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!

Crank It Up! Is a 6 page game by Patrick Dubuc. In it you’ve been poisoned in your sleep, and the only way to stay alive is to keep your adrenaline pumping. You have to avenge yourself before it’s too late. It’s a Breathless game, but to be honest with the proliferation of SRDs these days, I’m not sure what that means.

You have two sets of “hit points”, Stress and Adrenaline. Once your stress is maxed out at 5, anything dangerous will kill you. Once your adrenaline is reduced to 1, anything you do can cause stress. The things you do are skill tests. You roll a die of a specific size, and if you roll 5 or more, you succeed, but below that, you have mixed success. If you roll over 12, though, your success is off the charts. The size of this dice goes down as you use that skill a second time, so when you start you’re superhuman, but by the end, you’ve got no strength at all. To reset this skill deterioration, you can catch your breath, at the cost of a new complication being added to the situation, and your adrenaline decreasing. To avoid this, you can use items, which can be used in lieu of skills if they’re low. You have 7 skills, but most of them are small dice to begin with, so you’re going to have to catch your breath pretty often if you don’t spend a lot of time looting. So, you can always loot, which will provide you with some kind of item, probably.

That’s basically all of the rules; the overall feeling is that this is an action movie (as I haven’t seen Crank, the actual movie upon which this is based), in the style of John Wick or The Raid, where the protagonist is improvising their way through an environment on their way to a specific goal. Honestly, this whole system feels absolutely perfect for making up your own action movie collaboratively, and the adrenaline and stress systems do reflect that “I’m gonna die unless I keep doing ever-more extreme things” dynamic that I believe Crank is about. I do feel a little bit like the actual Crank-iness of this game should be optional, like the optional “heart attack” rule is, and the aim here should be a slightly more generic John Wick, with more options, or they should lean harder into it (by doing things like make the heart attack rule compulsory, and make the scenes more concretely Crank-y). But the rules are damned solid given the theme. I’m impressed that it managed to feel so perfectly action movie, without any of the usual combat crutches we see in roleplaying games: Everyone, this is evidence you can make combat feel fun without it being grid-based and slow.

However, this is designed as a multiplayer game, which to me, poses a problem: None of the movies that I imagine this system helping replicate the feel of, feature multiple protagonists for any significant part of their runtime. It feels like this should be a two-player game, one for the antagonist and one for the protagonist, to me. I can definitely see it being a two-player game where both players play both protagonist and antagonists, in a dual-stream movie, exchanging roles and scenes — in fact this manner of play would be entirely compatible with the game as it stands. But with 3 or 4 protagonists, I could see it getting messy and held up very quickly, the amount of improvisations and magically appearing loot items starting to strain credulity very, very quickly. But you know what? Even though it says it’s for more than 2 people, you can still just play it with two people. It’ll be great.

To add icing to this violent cake, the back half of the book is referee assistance; it’s not quite a module for the game, but it effectively is: A series of the kind of scenes you’d find in this kind of movie, in combination with tables for creating characters and weapons and events, and a free expansion which includes a bunch of characters for your game, which together render it very, very easy to run. The one objection you could point at this would be that what they provide you is 9 scenes, after which your movie is over and you’ll never play Crank It Up again, but honestly the structure of the scenes, while not explained at all, is intuitive enough that you could just watch a movie (I see John Wick 3 is on Netflix right now) and transcribe its’ scenes onto a piece of scrap paper.

What this game isn’t, is a game of explorational agency: You’re on rails, just like the protagonist of an action movie is, following the path provided by the clues to arrive at your destination. Any mystery solving is purely cursory, mood-building or world-building. This is not a game for thinkers, this is for a short burst of explosive imagination. But, I could see this game adapted to make a more exploratory, high-agency play possible.

Overall, Crank It Up is feels really innovative to me, although that might be my lack of background in Breathless and its progenitor, 2400. The way it makes roleplaying game violence fun in a new way, by handing two very specific kinds of limited narrative control to the players, but asking them to relinquish other kinds of agency in exchange, makes for a really satisfying feeling that totally fits in with the theme. I know there are piles of these small, indie games with clever innovations lost to obscurity on on itch.io, but for now, Crank It Up is the game I know about, and I think it’s pretty cool. If you and your friends want to enjoy a night of reckless violence, Crank It Up is a pretty good way to spend it.

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