rather than sparse. It’s good stuff, for most of the book, although in places you lose the navigability, particularly the sections where you’re generating locations where the heading choices which are a really visually appealing choice elsewhere get lost in the business of the table layouts — sadly a place where it’s really important to be able to flick through quickly.

I talked about one of the defining features of old school style games being that they are in need of an ecosystem, and here Blandy has really leant in. I’ve reviewed two modules that were commissioned as post of the Kickstarter here, but there are an additional four listed — pretty cool to be honest, for such a new system. In combination with the “procedural no prep” procedures, you’ve got a decent amount of play here, and to be honest, I reckon there’d be mileage in some kind of “Eco-twisted Classics Jam” like Liminal Horror did, adapting classic modules and tales to Eco Mofos, especially given they’ve developed a decent house style. There’s potential here for this to become a strong community for sci-fantasy adventures, just like Liminal Horror has excelled at in the modern horror space.

I’m surprisingly impressed by Eco Mofos, to be honest. As I started with the modules, I, while not being disappointed, didn’t realise how strong this book would be. There’s some excellent crafting and magic systems here that really colour the game, huge numbers of useful random tables, some innovative rules, and a lot of support for running the game built right into the core book, even if I think it needs some digital tools because of their depth. Add to that a burgeoning module ecosystem, and if you’re interested in playing a hopeful post-apocalyptic old school game, this is a damned strong contender. You get me those digital tools, and I think this might be my first choice, and there are a lot of options out there right now. If Blandy can keep up the momentum on third-party module development, Eco Mofos will be here to stay, I suspect.

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