Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

Vengeance California is a 49 page game by Houskull, where you revenge murder in 60’s California. It’s inspired by movies like Kill Bill, John Wick, and the Professional. This is refereed game for 3 or more players, played in a single session, with no prep.

Your only stat here is Rage, which can be high, medium or low, and how angry you are affects your 2 main rolls in an inverse manner: High Rage, harder safety checks, but lower risky checks, and visa versa. You roll up to 3 dice according to your prep and character, and then choose risk or safe depending on whether the action is dangerous or not. When you fail a risk check, take a wound, enough wounds and you die, causing everyone’s rage to go up. Nice, simple basics.

Now, we introduce Lines, a pleasingly cinematic mechanic: Player characters can say a line at any time to affect basically anything. Examples: “I know a guy”, or “It’s just a scratch”, or “I’m too old for this.” Well, actually, not the last one: This is a neat mechanic, but because this mechanic feels the need for balance, only the listed moves are “allowed” — these all come with a consequence. There are 8 official Lines, and I don’t feel like that’s enough, but I do think that the generic “complication” cost should cover you for improvising new lines, and I’d encourage this if I ran it. Honestly, this is the place for a mechanic like Devils Bargains — “hey, everyone, what’s the consequence of this line?”, if a complication doesn’t make sense. Complications are great, though: There are 6, randomly rolled, and each have 6 steps of rising and falling escalation. This mechanic is frankly genius for a game intended for a one-shot or a limited campaign. It brings a really elegant narrative flow to the game that reflective of the cause and effect of the movies that inspired it.

Character creation is fine, and thematic. I like the character sheets — basically all the important info is there. The player and referee advice is good, but I can’t imagine anyone reading it for a one shot realistically — if it were condensed and put on the character sheet and directors reference it might see use. It comes with a bunch of references a though, which is great!

The back half of the book is world building — and this slaps. There’s a map, factions, a phone book to help improvise fronts and the like, a bunch of inciting incidents and odd jobs, items and a non-player character generator. The non-player character generator is the weak link: I’d rather a list of them, just like the phone book and factions. These are mostly intended as prompts: This isn’t a sandbox of Santa Vista, they’re things for the referee to respond with and use in scenes. So the generator feels out of place here.

There are a few gaps though: I don’t know why the characters would take odd jobs, for one — detours for coin or favour seem to suck momentum from the game, but that’s a minor. More importantly, I don’t see a mechanism for ending the game or pacing it — it ends when the players get revenge. The referee is supposed to pace the game, but I really could see this ending prematurely aha being unsatisfying, or running long and losing momentum.

I find Vengeance California interesting in how it blurs the line between narrative driven and action driven play. You can see a lot of the choices have OSR roots, and this really clashes with the cinematic, narrative choices. But, this also fits: John Wick looks at the environment and responds, he doesn’t do what works for the story. The world reacts to him. John has a magic coin? He needs a mystical criminal sect to trade it to. This is the logic Vengeance California follows.

Layout is clear, bold, uses space and colour well. Art is in something like crayon or oil pastel, and while I like it and how it is balanced with the layout choices, I don’t think it’s reminiscent of the source material and it would be better if it were. There’s good reference material for in person and online play. Nice.

Vengeance California is a really good little one-shot game. It’s low prep, but it requires some decent improvisational chops from the referee, and I think the aids could improve a little, especially the NPCs, but also in terms of suggested connections, to ease the imbalance in cognitive load. The design choices are honestly great, and there’s a neat mechanical tension that would be fun to explore. If you’re happy being a referee who takes a heavy improvisational load, and would love a cinematic, violent one-shot or short campaign, Vengeance California is a great game for you.

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